I have great hope for Donald Trump’s run for the presidency. Seriously.
At no time in our nation’s history has there been greater need for someone like Trump, a man best described in the pages of the late, lamented Spy magazine as a “short-fingered vulgarian” — and that was before the invention of reality TV.
I doubt Trump will be around long enough to make it to the Iowa caucuses, but I hope he’s around long enough to make a real impact on America. In fact, I think, in 2012, Trump is the one we’ve been waiting for.
To begin with, he can be the force that paves the way for some real tax reform, in which rich people actually pay reasonable taxes again. It’s not fair to blame Trump on the rich. I’m sure most rich people don’t like Trump any more than the rest of us. But if you want to caricature the rich, let’s just say that you would never catch Warren Buffet saying he was way richer than Mitt Romney.
Trump is the rich guy who insists everything be named after him — and not just wings of hospitals or museum collections. He screams from the top of his very tall Trump Towers that taste doesn’t matter, just so long as it’s Trump-a-sized.
The fact that he leads in some Republican polls is an embarrassment to most Republicans. Karl Rove calls him a “joke,” a word he usually reserves Christine O’Donnell. And David Brooks, in his role as public intellectual, tries to explain it away by saying, “Donald Trump is the living, walking personification of the Gospel of Success.” That’s when rich people flaunt what they have, and Obama’s bitter people — you know who we mean — apparently root them on, as if they’re one lottery ticket away from telling off the Chinese and stealing Iraq’s oil.
Paul Ryan has made this an issue. He’s the one who put a Republican plan down on paper, where everyone could read it, which would cut Medicare and Medicaid spending while keeping some tax cuts for the rich and granting others, even though we’re $14 trillion in debt and he’s supposed to be the deficit cutter.
And he doesn’t stop there. He makes the cuts on the poor or near-poor or soon-to-be-near- poor, warning that we don’t want them lulled into the hammock of “complacency and dependency.” The truth is the rent-a-hammock store took the damn thing back months ago and the trees have all gone for firewood.
The latest polls are pretty clear. In a Washington Post/ABC poll, people were asked for ways to cut the deficit — cut spending on Medicare or Medicaid or defense spending or raise taxes for those making at least $250,000.
Medicare cuts came in at 21 percent, Medicaid at 30, defense at 42 — and raising taxes for the well off at 72.
A few pundits have noted that during the health care debate, a big talking point was that Democrats were ignoring the will of the people. Well, the polls now say the people want that extra trillion we’d get by doing away with the Bush tax cuts for the rich. And if it costs Trump a tower or two, all the better.
Then, we turn to the most disturbing aspect of Trump’s faux run — besides the pure Trumpiness of it — which is the birther thing. He doesn’t believe a word he’s saying, or that’s the way to guess anyway. This is the guy who used to be pro-choice and now isn’t, used to be for taxing the rich and now isn’t, used to say Obama would be a great president and now says he’s the worst.
But when the birther guy is leading in some polls, the birther question has to be asked — and would-be candidates have to actually answer, meaning even Michele Bachmann was forced to say it should be put to rest.
And, besides, when Arizona Gov. Jan Brewer vetoes the latest birther law, which would actually have conceivably required a presidential candidate to present a circumcision certificate, isn’t it pretty much over? I mean, even if 37 percent of Republicans tell pollsters Obama wasn’t born in the United States?
As The Atlantic’s Chris Good suggests, birtherism can’t survive Trumpism. Eventually it will just be Trump and a few benighted morning talk show guys. And Sarah Palin will continue saying that Trump is being ill-treated by the media when, in fact, Trump’s entire campaign is to get as much media as possible.
He’s already accomplished that much, of course. I’m guessing he can still do so much more.
E-mail Mike Littwin at mlittwin@denverpost.com.
