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The Id versus the Superego: Trump v Sanders for 2016? Phillip Frazer
Donald Trump has made and lost several fortunes building hotels, apartment buildings, skyscrapers, golf courses, and casinos in New York and a dozen other cities around the world. Last year he stunned the Republican Party – and anyone who cares about American politics – by polling 20 points ahead of his nearest rival for his party’s nomination to be its candidate for president. Trump has practice being top dog, and not just in the real estate business he inherited – he has also run professional wrestling and beauty pageants on TV, and he was the bully boss on a reality TV show The Apprentice which was dedicated to glorifying … Donald Trump. Over 50 years spent spruiking himself as America’s toughest, smartest, winningest, and all-round bestest baron of business, he reckons he can run anything better than the people currently running the thing, including running the USA and, by extension, the world. And he’ll run the United States, which he believes is the best country in the world at doing everything, without much concern for those airyfairy non-business concepts like democracy, the common good, equality, the Constitution, laws, or even merit. This guy’s put the Id back into ideology. But – while all of this bombast, braggadocio, and bullshit doesn’t sketch the outline of a coherent political program, let alone a worldview, it has given the pompadoured pied piper hordes of followers who once believed in the American dream but now find themselves in a festering nightmare. Trump, who not only scorns policy and principle, but also laughs at the idea of coherent speech, barks and dog whistles across the airwaves about making America great again and his supporters feel the nightmare receding and the dream reappearing, just around the corner, somewhere, over the rainbow. These are white middle and sub-middle class citizens who have either never had much financial success or have lost it. They’re looking for someone to blame and someone to save them. For blaming, Trump offers them immigrants (par-
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JONSON STREET Left: US Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump prior to a debate at The Venetian Las Vegas. Photo EPA/Mike Nelson. Right: Democratic presidential candidate Senator Bernie Sanders speaks at Muscatine High School in Iowa. AP Photo/Andrew Harnik
The voter statistics maths There are 126 million likely voters in the US, of whom only 15 per cent or so turn out to vote in the primaries, which brings the tally down to 18.45 million, half of whom are Democrats, so 9.2 million Republicans, and Trump might get 40 per cent of their votes = 2.9 million then subtract ten per cent for landline bias – most polls don’t reach people who only have a mobile phone, and they are significantly more liberal – leaves 2.6 million which is 1.2 per cent of voting-age Americans.
ticularly Spanish-speaking ones) and Muslims, who collectively crash-bombed those twin towers of Manhattan real estate and keep fighting us (ie America) over our oil that’s inexplicably under their sand. For salvation he offers them Trump.
Trump’s chances So how worried should we be? Here’s one reason to keep calm: The election is still 11 months away, and all these Trumpsters amount to about 40 per cent of eligible voters in the upcoming Republican primaries – not the election itself – which amounts to fewer than three million Americans, or about one per cent of the population. (See the coloured box for the maths.) So far, I guestimate that about 40,000 people have pressed the Trump button in roughly 100 telephone polls – each of which typically calls 1,000 people – and of course no actual votes of any kind have yet been conducted. And here’s a reason to be un-calm: The guy now closing in on Trump for the Republican nomination is Texas senator Ted Cruz, who’s a fundamentalist of the ‘dominionist’ variety of christianity. He says god has chosen him to have dominion over the US (god’s chosen country of course) until god himself takes over. Recently, Cruz made a
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video of how he makes his fave food, machine-gun bacon, which involves wrapping a rasher around the barrel of an automatic weapon and firing off a dozen rounds, till the bacon sizzles. Cruz also advocates returning gold as the basis for valuing the US dollar, eliminating the IRS (America’s federal tax authority), opposes gay pride parades (forget about gay marriage), and believes government support for individuals creates dependency.
Surprise Sanders Coming third among Republicans is Marco Rubio, whose parents, like Cruz’s, left Cuba after the 1959 revolution. Rubio believes life begins at conception so abortion is murder, we should freeze all federal spending except defence at 2008 levels, ban gay marriage, cut corporate taxes, privatise more education, and ignore global warming because ‘you can’t change the weather’. Meanwhile, there are two Democratic Party contenders and the biggest story of this whole election so far is that Senator Bernie Sanders, the only member of the US Congress to call himself a socialist, is trailing Hillary Clinton by less than Obama was this time in the 2008 race, and he could well beat her in the Iowa primary on February 1 and/or in New Hampshire on the 9th. Polls of all American voters
predict Sanders would beat Trump by 13 per cent in next November’s presidential election – versus Clinton’s seven per cent. If you’d taken a poll a year ago about the likelihood of 2016 being between Sanders and Trump, the winner would’ve been No Takers. You might wonder why the Republican Party doesn’t just refuse to spend any of its campaign funds on Trump. Well, Trump has at least $3 billion of his own money, and if he stumbles, his replacement will be effectively chosen by kingmaker brothers David and Charles Koch, who are worth closer to $30 billion (from daddy’s oil and gas fortune) – they say they’ll spend $1 billion to make sure their chosen Republican beats Hillary Clinton. That’s more than either the Democratic or Republican parties have to back their candidate. Clinton, who is the Democratic Party establishment’s candidate, has been given $100 million thus far, four of her top five donors being Wall Street banks Citigroup, Goldman Sachs, JPMorganChase, and Morgan Stanley. Bernie Sanders is a 73-yearold secular Jew. A senator from Vermont, he has been lecturing friends and strangers forever about what’s right, ethical, and moral – he’s offering America a superego since it doesn’t have one, so naturally he refuses to take big corporate money. Instead, he has collected $80 million from 2.7 million individual contributions averaging $29, which is the largest pool of supporters to back any presidential candidate ever, beating Obama’s records in 2008 and 2012. And the election year has just begun.
Walking south down Jonson St takes you away from the beach to the calmer southern end where the locals shop and hang out. There is plenty of parking on the street, in the carpark between Palace Cinemas and Woolworths and behind the shops. From here you can explore some of Byron’s best loved, locally owned businesses.
Q Phillip Frazer blogs at www. coorabellridge.com.
The Byron Shire Echo January 6, 2016 17