So we’ve established that Donald Trump can lead Hillary Clinton in a poll, indeed in several polls. This should concern liberals and Democrats and anyone who fears a Trump presidency, but it shouldn’t inspire raw panic. Trump is benefiting from having clinched his nomination; Clinton is suffering through the last stand of Bernie Sanders. Trump has climbed to about 43 percent, not 50 percent; Hillary has lost support that she should be able to win back once it’s just the two of them. Barring the unforeseen, Trump’s path to the presidency is still obscure, his likely coalition insufficient, his chances of losing by a comfortable margin quite high.
But the unforeseen does have a way of happening. So with the race in a temporary dead heat, it’s worth pondering what unexpected events might pave Trump’s still-unlikely path to the White House.
A lot of people would start with the economy, where the idea that we’re just one financial meltdown away from a Trump presidency has become the pessimist’s conventional wisdom lately.
I’m not so sure that’s the right way to look at Trump’s appeal, however. He’s done well with working-class voters, and his promise to bring back jobs has resonated, but it’s not as if he’s been riding to victory amid a swooning economy, or even an economy with the high unemployment rates that prevailed in 2012. Like Bernie Sanders, his populism has fed on stagnation and diminished expectations, not panic or collapse: Its success is the fruit of an unsatisfying stability, not a vertiginous decline. A real collapse might actually not be good for his prospects, since the idea that America needs him to “blow things up” in Washington might seem considerably less appealing if the world economy were actually blowing up on its own.
The same logic might hold for a mass-casualty terrorist attack on American soil, another oft-cited Trump-versus-Clinton black swan. Of course the details would matter: A mass-casualty terrorist attack perpetrated by a Benghazi-based terrorist cell that slipped its men across the United States-Mexican border would presumably be less than ideal for Team Clinton. But I don’t think it’s a simple case of “the worse the blow, the better for Trump.” The Man From Mar-a-Lago is many things, but he isn’t a reassuring figure or a steady hand, and the prospect of putting him in charge in the midst of an enormous national security crisis might give many undecided voters pause.
What Trump benefits most from, I suspect, is a more limited sense that things are out of control — a feeling of anxiety about the world that pulses through your TV set or your computer screen but hasn’t yet hit your neighborhood or family or bank account directly.
Thus the terrorist attacks in Paris and San Bernardino, Calif., and the entire Syrian refugee crisis were ideal for Trump’s appeal, contributing to a sense that “there’s something going on, and it’s bad” (as he put it) without clarifying the stakes involved for the United States or the kind of response that a President Trump might actually be charged with undertaking.
If this theory is right, then in the fall campaign Trump would benefit more from economic jitters — stock market hiccups, a spike in gas prices — than he would from a sudden recession. He would benefit more from another spate of Islamic State beheadings than he would from a terrorist attack that required a major military response, and more from a continuing sense of immigration-driven instability in Europe than from, say, a real confrontation with Vladimir Putin over the Baltics.
His ideal summer and fall would feature a new form of chaos with every news cycle: Zika in the summer months, a child migration crisis when the weather cooled, a European capital in lockdown every other week. He would want to campaign amid a persistent mood of instability, anxiety and dislocation, but one that didn’t make people so anxious that they started worrying about all the obvious ways that he might make things worse.
The same might hold for what Trump needs from the Clintons and their scandals. He probably isn’t going to get the kind of bombshell that actually knocks Hillary out of the running and into federal court. But in a way he wouldn’t necessarily want that, because anything bad enough to wreck her campaign could force her out of the race entirely. Does Trump really want to campaign against a late-entering Joe Biden? I suspect not.
A steady drip-drip of scandal, then, might suit his purposes a little better. “It’s always a mess with Hillary,” Trump has taken to saying, and that’s the narrative he wants confirmed, cycle after cycle, week after week.
Of course it would be helpful if the scandals were juicy and novel. The email business (in the news again with the State Department inspector general’s withering report) could use another wrinkle, a late-breaking link to Putin or China or Iran, and likewise the Clinton Foundation’s various conflicts of interest and corruptions. Bill Clinton’s sex life is perhaps somewhat useful as a shield against attacks on Trump’s own misogyny, but it’s also old news: What Trump really needs is something that doesn’t feel recycled from the 1990s — like, say, a Juanita Broaddrick-style allegation from Clinton’s post-presidential jet-setting that breaks in early October.
None of these imagined crises and scandals are at all implausible. What is unlikely is that there will be enough of them, enough of a permanent cascade, to make Trump’s “there’s something going on, and it’s bad” resonate day in and day out, and overwhelm all the normal reasons people have to vote against him.
But that’s probably what he needs: not a black swan, you might say, but a flock of gray ones, startling enough to make his fearmongering seem like wisdom, but never quite so frightening that they dissuade voters from taking a flyer on a man who by rights should instill a different, deeper sort of fear.
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ROSS DOUTHAT>
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