TRUMP IS ‘BULLYING WHITE MAN’

“His [Donald Trump’s] supporters seem to believe that he can do these things; or, even if they don’t quite believe, they long for someone who can — who can tame OPEC and China and Iran as if world affairs could be made to be like a reality TV show. This is an understandable yearning to some extent, in an age in which the United States’ ability to call the global shots is so much reduced from what it was fifty years ago. But it has a more sinister aspect, this wish for a strong man who can just fix everything. And surely it’s also the case for some Trump supporters that after eight years of [President] Obama, a bullying white man is exactly what is needed to restore things to their natural order. It is these qualities that lend Trumpism its faintly disturbing Face in the Crowd*odor.”

[* A Face in the Crowd was a 1957 Elia Kazan movie about an overnight media sensation.]

Michael Tomasky, “Trump,” in the New York Review, September 24, 2015, pp: 12-16.