By Benjamin Wallace-Wells
http://www.newyorker.com/news/benjamin-wallace-wells/how-donald-trump-could-disappear-from-the-political-sceneCertain detectable changes have been made to the Donald Trump stump speech. In Bedford, New Hampshire, on Thursday, he delivered his remarks as they had been prepared and kept himself to half an hour—normal for a political speech, but unusual for him. Meanwhile, his promises had grown even less restrained. “You have forty days to make every dream you ever had for your country come true,” Trump said.
Still, so much is the same. There is still the big talk of the border wall, and the populist denunciations of the “financial interests who control our politics and our media.” There are still the same hand gestures, and the insistence that African-Americans have never had it so bad. More than anything, there is Trump’s willed loneliness. He rarely acknowledges anyone’s heroism or good intentions but his own. In New Hampshire, Republican Senator Kelly Ayotte and the gubernatorial candidate Chris Sununu are in tight races. But neither Ayotte nor Sununu was present at the Bedford rally, and Trump did not mention either one.
In the spring, when operatives and analysts were nervously measuring the effectiveness of the populism on the right and the left, it seemed as if the whole political establishment might be vulnerable. Bernie Sanders backed a primary challenger to the Democratic National Committee chairwoman, Debbie Wasserman Schultz. Trump praised an insurgent taking on House Speaker Paul Ryan, and an atmosphere of tragedy developed around John McCain, who from the Senate floor was asking his party to stop holding up visas for Afghans who had served as military translators, just as he was trailing his primary challenger back in Arizona. But, when the primaries were held this summer, Wasserman Schultz won (though she lost her chairmanship), and Ryan and McCain won, and it was hard to find any evidence that the populism of the Presidential candidates had been a force in other races. Only three sitting Republican congressmen lost primaries this year. Two were beaten after redistricting pushed them into new seats. The third was the hard-line conservative Tim Huelskamp, in Kansas, who was endorsed by Trump and beaten by a more moderate challenger. “Despite all the wild predictions about establishment candidates being caught up just because of the top of the ticket, exactly the opposite occurred,” Rob Engstrom, the national political director of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, said. “It’s been a fairly status-quo election.”
This is a strange situation. In recent polls, Trump’s supporters are as angry as they’ve ever been. In the latest national NBC/Wall Street Journal poll, an astonishing ninety-three per cent of the Republican candidate’s supporters said they did not feel that their interests were represented in Washington. And yet that energy has not mattered in other races. Part of the reason may be that the Trump phenomenon gathered too late for local populist candidates to emerge alongside him. Another factor may be Trump’s disdain for the party he inherited and his lack of interest in thoroughly changing it. But there is another explanation for the limitations of the Trump phenomenon: that it was shaped by the specific circumstances of the Presidency—as the first black President leaves office and the prospect of the first female President draws nearer—as much as by a more general malaise. In an interview this week with Slate, David Plouffe, Barack Obama’s campaign manager in 2008, called the Trump campaign “a black-swan event” that would not have much effect on American politics. He added a caveat: that Trump had helped uncover “rising populism that is both right and left, and a rising nationalism in the Republican Party. Those things are going to be with us for a while.”
If Trump wins, it’s easy to see how those forces would be organized: as a cult of Presidential personality. But if he loses, as now seems more likely, it isn’t so easy to see where they will gather. A few hard-right elected Republicans—Senator Jeff Sessions, of Alabama; Congressman Steve King, of Iowa—have seen their profiles rise with Trump, and have made their nativism clearer. “Cultural suicide by demographic transformation must end,” King tweeted at a pair of European far-right leaders last week. But there are no new radicals arriving in Congress to join them. Meanwhile, Trump has relied on the same few surrogates—Sean Hannity, Ann Coulter, Newt Gingrich, Rudy Giuliani, and Chris Christie—none of whom will hold office after November. Democratic operatives working in congressional races have found that linking a local opponent to Trump tested less well with voters than linking him to the Republican Party, probably because voters understood Trump to be a distinct phenomenon. “He cannot be an albatross because he is such a peculiar bird,” the Washington Post’s Dana Milbank wrote, summing up the position of Democratic strategists. How interesting it will be if, for all the populist tectonics beneath, the Republican Party that returns to Washington in January looks very much like the status quo.
