The more Trump says, ‘Believe me,’ the more he shows we can’t trust him

By Clarence Page

Saturday, July 30, 2016 | 2 a.m.

Where’s the pivot?

That’s what I was wondering throughout Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump’s lengthy and surprisingly humorless acceptance speech last Thursday at the Grand Old Party’s national convention in Cleveland.

Ever since Trump won enough delegates to clinch the nomination in May, I’ve been waiting to see if and when Trump would make “the pivot.”

That’s today’s fashionable term in political circles for a campaign strategy that President Richard Nixon used to describe as more of a pendulum: You swing toward your party’s base to win their nomination, then swing back to the center to attract the independent voters who decide general elections.

Timing and managing your pivot as a candidate is tricky but crucial. But, with barely more than 100 days left to the November elections, Trump sounded like a guy who ain’t about to pivot.

Quite the opposite, Trump sounded like he’s doubling down on his efforts to rouse the conservative and largely blue-collar and middle-class base that has turned out in huge numbers, as he puts it, at his rallies.

That’s quite the opposite of the outreach to minorities, women and millennials that was recommended by the Republican National Committee’s post-2012 “autopsy” report.

There always has been a lower-profile but widespread grass-roots faction in the Grand Old Party that believes in doubling down instead of watering down their conservative agenda, especially in big, crucial rust-belt swing states such as Ohio, Michigan and Pennsylvania that failed to show up for Mitt Romney in 2012.

“I have visited the laid-off factory workers, and the communities crushed by our horrible and unfair trade deals,” Trump said in his convention speech. “These are the forgotten men and women of our country, and they are forgotten, but they will not be forgotten long. These are people who work hard but no longer have a voice. I am your voice.”

He put a lot of emphasis on those last four words. His me-against-the-world message seemed to reveal something important about the inner Trump. Leadership usually means sharing the struggle with those whom you wish to lead. Trump implies he can do it all himself.

“Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it,” he said. “I have seen firsthand how the system is rigged against our citizens, just like it was rigged against (former Democratic candidate) Bernie Sanders.” How? Trump did not say. He didn’t have to. He apparently figured it was enough that he extend the olive branch to disappointed Sanders voters.

Instead of the “Morning in America” politics of optimism that Ronald Reagan perfected and Bill Clinton and Barack Obama emulated, Trump preached doomsday darkness: Be afraid, very afraid.

If there was a pivot in Trump’s speech, compared to what we have heard on the campaign stump, it was in his pivot toward that dark side. The world’s going down the tubes, he emphasized, all because of — guess who?

“The irresponsible rhetoric of our president,” he shouted, as if he did not know how microphones work, “who has used the pulpit of the presidency to divide us by race and color, has made America a more dangerous environment than, frankly, I have ever seen and anybody in this room has ever watched or seen.”

He went on to claim that the Obama “administration has failed America’s inner cities” and described the problems of “Baltimore, Chicago, Detroit and Ferguson” like every other self-styled expert who has spent little or no actual time in the communities he was talking about. Thanks for the thoughts, Mr. T, but where are your remedies?

The same goes for his daughter Ivanka, who delivered more effectively than her dad a message of hope, particularly to women and her fellow millennials — two groups with whom Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton holds double-digit leads over Trump.

Trump’s speech lasted an hour and 15 minutes, the longest for a nominee in more than 40 years, but for all its scary litany of problems — which have given professional fact-checkers much to debunk — Trump offered no solutions.

He promises to destroy the Islamic State and “do it quickly.” But how? He’ll tell us after he’s elected, he says. “Believe me.”

He says that a lot. But as I learned long ago, when someone says “believe me” all the time, you probably should not believe them.

There’s nothing new about the use of doomsday rhetoric in politics. Check out historian Richard Hofstadter’s classic 1964 essay “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.”

Trump apparently follows the Machiavellian view that you can win more supporters with fear than with love. But in one authoritarian regime after another, we have seen how the politics of fear often leads to more problems that people should be fearful about.

Clarence Page is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune.