Fourth Estate Donald Trump, American Demagogue And the press corps that just doesn’t get him.

Jack Shafer is POLITICO's senior media writer. Previously, Jack wrote a column about the press and politics for Reuters and before that worked at Slate as a columnist and as the site's deputy editor. He also edited two alternative weeklies, SF Weekly and Washington City Paper. His work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, The New York Times Book Review, The Washington Post, the Columbia Journalism Review, Foreign Affairs, The New Republic, BookForum and the op-ed page of The Wall Street Journal.

Demagogues like Donald Trump exhaust the patience of the political press corps because reporters fundamentally misunderstand the candidates' appeal.

Reporters like to think that logic and reason hold sway, so they believe a demagogue can be easily disarmed by exposing his crimes against logic, his pandering to the uninformed and his manipulative emotionalism. They’re entirely wrong—as the last month of The Donald’s unlikely rise to the top of the Republican presidential heap has demonstrated day after day.


Late last month, after Trump disparaged the war record of Sen. John McCain, the political class began composing the real-estate developer’s campaign obituary. Washington Post Chief Correspondent Dan Balz, inheritor of David Broder’s status as the high priest of conventional wisdom, landed on Trump’s back with a July 20 piece titled (in the print edition) “The downfall of The Donald? Attack on McCain may be Trump’s Waterloo.”

Balz speculated that Trump had finally “crossed” a line that would likely marginalize him and his campaign. He gathered quotations from other Republicans—many anonymous, of course—to define that line-crossing. One called the description of McCain “lethal” to Trump’s prospects. Another predicted “a complete cratering” of support for Trump, and still another foresaw him marginalized as a “niche candidate.” “The fact that he has no filter is what some voters find appealing, but it’s that lack of a filter that could doom his presidential campaign,” GOP pollster Neil Newhouse told Balz.

Like any journalistic priest, Balz performed some ledger balancing by citing Republicans who weren’t ready to write Trump’s political obituary. After all, even end-timers allow that God might change his appointment for the final days. But the thrust of Balz’s piece was unmistakable—Trump had finally gone too far to be taken seriously.

Balz’s intuition was widely shared. “This is the beginning of the end of Donald Trump,” fellow presidential candidate Lindsey Graham promptly told CNN. The incident marked a likely “inflection point” for the Trump campaign, reported the New York Times, as Nate Cohn wrote, “His support will erode as the tone of coverage shifts from publicizing his anti-establishment and anti-immigration views.” “The Beginning of the End of Trump,” stated Washington Post opinion writer Jonathan Capehart. “Is This the Tipping Point for Donald Trump?” asked the headline at NBC News.

Yet Trump has survived the McCain incident to transgress again and again, up to and through the Fox News Channel debate. The very thing that was supposed to slay him is only making him stronger, yet the press has yet to correct its mistake. Speaking on Fox after the debate, pundit Charles Krauthammer said, “The real story is the collapse of Trump in this debate.” Two days after the debate, National Journal asked, “Is this the End of Donald Trump?” and MSNBC offered, “ ‘The Beginning of the End’: Inside Trump’s RedState Meltdown.” Today, the Guardian reported, “GOP Frontrunner’s Jab at Megyn Kelly May Be Beginning of End.”

The press can’t get Trump right because they have so little experience reporting on demagogues. Reporters believe that if they lay out a demagogue’s contradictions, quote people who cringe at what he has said or compile lists of his despicable utterance, that the demagogue will sink under his own weight.

Nuh-uh. The modern American demagogue—I’m thinking Huey Long, Father Charles Coughlin, Strom Thurmond, Joseph McCarthy, George Wallace, and Pat Buchanan—is more resilient than that. Or I should say that the demagogues’ faithful cannot not be easily persuaded to abandon their leader once they adopt him. If anything, establishment attacks on a demagogue only stiffen the loyalties of his subjects, proving to them that he is telling truth to power. The demagogue’s formula, which can vary, tends to simplify all politics and policy to single irrefutable talking points. In Trump’s case, he reliably heralds himself as a “smart” man who can solve problems the “stupid” people of Washington can’t by the pure force of his own will.

For Trump’s core followers (“demagoguettes”?), it matters little that he has demonstrated no consistency on the issues, as my Politico colleague Timothy Noah wrote last month. Trump’s core followers ignore the press corps’ attempt to alert them to his “eclectic, improvisational and often contradictory” policy preferences. Single-payer advocate a couple of campaign cycles ago, hater of Obamacare now. A hawk when giving speeches, he rarely endorses military intervention. He flip-flops on trade. Assuming that they notice, this doesn’t bother Trump supporters because they trust their man’s common sense and patriotism to do the right thing. If he promises to be uncompromising today, they will forgive him for compromising tomorrow because, you know, things change.

The standard American demagogue relies on anger and resentment to attract supporters. But Trump’s fury is too comic to stir the masses. He makes angry faces but he’s almost never really mad. Instead, to cultivate the disaffected he pins his banner to his standing as a political outsider, as a champ who can’t be beaten. Trump’s loose mouth—a liability attached to any another candidate—becomes an asset for him. “ Finally! A candidate who speaks his mind without filters!” you can almost hear his supporters say, even if most of what he speaks is rubbish. The ambiguity of the Trump message—his promises to make America great again, to show the Chinese and the Russians and the Mexicans that we mean business—goes down like lite beer. “I play to people’s fantasies,” he wrote in 1987 Trump: The Art of the Deal. “A little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular.”

“I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration—and a very effective form of promotion,” Trump continued.

The downside of being an American demagogue is that your big head inevitably bangs against a low ceiling. There are only so many voters who will pull the lever for a Maximum Leader type. George Wallace, perhaps the greatest of American demagogues, scored only 13.5 percent of the vote in his independent run in the 1968 presidential election. And that’s the year the streets were on fire, the nation was at war and inflation was kicking in. Sustained demagoguery requires a meaty, divisive issue—like Communism, school busing or a good old-fashioned culture war—to thrive. But even when those conditions exist, the American demagogue usually has to struggle to maintain a conspicuous place in the public eye.

Once he’s blasted off, the American demagogue often takes years him to lose orbital velocity and slowly crash to earth. The American demagogue’s followers grow despondent at his failure to achieve real power, and that slows him down. Smarter politicians find a way to co-opt his message, as Richard Nixon did George Wallace’s (with a little help from Arthur Bremer’s bullets), and that slows him further. If you give Trump enough time, oh my friends in the press, all of your predictions will come true.

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