Why Trump Works

The Nicolle Wallace interview with Jeb Bush last night was so many things--sad, irritating, and also just plain fascinating, because the same question kept coming up--"How did we get here? How did Trump end up being the nominee?"

I can see why they--along with so many other people--are so confused. Up until very recently Trump was known for being pro-choice, critical of the 2nd amendment, and not very religious. He seems to go against everything the GOP stands for, but there's one thing he has going for him that Jeb and a lot of the other Republican Presidential candidates didn't have--

He infuriates liberals.

There's something we have trouble saying in America--and it's that a lot of us want to see our enemies fail more than we want to see ourselves succeed.

Or maybe I should put that a different way.

Let's say you were given two choices:

You can have a life where you achieve tremendous success but everyone you don't like achieves the same amount of success that you do.

OR

You achieve a lesser amount of success but nobody else is as successful as you are.

Now, logically, we should all pick Choice #1. That's the magnanimous choice. That's the moral choice. In most cases, that's the choice you make if you're a religious person.

And yet...

I don't think we live in a country that's cultivated the ideals that go along with opting for Choice #1.

Everything we do is a competition. Everything is comparative. Pick up a magazine that doesn't have a list in it somewhere of the Best this or the Most that.

And in addition to a competitive culture, we've also created a culture obsessed with youth, which means not only do you have to be more successful than everybody else, but you have to become successful by a certain age, or you might as well give up and adopt bitterness as a permanent personality trait.

Let's be honest--an awful lot of older people resent younger people. Look at what happened in England. If that wasn't the older generation giving the finger to the younger generation, I don't know what is. Now, none of the "Leave" people are going to come right out and say "I voted the way I did because I hate young people," because they're not willing to admit that they're scared of death and aging, which is a whole other topic for another day, but the point remains, it wasn't about making the sound political decision, it was about looking at the people you don't like and saying "I may not be able to win, but I can sure as hell make you lose."

Here in America, we have the same sort of thing, but our divide is down the party line--Red and Blue.

I'll admit that I'm not innocent when it comes to this. I'm a Hillary supporter, and one of the reasons I like her is because she angers all the people I don't like--Conservatives, People I Perceive to Be Radicals, and Millennials.

Why do I like angering Conservatives? Because they like angering me. Why do I like angering people I perceive to be radicals? Because they constantly bombard me with their beliefs. Why do I like angering millennials? Because they're going to live ten years longer than I am, and I resent that. Because they took the world my generation took from the previous generation and made it their own the same way my generation did and that pisses me off. Ask the British about all that, they understand.

But as for Clinton--Do I find faults with her? Oh, all the time. Every day. Once an hour usually. Would I actually be better off with her as a President?

Who knows?

But I know the people I don't like would be worse off--and that's good enough for me.

Am I proud of that?

Absolutely not, but then again, I never really thought about it that way until last night when I saw Jeb shaking his head asking why Conservatives would line up to vote for someone who is clearly not a Conservative, and I thought--

It's because he gets under the skin of people like me.

And that might just be the only real qualification you need to be successful in politics now.

Look at President Reagan. Whatever you may think of him, he made the people who voted for him feel the way they wanted to feel, and even though most of them were suffering financially under him, they weren't suffering as bad as those they didn't like--the poor, minorities, addicts, etc. So it was fine. It was okay. We don't mind being destitute as long as the people we don't like are worse off than us.

Take what happened in Indiana and in the South when they passed discriminatory laws and risked financial ruin. The rest of us kept saying--Don't they understand what they're doing to themselves? Of course they did. They're not stupid. They just didn't care, because it made the rest of us mad.

Never underestimate the power of righteous indignation. America was created by revolution, and what's a revolution if not righteous indignation put into action? And yet we're surprised that it still exists today, and that it might overpower things like kindness and common sense.

We've always been a nation that cares more about what our neighbors have than what we have. That's not a new phenomenon. The trouble is, up until now, we could resent our neighbors, but we couldn't really do anything about it, because our neighbors looked just like we did, so we could covet what we saw in their backyards, but we couldn't feel entitled to it.

Then our neighbors stopped looking like us, and suddenly--there was a window.

When Trump came along, he didn't open the window, he smashed it.

He said "Your neighbors don't deserve what they have." or "They probably stole it" or "They probably stole it from you" except he wasn't calling them neighbors. He was calling them Mexicans and Muslims and women and whoever else he could make out to be "the other."

And do we know better? Do we understand who he's really talking about?

Of course we do.

But we've been looking over the fence for a long time, simmering over what we're seeing--the success of others. Even as our houses got bigger, and our lifespans got longer, and our bank accounts grew--the other houses looked bigger, the other lives looked longer, and the other pockets seemed deeper. And no amount of logic can compete with what we create in our own minds when what's invented there is meant to soothe our own egos and justify our own inadequacies.

That's what Trump represents. He's choice number one in the scenario I mentioned. He's the guy standing next to you while you look over your fence at your neighbor's yard, whispering in your ear "They don't deserve it. They didn't earn it. They have no right to it."

He gives people permission to feel cheated, and because they've been cheated, they can behave in a way that angers and upsets those of us across from them. And Clinton does the same for people like me. Sanders did it for his supporters. Cruz did it for his.

They hand us soundbytes and memes and weapons and say--

"Here. Throw this at the people directly across from you. It'll hurt them."

And whether we admit it to ourselves or not, that's what we want. That's what we're looking for--to hurt the people we think are the reason we're not who we want to be.

Because if it turned out we're the reason--that we're at fault for not being as successful as we'd like to be, or as rich as we'd like to be, or as happy as we'd like to be--well then what?

Last night, Jeb said he thought his strength against Trump was that he was offering solutions while Trump was just pointing out the problems. And you know what? He's right. Would his solutions actually have worked? Who knows? But he was offering them.

But solutions mean work. They mean trying harder. They mean discussions amongst rivals. They mean compromise.

And nobody wants to hear about any of that.

We just want to know who has what we want, and how you're going to take it away from them and give it back to us.

You don't need to be our friend. You just need to be the enemy of our enemy.

That's enough. That'll get you the vote.

That'll get you everything.