The Trump effect

American politics doesn’t seem to be making any sense this year. A blustery billionaire is leading the pack for the Republican presidential nomination and widens his lead with every breathtaking transgression of rhetorical decorum.

But there are no uncaused events in God’s world. Something has produced what we may call “the Trump effect.” On the GOP side, there’s broad dissatisfaction with government in general and with the current administration in particular. (Democrats want more of it all.) When people lose confidence in the political system, they turn to a convincing boaster who doesn’t care much about the constitutional system but seems like he’ll make the trains run on time and kick butt at the border and beyond.

We have witnessed a steady succession of scandalous incompetences. VA hospitals have let veterans die for administrative convenience. The General Services Administration treated itself to wildly expensive entertainments. Health and Human Services spent a billion dollars on a failed Obamacare website. But Donald Trump, the billionaire developer whom everyone knows from the TV show The Apprentice, says he will run the country like a business.

People sense that politicians primarily serve their financial backers. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, only the grossest example, sold her services for extravagant speaker’s fees and donations to the Clinton Foundation, even from foreign governments. Trump makes no secret of his massive personal fortune to signal that he is his own man.

Our political leaders tiptoe around the Islamic aspect of the terror threat. President George W. Bush assured us that Islam is a “religion of peace” and spoke of a “War on Terror”—a war not on the enemy but on how our enemy attacked us. President Barack Obama took denial to a whole new level. Fighting al-Qaeda became the Overseas Contingency Operation, hiding the whole thing behind a cloud of lexical smoke. When Maj. Nidal Hasan killed 13 at Food Hood in Texas while shouting “Allahu Akbar,” the administration called it merely “workplace violence.” It was days after the San Bernardino massacre before Obama publicly recognized it as an act of terror, conceding only after the FBI forced his hand.

Most people can see that the terror problem is overwhelmingly a problem with radical Islam. They are tired of political correctness taking precedence over national and domestic security. Trump, by contrast, prides himself on being frank to the point of appalling rudeness.

In political desperation, people turn to outsiders, someone who channels their anger and seems candid and unsoiled. But are they looking where they’re leaping? When a boy at a rally in New Hampshire asked Trump what his life would be like when he’s older if Trump were elected president, Trump responded only that “Your life will be much better than it would have been if I didn’t become president. It’s as simple as that.” In saying that, he thought he was saying a lot. But he said nothing about law, liberty, security, prosperity, morality, or harmony. The crowd cheered its approval.

H.L. Mencken said,“Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.” If voters have not been jealous for their liberty in the rule of law, it should be no surprise that neither our present leaders nor our aspiring champions ignore it.