There is something significant about the Trump phenomena

When Donald Trump first announced for president, most observers (including myself) though he would be a flash in the pan – a week-long media event and then gone.  When he made his first outrageous statement (I can’t even remember what it was, there have been so many) most observers (including myself) figured he had shot himself in the foot, and would soon be gone.  Well, we were all wrong.  It is months later, many, many outrageous statements later, and Trump is not only leading in the polls, but is widening the lead over the past few weeks.

Taken in isolation, it would be easy to assume there is a small base of Republicans who just live on another planet.  But look at the context.  The nominal democratic dynastic shoo-in, Hillary Clinton, is losing ground steadily to outright Socialist Bernie Sanders, and some polls suggest that if Vice President Biden runs, she would lose ground to him as well.  On the Republican side, look at who the runners-up are behind Trump -  not the establishment figures like Jeb Bush or Scott Walker or Marco Rubio, who were supposed to be the contenders – it is Ben Carson, a retired neurosurgeon.

There is a significant message here – It’s Washington outsiders who are leading or gaining in the polls, on both the Democratic and Republican side, not establishment Washington insiders.  And why might that be?

Well, among the outrageous and incorrect and plain made-up-on-the-spot statements that Trump spouts every week there is a lot of truth, a lot of things we all know but don’t often say. Maybe he is getting the support because, in his crude and uncontrolled and egotistical way, he is saying what no professional politician will admit – that the emperor has no clothes.

·         Everyone knows, but few say, that politicians from the president on down are bought and paid for by special interest groups, corporations, unions.  When a super-PAC puts half a billion dollars behind a candidate, who but a naïve fool would not think that they expect something significant in return when she/he wins?

·         Everyone knows, but few say, that Washington insiders get special treatment and are for the most part above the law. When I did classified work, if I had mishandled classified material like Hillary Clinton (who is still getting a pass from the media), or like General and CIA Director David Patraeus (who got a lenient plea bargain), or like CIA Director John Deutch (who got a Presidential pardon), I would have been in the slammer so quickly and for so long.

·         Everyone knows, but few say, that Washington insiders are not accountable. How many heads have rolled because of the IRS’s baised treatment of Republican political action committees before the last election?  How many heads have rolled since The Office of Personnel and Management managed to lose the entire files of everyone investigated for a security clearance since 2000, and lose them apparently to Chinese hackers?  How many heads rolled when the Government ObamaCare websites first went up so disastrously?  How many heads do you expect to roll because Hillary Clinton was allowed to use a personal server (likely not very secure), in her home, to store and pass government and diplomatic messages of potentially damaging information?

·         Everyone knows, but few say, that politicians are in it for their careers, and for their pocketbooks, not for the nation or even for their supporters. (If I hear another politician prating on about “serving the People”, I’m going to throw up!) Most of Congress gets re-elected every year, unless they really goof up or they die. And both parties have made sure that happens in the House by outrageous gerrymandering of districts. Note how many in Congress are pretty rich. Notice that when they leave office they go into lucrative jobs in corporations or as K-street lobbyists for the very people for whom they used to do favors (Or, if they are Clintons, they get $750,000 speaking fees for an hour speech from a group negotiating with the State Department – headed by Hillary - for a lucrative deal)

·         Everyone knows, but few say, that our Government is really, really f**ked up (pardon the language, but it seems to require that level of expression to truly capture the state of affairs). OPM can’t even keep some of nation’s most sensitive data (files from security clearance investigations) safe. (They didn’t even discover they had been hacked until a vendor came in to demonstrate some security software and discovered it)   The Air Force makes a $25 BILLION dollar error in calculating the probable cost of its new bomber. A guy like Edward Snowden  - only a low-level contractor, not even a government employee - can download millions of classified files and send them off anywhere he likes – and isn’t even caught (he had to announce that he had done it before anyone noticed).  The list goes on and on, with new examples added every single day.

So perhaps when outsiders begin to speak up, even if they are as outrageous as Donald Trump or as left-wing as Bernie Sanders or as unconventional as Ben Carson, they are tapping into something fundamental about the America electorate.  The electorate as a whole isn’t particularly smart, and is easily beguiled by specious arguments and red herrings and populist promises that can never be fulfilled, but they are smart enough, Republican and Democratic alike, to know that the Washington insiders these days  are pretty inept at most things they try except getting re-elected and getting rich.

Barack Obama got to be president on the basis of soaring oratory and a promise to make Washington work better. Well, we got the oratory - almost 8 years worth of it thus far - but we didn’t get better government (though we certainly got more government). So perhaps it is not surprising that outsiders in both parties are doing so much better that the talking heads on TV  would have predicted.

There is an interesting dynamic at play here. It started, or at least perhaps first became noticeable, with the rise of the Tea Party groups.  I suspect the anomalies thus far in this election are part of the same mass movement and largely independent of political parties.  The electorate is uneasy, unhappy, even perhaps increasingly enraged, at Washington insiders. The issues are many and different depending on one’s political stance, but the uneasiness is general, across all parties, and may well develop into something politically significant. Especially since the emergence of social media has dramatically changed the electoral landscape.