Now we can be sure. Donald Trump will never tack to the middle. “Let Trump be Trump,” is his team’s new motto, which is baffling since he has not tried anything else. By recruiting Stephen Bannon of Breitbart News, the far right conservative website, to run his campaign, Mr Trump has banished whatever doubts still lingered: his White House bid is chiefly about inciting white resentment. For the next 10 weeks, he will trigger every dark fear he can find. It has been more than a generation since Richard Nixon ended America’s “long national nightmare” by resigning the presidency. Mr Trump’s version still has a way to go. There is little reason to think it would come to an end if he lost.
The former reality television star’s debt to Nixon is as much about psychology as ideology. America’s 37th president collected resentments like philatelists do stamps. Nixon never met a grudge he did not want to nurse. Roger Ailes, the disgraced founder of Fox News, made his name by training Nixon to smile more and treat TV as his friend in his winning 1968 campaign. It is no coincidence that Mr Ailes is now coaching Mr Trump for his televised debates with Hillary Clinton. He has his work cut out. Mr Trump may have borrowed Nixon’s 1968 playbook by running a fear-based campaign that appeals to law and order. But today’s silent majority is way less white than it was back then. As an electoral strategy, Mr Trump’s campaign is flirting with suicide.
Yet it works as a media strategy. Nixon believed people respond to fear rather than love. “They don’t teach that in Sunday school — but it’s true,” he said. He also harboured a deep hatred of the elites — the professors, Ivy Leaguers and experts whom Spiro Agnew, his vice-president, called the “effete core of impudent snobs”. Mr Trump is surrounded by people with the same Nixonian grievances. His first mentor, Roy Cohn, the legendary New York lawyer, advised people that you should know the judge not the law. Roger Stone, Mr Trump’s oldest friend with whom he speaks daily, believes “hate is a stronger motivator than love”. Paul Manafort, the former Trump campaign manager, who resigned on Friday, made his fortune as an adviser to paranoid strongmen around the world. Mr Bannon’s website is dominated by conspiracy theories. Now he has a golden chance to turn his paranoia into a presidential campaign. What will it look like?