Trump taps into anger

Opinion: December 1, 2015 at 12:00a.m.

Donald Trump is still on top of the polls – defiantly, loudly, implausibly on top, even after saying things that would doom any candidate in a normal year.

A month ago, Trump’s standing among Republican presidential candidates appeared to be eroding, especially in Iowa, where Ben Carson was gaining support. But since the Nov. 13 terrorist attacks in Paris, Trump has seized the center of the GOP’s stage and bolstered his lead in both national and state polls. The horrors inflicted by Islamic State have given his campaign a lift.

The would-be president said he would register Muslims in a national database and probably close some of their mosques. He charged that Muslims in Jersey City, N.J., cheered the collapse of the World Trade Center in 2001, even though nobody else remembers such a thing. He warned that President Barack Obama plans to admit 250,000 Syrian refugees next year; the real number is 10,000. He sent out bogus statistics claiming that 81 percent of white murder victims are killed by black people; after Bill O’Reilly of Fox News told him that wasn’t true, Trump shrugged and said he didn’t have time to check the facts. And that’s only in the last week.

How can a figure this gratuitously divisive hold on to his place atop the GOP presidential standings? Anger and fear.

Distrust of government

The anger of conservative voters has been evident all year, but recently the nonpartisan Pew Research Center released an important study that added new detail to the picture. The headline on Pew’s report was that only 19 percent of Americans say they can trust the federal government most of the time, one of the lowest levels in half a century. But among Republicans, that disaffection runs much deeper: 32 percent say they not only mistrust the government but are “angry” with it.

The angriest voters, Pew found, are politically engaged conservatives, the Republicans most likely to vote in primary elections. Most of them say an ordinary citizen could do a better job in the White House than a professional politician. Among that group, Citizen Trump scores high.

Even so, Trump is the preferred candidate of only about one-third of Republican voters. By all rights, something should happen to unseat him. But what?

I consulted several strategists for Trump’s competitors – and came up empty.

“I wish I knew,” said the adviser for one candidate, who begged for anonymity to prevent his haplessness from becoming public knowledge.

If only the party could unite around a single alternative to Trump, he said, but “that’s not happening yet.” Maybe the voters will wise up, he ventured. “When it’s time to cast a real ballot, they’re going to think about electability, about which candidate can win the general election against Hillary Clinton.”

“Watch the next debate,” another strategist advised. “Someone will recognize the need to go after him.”

Or maybe Trump will come in second in Iowa, he continued, and decide to withdraw, because he doesn’t want to look like a loser. “He lives by the polls and will die by the polls,” he said. “Watch him get angry when the Iowa polling shows him drop.”

Trump is still a long way from becoming his party’s presidential nominee, but by all logic, he shouldn’t even be this close.

Doyle McManus is a columnist for the Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.