That’s incredibly concerning, because the heart and soul of the American democratic experiment is the attitudes of people towards constitutional values,” says Michael Signer, an author and political scientist at the University of Virginia. “The biggest concern… is that there’s this part of the American public who wants a strongman, and is willing to reject our institutions for one. His rise has unveiled America’s angry, sometimes ugly, face, and left many in the establishment fearful for the country’s future. “The Donald”, a self-styled outsider, has not only captured the extreme right of American politics - he has used it to hijack the US political establishment, taking advantage of the country’s political polarisation, its distrust in its political class, and a media that has become wildly disrespectful of the institutions of state to propel himself to touching distance of the highest office in the world. He said it himself, addressing a crowd in January: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters.” Since June 2015, when Trump rode down a golden escalator to announce his candidacy in a flurry of promises - from building a wall on the Mexican border to banning foreign Muslims from the USA - his campaign has defied all conventional political wisdom, his socially transgressive grandstanding seemingly adding, not detracting, from his appeal. Or when he told a crowd he longed for the days when there were “consequences” for civil rights protestors who disrupted rallies. It could have been when his rally in Chicago had to be called off after a standoff between his supporters and protesters turned into a ruck, or afterwards, when Trump failed to denounce the violence, and instead blamed Democratic primary candidate Bernie Sanders. It could have been when he talked about the size of his penis in a televised debate, breaking the fourth wall of testosterone-fuelled, hotdog-and-cheesesteak all-Americanism to just outright tell the world that this was a pissing contest he was best equipped to win. In 2016, it was Jeb Bush tweeting a picture of a personalised handgun with the one-word caption: “America”.įor Donald Trump, still leading the field in the Republican primaries, it could have been that QVC moment when he shared a stage at a press conference with a mound of gleaming Trump steaks and bottles of Trump wine. It was an overexcited Democratic primary candidate Howard Dean bellowing like a heifer trapped in a grate on stage in Iowa in 2004. It was Al Gore rolling his eyes and sighing while debating George W Bush in 2000. More often than not, it spells the end of a candidate’s ambitions. In every US election campaign there is a moment where the paper skin of spin and theatre is broken, and the pomposity and hubris, the outright fakery of political life bursts through.
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