The author recently answered queries about Trump and the Democrats.
Do you think there’s a realistic chance Donald Trump could become the next President?
Anyone nominated by either the Democratic or Republican party has a chance to win. Each candidate would start with a floor of about 40%, which is to say that within the 20% the candidates have to play with, anything can happen. Trump, like any Republican, would be helped by the voter-suppression laws in place in many swing states run by Republicans. The Democratic nominee could self-combust, be delegitimized by endless and scurrilous attacks, or even, given some unpredictable health, personal, or legal surprise, be forced to leave the race. In a presidential election, Nate Silver will prepare careful and accurate guides to what should happen, what is most likely to happen, but not what will happen: anything can happen. Add to this the disbelief on both sides that Trump could actually win, which energizes his followers and confirms his claims to outsider status, and add to that the fact that in many circles, particularly among better educated and better-off people, and particularly on the coasts, there are plenty of people who are attracted to Trump, who are secretly thrilled by the current of nihilism he is riding and the specter of destruction he embodies, but are keeping their mouths shut.
I’d be interested in your views on the U.S. election early primaries…
I supported Hillary over Barack in 2008. I thought she’d be a better candidate and a better president. I was obviously wrong about the former, and who knows about the latter. Given the disaster of her health plan in 1993, I don’t think she would have gone back to that well right away. She would have been different in foreign policy, though I have no idea how. She might have had a tougher Attorney General than Holder.
I support her now. It’s clear she’s a poor candidate. Far too many people don’t like her and they don’t trust her. Some of that has to do with a congenital inability to answer a question about some pseudo-scandal directly (even a supporter like me had to think, “How dumb do you think we are?” when she explained her e-mail account with the need to talk to her mother about Chelsea’s wedding and how it was a hassle to carry two Blackberrys when obviously she wouldn’t have been carrying any). But by comparison, has any major news item touting the e-mail story—and the New York Times ran daily or daily-multiple stories for weeks and goes back to it at every chance—have they or any major news organization brought up the fact that the George W. Bush administration routinely channeled White House Iraq e-mails and millions more on controversial subjects to the Republican National Committee server, so they would be protected from FOI and the courts, a violation infinitely bigger, more serious, and more corrupt than anything Hillary has been accused of? But a lot more of why people don’t trust Hillary is phony noise kicked up by the Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, which existed when she named it and exists now—then it really had a source and a center, Richard Mellon Scaife, now it’s more diffused but no less real—and the New York Times, which is congenitally unable to run a single story on Hillary without a deep dig of some kind, regardless of how harmless the story is otherwise. They still refer to Whitewater, a story they invented, or were fed, as if it ever amounted to anything.
I don’t trust Sanders. I don’t mean he lies or that’s he’s a stooge. I don’t think he’s that serious about his proposals, because they aren’t serious proposals any more than Donald Trump promising to deport 11 million people and build a wall that Mexico will pay for (unless he plans to make a deal with the Zetas to pay for the wall in exchange for our looking the other way at the tunnels they’ll be digging under it) are serious proposals. I do worry that people are building a cult of personality around not Bernie Sanders but some emanation of goodness called Bernie, and that he is cooperating and, worse, loves it. He’s not challenging his audiences, he’s not educating them—he’s flattering them. If you support me, that means you’re good. That is the essence of cult politics, it’s not democracy.
Putting all that to the side, I think he would be a disastrous candidate versus any Republican. He has not yet been subjected to the contempt, slander and ridicule the GOP candidates have routinely dished out to Hillary, which has damaged her as it would anyone. Opposition research has not been dedicated to him so that anything he says can be pseudo-factually discredited, as has been done with Hillary for almost 25 years. The full-fledged and open Red baiting that will be turned on Sanders in a general election has not begun, and the complex publicizing of him as a Jew, both a whispering campaign meant to appeal to the most base anti-semitic fears, jealousies, and perversions, and a more upfront campaign, by surrogates, that he’s not an observant Jew, doesn’t believe in God, doesn’t support Israel as strongly as I—whoever I happens to be—will be ferocious. Barack’s campaign and his presidency have left the country more explicitly and unapologetically racist than it was before his election; Sanders will awake corpses we might have thought were long dead.
So I don’t think he should be the nominee, and I don’t think he will survive, as a candidate, if he is. Clinton, I hope, will get stronger as a candidate, and she’ll be a good president if she gets the chance.
First thanks the author for allowing us to repost these exchanges which originally appeared at the “Ask Greil” portal at greilmarcus.net.