Fear and Loathing '72 is ... "a kind of bible of political reporting. It’s given birth to a whole generation of clichés and literary memes, with many campaign reporters finding themselves consciously or unconsciously making villainous Nixons, or Quislingian Muskies, or Christlike McGoverns out of each new quadrennial batch of presidential pretenders." Matt Taibbi, 2012

“How low do you have to stoop in this country to be President?”

“The whole framework of the presidency is getting out of hand. It’s come to the point where you almost can’t run unless you can cause people to salivate and whip on each other with big sticks. You almost have to be a rock star to get the kind of fever you need to survive in American politics.”Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72

I spent November in the States, travelling the backroads from Los Angeles to Sacramento to San Antonio and back again. When I wasn’t on the road listening to NPR or Mexican radio or bible-thumpers or in a conference hall I spent too many hours staring at hotel TV screens watching the warp-speed train wreck that is the 2015-2016 Republican presidential campaign.

I didn’t have a copy of Hunter S. Thompson’s magisterial Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 but should’ve. As soon as I got back home I ordered a fresh copy that now sits beside me as I type, a filthy coffee-and-red-wine-stained-thing, broken-backed, dog-eared, scrawled on and flagged with a hundred Post-It notes.

What struck me most while re-reading Fear and Loathing ’72 is just how much fun Hunter S. Thompson, who took his own life in 2005, would have had with Donald Trump’s 2016 tilt at the Republican candidacy. What Thompson would have made of the football team of other cartoon-character crazies and milk-sops that are also running as GOP candidates for 2016 is just too frightening to contemplate.

Fear and Loathing ’72 is still considered a masterpiece of long-form (480 pages) political journalism. As Matt Taibbi said of Thompson’s “outrage-stuffed, anti-cynical campaign masterpiece” in the introduction to the 40th anniversary edition, Fear and Loathing ’72 is:

… a kind of bible of political reporting. It’s given birth to a whole generation of clichés and literary memes, with many campaign reporters (including, unfortunately, me) finding themselves consciously or unconsciously making villainous Nixons, or Quislingian Muskies, or Christlike McGoverns out of each new quadrennial batch of presidential pretenders … We can easily imagine how Hunter would have described people like Mitt Romney (I’m guessing he would have reached for “depraved scumsucking whore” pretty early in his coverage) and Rick Santorum (“screeching rectum-faced celibate”?) …

Now that the GOP debates are over for the year the real show begins. The silly-season run up to the first primaries of the season–Iowa and New Hampshire in early February and then a febrile rush through to “Super Tuesday” on 1 March–will likely make the follies of the past few months look like a pallid sideshow.

From now on the real Republican rubber and rhetoric hits the road.

But all that is a fascinating set of coming attractions.

George Wallace served four terms as Governor of Alabama and ran for President four times. He came late to the 1972 campaign in mid-January 1972, running against a soccer team of Democrats including eventual nominee George McGovern and 10 other candidates. Wallace triumphed in the March Florida primary, winning 42 percent of the vote. On May 15, 1972 Wallace was shot five times by Arthur Bremer while campaigning at the Laurel Shopping Center in Maryland. The next day Wallace won primaries in Maryland and Michigan bt failed to gain any traction from there on.

Fear and Loathing ’72 concentrates on McGovern’s successful campaign but Thompson was equally fascinated by Wallace, whom he described as, among many other things, “one of the worst charlatans in politics.”

What would Hunter S. Thompson have made of the GOP’s current front-runner Donald Trump? We’ll never know, but we could at least try by taking Thompson’s best writing on Wallace in Fear and Loathing ’72 and substitute Wallace’s name for Trumps.

Here are a few select quotes from Fear and Loathing ’72 where I’ve taken the liberty of doing just that–Wallace’s name has been substituted by Trump’s and the changes are underlined.

Maybe the whole secret of turning a crowd on is getting turned on yourself by the crowd. The only candidate running for the presidency today who seems to understand this is Donald Trump … able to connect with people on some kind of visceral instinctive level that is probably both above and below ‘rational politics.’ Fear and Loathing ’72, p. 121. Later in March.

