The Trump Doctrine: “We Want Deal”

The Trump Doctrine: “We Want Deal”

“We must take real care about this, as a message of hate is quickly spreading and winning adepts on our neighbor’s country.”

Erreh Svaia

By: Evan Osnos

Taken From:|The New Yorker

On Tuesday, in Dubuque, Donald Trump, the front-runner for the Republican Presidential nomination, took a break from his frequent warnings about the threat posed by criminals from Mexico to reflect on his experience with another part of the world. “Negotiating with Japan, negotiating with China, when these people walk into the room, they don’t say, ‘Oh, hello, how the weather, so beautiful outside is, isn’t it lovely?’ ” Trump told the crowd. He adopted a broken-English accent. “They say, ‘We want deal.’ ”

Trump’s fear of Asians taking advantage of Americans, though not as well-known as his suspicion of Mexican criminals, has a long history. In 1987, he ran an ad in three newspapers, calling for “a little backbone” in U.S. foreign policy. “For decades,” it said, “Japan and other nations have been taking advantage of the United States.… Let’s not let our great country be laughed at anymore.” An aide at the time, John R. O’Donnell, later wrote that the ad was “tailored to blue-collar resentments over the trade deficit and to rally Middle America against the machinations, real or supposed, of our foreign allies.” In 2012, Trump updated his view of Asians with a comment about his belief that climate change is a hoax. He tweeted, “The concept of global warming was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.”

Trump’s range as a performer is often described as vaudevillian, and that description should be applied to his world view as well. He often appears to be reenacting conversations about other countries that took place a century or two ago. When he talks about Mexico “sending people that have lots of problems,” including drugs, crime, and “rapists,” he echoes Francis Walker, the administrator of the 1870 and 1880 censuses, who described new arrivals as “beaten men from beaten races, representing the worst failures in the struggle for existence.” Or Senator Pat McCarran, the Nevada Democrat, who told his colleagues in 1953 that they must be wary of “hardcore, indigestible blocs which have not become integrated into the American way of life, but which, on the contrary are its deadly enemies.” McCarran warned, “Today, as never before, untold millions are storming our gates for admission, and those gates are cracking under the strain.” The quota system that he favored remained in place until 1965.

Since Monday, when I published a piece on Trump’s popularity with white nationalists and anti-immigration activists, events have moved rapidly. At a news conference in Dubuque, Trump ejected Jorge Ramos, the most influential Latino news anchor, when Ramos tried to ask a question without Trump’s approval. “Sit down. Sit down. Sit down,” Trump scolded him, before signaling to his security team, who forcibly removed Ramos from the room. Trump said, “Go back to Univision.” While Ramos was in exile in the hallway, a well-dressed man in a suit jacket, wearing a Donald Trump sticker, approached Ramos (who is a U.S. citizen), and said, “This is not about you. Get out of my country.”  Trump, ever alert to when he is losing a room, later permitted Ramos to rejoin the group, and they had an awkward debate.

A few days earlier, Trump received generous praise from David Duke, the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan. Though Duke was initially skeptical of Trump, he had become a believer. “Trump, he’s really going all out. He’s saying what no other Republicans have said, few conservatives say. And he’s also gone to point where he says it’s not just illegal immigration, its legal immigration,” Duke said on his radio show. He urged his listeners to support Trump because it was a “great opportunity.” “So he’s certainly the best of the lot. And he’s certainly somebody that we should get behind in terms, ya know, raising the image of this thing.” When Trump was asked, on Bloomberg television, about the support that he has received from Duke and other white nationalists, he said, “I don’t need his endorsement; I certainly wouldn’t want his endorsement.” Asked whether he would repudiate it, Trump said, “Sure, I would if that would make you feel better.”

By now, it’s well known that Trump’s strategy of emphasizing racial and ethnic divisions contradicts the way that the Republican establishment had hoped to run the 2016 race, but, as Trump’s lead has grown—defying predictions that he would peter out—disagreement from within the Party has given way to a kind of despair among traditional Republicans. In the Washington Post this week, George Will wrote, “Every sulfurous belch from the molten interior of the volcanic Trump phenomenon injures the chances of a Republican presidency.” Will ran through a possible arithmetic of defeat: in 2012, Mitt Romney lost non-white voters by sixty-three points. He had relied almost exclusively on white voters—they were ninety per cent of his support—and next year the white percentage of the electorate will be two points smaller than in 2012. Will wrote, “Romney did even slightly worse among Asian Americans—the fastest-growing minority—than among Hispanics.”

In returning to a primordial American politics, Trump has fortified his primary campaign and attracted the admiration of Duke and others who hear in his message a return to the past. In the next fifteen months, that approach may collide with the arithmetic of modern American politics, and Trump will face a strategic decision. But, for the moment, he remains consistent, and faithful to the political credo of Roger Stone, the former Nixon aide who has advised Trump over the years (and who left the campaign earlier this month). Stone likes to say, “Hate is a stronger motivator than love.”