OPINION: Last year, in a conversation with writer Dame Fiona Kidman, I suggested Donald Trump would have a path to selection as the Republican nominee for the 2024 US presidential election. Her response was typical of most sane and decent folk: a wince of consternation and words to the effect of, “Surely not!”
Many of us have gone on thinking “surely not”, as Trump has continued to commit crimes. To add to the January 6 insurrection and associated wrongdoing, we now learn he has taken classified documents, including nuclear secrets, and been indicted on multiple federal criminal counts. There’s the recent finding of liability in court for sexual assault, and all the further indictments expected to be laid this year. His best chance of staying out of prison is to run for president, to delay his trials, to quash investigations if he is elected.
As he ages, he looks crazier and even more flagrantly criminal, but his core followers do not waver. This is the puzzle for those of us who think, sanely and sensibly, surely not. The question goes on being asked, “Why support a candidate who is delusional, predatory and lawless?”
But Trump fans don’t care about alleged criminality. He is their weapon against the system, their big gun. They want him loaded, cocked and ready to go off. His recent rallies have been a feedback loop of affirmation. They pledge their allegiance and he woos them with his mesmeric salesman’s sing-song. Neatly articulating the symbiotic relationship, he tells them, “I am your retribution.”
As with most cults, it’s a con. He makes money off the believers and his policies don’t help them. There are perhaps a million Republican voters who could lose faith and reject Trump. These people may decide if sanity prevails.
American psychiatrist Dr Bandy Lee, along with professional colleagues, has assessed Trump as lacking the mental capacity for office, and as highly dangerous. She writes that abusive personalities look for vulnerable people who unconsciously gravitate towards the kind of ill-treatment they’ve already suffered. Abuser and victim fit together like a lock and key. This dynamic can exist in a marriage, in a family or in a movement led by a demagogue. Lee believes there’s a duty to warn against the danger. Inevitably, she mentions Nazism.
Historian and complexity scientist Peter Turchin studies failed states. He has pointed to social inequality as a source of the instability that enabled Trump. In Turchin’s formulation, the United States became much less equal when the New Deal began to disintegrate in the 1970s. The power of unions was eroded, wages declined and the tax system was altered to favour high earners. The rich got richer, the poor got poorer. State education was downgraded. Diseases of despair exploded, crime increased and wage earners grew increasingly stressed and miserable.
Conditions favoured the demagogue opportunist who harnessed the rage. Turchin cited Trump’s 2016 campaign as evidence of the “collapse of social norms governing civilised discourse”. He has predicted that, whoever is in power in the US, political and civil unrest will continue until inequality is reduced.
Societies that are more equal are happier and safer. Many of us refuse to accept this, though. We want to pay less tax, invest less, even as we complain about poor public services, child poverty and crime. At a dinner for Auckland professionals, I recall the speaker talking about the deprivation he was seeing among his patients. If we don’t share more, he said, we’ll end up living in gated communities. This is the difficult question, the complexity. If there is increased crime or even social unrest, have we, with our own choices, contributed to it?