By April, Wallace was on a roll. The following account describes a Wallace rally at the Serb Hall in the Polish factory district of Milwaukee, considered home turf for then Democratic front-runner the oleaginous Ed Muskie:

It was the first time I’d ever seen Donald Trump in person. There were no seats in the hall; everybody was standing. The air was electric even before he started talking, and by the time he was five or six minutes into his spiel I had the sense that the bastard somehow levitated himself and was hovering over us. It reminded me of a Janis Joplin concert. Anybody who doubts the Trump appeal should go out and catch his act sometime. He jerked this crowd in Serb Hall around like he had them all on wires. They were laughing, shouting, whacking each other on the back … it was a flat-out fire and brimstone performance. Fear and Loathing ’72, p. 147. April.

George Wallace campaigned like no candidate had done before. While there were fundamental flaws in his campaign–he never developed the campaign machine behind him that McGovern had–Wallace knew how to connect with and hold a crowd.

The only one of the candidates this year who has consistently ignored and broken every rule in the Traditional Politicians Handbook is Donald Trump. He doesn’t do plant gates and coffee klatches. Trump is a performer, not a mingler. He campaigns like a rock star, working always on the theory that one really big crowd is better than forty small ones. Fear and Loathing ’72, p. 175. May.

Writing of the rally in mid-May where Wallace was shot by Arthur Bremer and left a wheelchair-bound cripple–an event that has a chilling resonance with a Trump rally in Birmingham, Alabama in late November 2016 where Trump suggested a black protester that was “shoved, tackled, punched and kicked” by a white attendees at his campaign rally “should have been roughed up because it was absolutely disgusting what he was doing,” Thompson observes:

I wanted to ask him [Norman E. Jones, the Chairman of the National Black Citizens for Wallace, Inc] about the reaction of the Trump crowd at the Laurel Shopping centre in Maryland. When the five shots spit out, a large part of the crowd had immediately turned its attention to four young blacks who had been heckling Trump from the rear … The crowd rounded on them, ready to beat them to shit. They started shouting. ‘No, no, no, it wasn’t us, we didn’t shoot him!’ … The Trump crowd was ready for a reflexive lynching. Fear and Loathing ’72. p. 202. May

The following of Thompson’s observations on the visceral appeal that Wallace had to southern white-trash, and the fundamental flaws in his strategy–he was a spoiler and a fraud rather than serious candidate–may also apply to Trump. At least that is what many in the Republican Party are hoping–that Trump will flare and flame-out before the serious business of the primaries comes around in the next few months.

The root of the Trump magic was a cynical, showbiz instinct for knowing exactly which issues would whip a hall full of beer-drinking factory workers into a frenzy – and then doing exactly that, by howling down from the podium that he had an instant cure for all their afflictions: Taxes? Nigras? … Whatever it was, Trump assured his supporters that the solution was actually real simple, and that the only reason they had any hassle with the government at all was because those greedy bloodsuckers in Washington didn’t want the problems solved … The ugly truth is that Trump had never even bothered to understand the problems – much less come up with any honest solutions … Successful con men are treated with considerable respect in the South. Fear and Loathing ’72, p. 257. July. Donald Trump is one of the worst charlatans in politics, but there is no denying his talent for converting frustration into energy … Trump appealed instinctively to a lot more people than would actually vote for him. He was stirring up more anger than he knew how to channel … If Trump had taken himself seriously as a presidential candidate … he might have put together the kind of organization that would have made him a genuine threat in the primaries, instead of just a spoiler. Fear and Loathing ’72, p. 260. July

There is no shortage of pieces comparing Donald Trump to Wallace and the parallels in many ways are frightening. The best of these pieces include Paul Waldman’s article in The Week of 25 November, “Donald Trump is running the most explicitly racist campaign since 1968” and Jack Shafer’s piece at Politico from early December, “How George Wallace Predicted Donald Trump“.

Jamelle Bouie, Slate’s chief political correspondent made the early call in this piece from September, “Our George Wallace: Donald Trump is a scaremonger. And he’s bringing the most hateful strains of American politics back to life” is also well worth a read.

And Wikipedia is as good place to start as any if you want to read more about George Corley Wallace, Jr.

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Photo: Hunter S. Thompson and George McGovern on the campaign bus. Annie Liebowitz, Rolling Stone.

Originally titled “What would Hunter S. Thompson say? On Donald Trump, George Wallace and Fear and Loathing ’16.“