Victim-lambasting Trump supporters oblivious to irony

By Clarence Page

Monday, May 2, 2016 | 2 a.m.

Oh, so now Donald Trump cares about whom he offends?

The New York billionaire’s Republican presidential candidacy is in for a makeover. In fact, his new campaign adviser Paul Manafort said at a meeting of Republican National Committee leaders in Hollywood, Fla., that The Donald’s pivot to a more cool and cuddly candidate already has begun.

“You’ll start to see more depth of the person, the real person,” said Manafort, according to a recording obtained by the Associated Press in the closed-door meeting. “You’ll see a real different way.”

“The negatives will come down,” Manafort said. “The image is going to change.”

Is he — and Trump — for real? The announced transformation conveniently comes at a time when Trump is trying to woo a constituency he underestimated, if he expected it at all: Republican convention delegates who do the actual nominating of the party’s presidential candidate.

Will Trump change his tone? Will he no longer sound like the guy sitting at the end of the bar in a monster truck rally T-shirt, complaining about whatever gripe comes into his head?

Maybe, but I doubt it. Trump has signaled makeovers before, but, like his positions on abortion and some other touchy issues, they didn’t last long.

For example, in a touch of grace on the evening after his New York primary victory, Trump referred to his opponent Ted Cruz as “Sen. Cruz.” But by the next afternoon in Indianapolis, Trump was back to attacking “Lyin’ Ted.”

More recently he mocked his other opponent, Ohio Gov. John Kasich, for his “disgusting” style of eating at campaign stops.

“At some point I’m going to be so presidential that you people will be so bored,” Trump said a Harrisburg, Pa., rally, adding that “I just don’t know if I want to do it yet.”

Indeed, faced with the challenge of winning new voters and convention delegates in the political middle, Trump will have a tough time reaching out to the middle without losing his base on the right.

If Manafort is advising Trump to give “boring” a chance, that’s good advice, but I don’t expect The Donald to follow it. After witnessing Trump build his brand in real estate, sports, beauty pageants and reality TV over the past four decades or so, it is obvious that he can’t help himself. He’s a showman. He loves, as the title of an old Broadway musical goes, the roar of the greasepaint and smell of the crowd. He doesn’t do “boring.”

In many ways, his message exemplifies the growth on the political right of a condition that conservatives usually criticize in the left: a persecution complex.

A “cult of victimology” was identified by John McWhorter, a Columbia University linguistics professor, in his 2000 book, “Losing the Race: Self-Sabotage in Black America.”

“Victimology,” the tendency to treat victimhood not as a problem to be solved but an identity to be nurtured, is one of three burdens by which blacks hold themselves back, McWhorter wrote.

The second was “self-segregation,” by which some of us set ourselves apart from mainstream society through various identity politics. The third was “anti-intellectualism,” which essentially values ignorance of new ideas or points of view.

The more I see these tendencies in black Americans these days, the more I also see them in white America, especially Trump’s campaign, which exploits all three to rally his overwhelmingly white and largely blue-collar constituency.

For example, 54 percent of Trump supporters, compared with 37 percent of Cruz supporters and 35 percent of Kasich supporters, say whites losing out because of preferences for blacks and Hispanics is a bigger problem nationally than discrimination against those minority groups. That’s according to an analysis of Washington Post/ABC News polling data by Greg Sargent’s Plum Line blog.

Significantly, pollsters found that the Trump supporters were more likely to say they were “struggling economically,” a condition that as a group they ironically hold in common with the black and Hispanic voters so many of them resent.

A truly great political leader would try to build bridges across racial and ethnic lines to help these groups work together to close widening gaps of income inequality and other grievances. We have not seen that sort of leadership from Trump and I don’t expect to see it, although I am always eager to be surprised.

Clarence Page is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune.