Dr. Brian Clardy described Donald Trump’s recent televised press conference—the one with the president of Finland—as “unhinged, unbelievable.”
Even so, the Murray State history professor thinks Trump will carry Kentucky, again barring something unforeseen like the “hot mike moment” from the old movie A Face in the Crowd. More on that in a minute.
Journalists—except the Trump radio and TV propagandists—similarly panned the president’s performance. It was maybe his most bizarre presser yet: a rambling, ranting, paranoid, rage fest and pity party.
Sauli Niinistö stood stoically and poker-faced stage right. I’d have given a Euro—inflation—for his thoughts. I looked up “this guy’s nuts” in Finnish. It’s “tämän kaverin pähkinät.”
“Today, we are all Sauli Niinistö,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom tweeted.
Anyway, I remember when Richard Nixon cursed, spewed racial and ethnic epithets, and prayed to pictures. But that was behind White House doors. Nixon was drunk, to boot.
Clardy’s convinced that the teetotaling Trump will triumph in Kentucky, from Jordan to Jenkins, by reprising his non-stop pandering on guns, abortion, immigration—and on race, especially race. “A lot of Kentuckians—but certainly not all—will vote those values, and they see Trump as their champion.”
Clardy meant a lot of white Kentuckians. The Bluegrass State is more than 87 percent white.
I suggested that when Trump said “Make America Great Again” he meant for whites to hear “Make America White Again.” Clardy agreed.
A slew of post election studies—click here, here, and here—clearly showed that racial resentment, not economic anxiety, was the main motivator of most whites who voted for Trump.
“I can’t imagine people in western Kentucky and in different parts of the state, with the exception of Louisville and Lexington, voting for a liberal Democrat,” Clardy said. (Trump carried every Kentucky county save Jefferson (Louisville) and Fayette (Lexington).
Added Clardy: “The only way for Trump to lose Kentucky is to have a hot mike moment where he says something so awful, so egregious, so out-of-control” that his base turns on him.
The professor concedes that most Trumpspeak has been awful, egregious, and out-of-control since he descended the golden escalator in Trump Tower. But Trump has pointed it at the enemies—most of them nonwhite—he shares with his base.
Clardy recalled the climactic scene from A Face in the Crowd. Marcia Jeffries (Patricia Neal) has turned Arkansas nobody “Lonesome” Rhodes (Andy Griffith) into a media superstar. He becomes an arrogant egomaniac and notorious womanizer.
Jeffries decides to expose him. At the end of a TV broadcast, Rhodes, his microphone off, smiles and waves at the camera while calling his fans “idiots” and “morons.” Jeffries, in the control room, turns the mike on; the faithful hear him, blow fuses, and Rhodes is finished.
No doubt, Trump the millionaire makes fun of the Trumpian rank-and-file when he’s deep in the White House inner sanctum. Clardy wonders if there’s a Marsha Jeffries among Trump’s courtiers. One might emerge as impeachment draws nigh, and he invariably starts tossing his toadies under the bus.
The Atlantic’s David Frum figures that come what may, the president will stick with the tried-and-true. “Trump’s message is aggrieved victimhood,” Frum recently wrote. “His message is emotional—poor poor me—and is aimed only at those willing to join his pity party.”
His almost entirely white base is, to use an old Baptist term, a fertile mission field. A lot of white folks feel victimized by half a century of federal civil rights legislation geared to make real the words of the Declaration of Independence about equality.
They yearn for an America when straight, white Protestant men ran everything, when wives stayed home as child-rearers and adoring helpmeets to their husbands, when African Americans—not the word they use—were invisible, when Latinx stayed south of the border and when LGBTQ folks stayed in the closet.
Trump’s their Great—and they fear last—White Hope. In their heart of hearts they know he can’t deliver on his implied promise to make America white again. But they love it when he talks the talk.
My canary in the coal mine for how Kentucky will go in 2020 is a flagpole between a modest house and a mobile home near where I live.
A big, bright blue “TRUMP 2020 NO MORE BULLSHIT!” banner flies below the Stars and Stripes. I checked today. Old Glory and the Trump standard are still there.
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