As with Ukip and Brexit, the Republican appeals to those ordinary people who have seen living standards plummet
When the American people look at you, they see who they want to be. When they look at me, they see who they are”. So says Anthony Hopkins, playing Richard Nixon in Oliver Stone’s film Nixon. Gazing at a portrait of John F Kennedy, the half-drunk Nixon understands the idealism the youthful President projected. He recognised himself, in contrast, as a vulgar, flawed but more accurate representation of what the American people were really like.
In the same way, Donald Trump is very much a “real” character. He is earthy, brash and insensitive. He openly boasts of destroying America’s enemies and restoring the greatness of a lost America. His attitudes to women and minorities reflect the values of a bygone era. Yet he is as American as apple pie.
The brash New Yorker’s emergence as a political phenomenon has been one of the strangest developments in decades. Not since Dwight D Eisenhower has a major presidential candidate never held elected office before. Yet Eisenhower in 1952 was a widely respected national hero, a five-star general who had defeated the Nazis. He projected strength but also good old-fashioned frontier values: independence, reserve and an unfailing sense of duty.
Now, 64 years later, Trump is a billionaire with a penchant for bad language and puerile antics. American friends say to me that “he is very New York”, meaning he is unashamedly crass and vulgar about his desire for money, women and power.
Yet Trump’s appeal is simple to explain. He rails against political correctness, just as he lashes out at the Chinese for stealing American jobs in lop-sided trade deals. Like every American president since the Nineties, Trump berates China for deliberately manipulating their currency. The Chinese keep the yuan undervalued to keep their exports cheap. Unlike other politicians, Trump suggests actually doing something about this. He proposes a 45 per cent tariff on Chinese imports to America.
The tough-guy act is appealing to an American middle class that hasn’t seen its wages increase in real terms for 15 years. To many of these ordinary, mostly white, voters in the Midwest and the South, neither the Democrats nor the Republicans have done anything to improve their situation. For 25 years, both major parties have preached the gospel of open borders, free trade and globalisation. With his talk of tariffs, massive walls and mass deportations Trump is saying in stark terms, “enough is enough”.
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