So why not just out-Donald The Donald?
Because you can’t.
Let’s look at the field and imagine if they tried.
In our hypothetical thought experiment, let’s take a minor corner of Trump’s pastiche of strange, vague, always-aggro ideas. This is from his 60 Minutes interview last September with Scott Pelley of CBS News:
Pelley: In your book, “The America We Deserve” you proposed raising the social security retirement age to 70. Is that still your plan?
Trump: Yeah, not anymore because now what I want to do is take money back from other countries that are killing us and I want to save social security. And we’re going to save it without increases. We’re not going to raise the age and it will be just fine.
Pelley: How are you going to do that? It is a basket case.
Trump: Through capability. We will set it up by making our country rich again.
Pelley: You know, the heart of all of your plans seems to be we’re going to be rich.
Trump: We are going to do great. As a country we are going to do great.
In the catalog of Trump nonsense, this is relatively innocuous, mostly devoid of offensive personal or racist attacks (although he gets close by advocating “taking back money from other countries that are killing us.”)
Now imagine (for example) Kentucky Sen. Rand Paul or Florida Sen. Marco Rubio — or any other human person — offering up the same pile of garbage. It’s not that they wouldn’t or don’t try. It’s rather that they haven’t laid the foundation for the context of relevance that would allow that kind of gambit to get off the ground.
Senators Paul or Rubio might say it, but could never get away with it. The minds of even viewers predisposed to believe would grope to find the foundation from which the statement would make sense.
Remember, relevance is comfort plus surprise.
Pick a Card, Any Card
Think of it as a card trick. When the magician shows you the ten of diamonds in the sealed envelope in his pocket, it is irrelevant — in fact, it’s not a trick at all — unless you KNOW you just put the ten of diamonds in YOUR pocket a few seconds ago. That’s your comfortable foundation of assumed truth. The trick becomes hyper-relevant when you look in your pocket and find not another ten of diamonds but, somehow, a card with the name of your childhood cat written on it instead.
That’s when you know it’s magic. Rubio or Paul might show you what’s in the sealed envelope, but by itself, it can’t matter without the full context of the trick.
Look at the faux Louis XV chairs, the marble floors and the opulent gold decor. They are stylistic cousins of The Apprentice boardroom, a place where things happen arbitrarily by fiat. They bring the viewer back to a place where Trump is called upon not to explain, but declare. The décor is a superficial but essential part of the communication.
That décor and the many other elements of Trump’s personal presentation style are the ten of diamonds in YOUR pocket. You just know this is the way things are (i.e., this is “just the way he is.”) You may love it (one-third of Republican voters say they do) or hate it (virtually all the rest of us), but almost all of us just accept it as a long-established reality.
Trump’s foundation of relevance — the context within which he is understood and has developed permission to play — has been prepared and sculpted for more than a generation.
Trump’s relevance has been cultivated over years, just like the water hyacinth’s evolutionary advantages have been created by eons of natural selection. Trump’s immunity against punishment for outlandishness derives from decades of behavior that has desensitized people to outlandishness from him. His immunity to accusations of ignorance or narcissism derives from decades of people accepting Trump as an ignorant narcissist. It’s in his DNA and people accept it (even, or perhaps especially, Trump haters) as a natural state of affairs.
A card trick is a cute, clever “short con” and it’s fun and no one gets hurt. But it operates by the same rules as Trump’s deeply destructive “long con.” The first rule of any con, long or short, is that the person being conned (the “mark”) wants it to be true.
We want the ten of diamonds to be somewhere other than where we thought we put it. And, for some of us, we want it to be relevant when a cartoon billionaire says we will fix social security “Through capability. We will set it up by making our country rich again.”
Some of us (one-third of one-half of us) want it to be relevant because it’s authentic magic. The rest of us accept it as relevant because it’s dangerous deception that must be exposed and purged for the good of us all.
People think Trump is relevant because he offers simple answers to complex issues and problems and people are too dumb to realize how shallow these answers are. But that’s only part off the story. That’s the card in the envelope at the end of the trick. If simple stupid answers were the only thing required, other candidates offering equally shallow simple answers (the Rubios and Rand Pauls and others) could simply mimic Trump. And they often try.
It’s not just that the answers are ridiculously simple. In fact, they’re less than simple, they’re just restatements of an unevidenced promise. (Q. How are you going to fix social security? A. Through capability.)
Rather, it’s that Trump has made them relevant to a small but significant constituency by re-rooting them in a context (his own mythology, his own brand), that this constituency accepts as comfortably true. That’s the card in your pocket . . . or, rather, the card you THINK is in your pocket.
The long con does not involve going to someone’s house and saying “give me all your money . . . trust me, you won’t regret it.” That’s just robbery. The long con involves going to someones house and saying, “Hi, remember me, I made some money awhile back on an insider stock tip. If you give me all your money now, I’ll do the same for you.”
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