Why some GOP candidates don’t act as aggrieved as Donald Trump
One of Donald Trump’s signature political achievements, which like most of them owes to his genius for shamelessness, has been to convert self-pity from a Republican vice into a virtue. He has likewise turned claims of victimhood inside out, from confessions of weakness into boasts. “I am a victim,” Mr Trump declared twice in announcing his present bid for the presidency. He has called one source of his suffering “the greatest witch hunt in the history of our country”, and another, simply, “a lynching”. It may be the only Trump whine he has ever managed to sell, but, as he exhorts his supporters to feel sorry for themselves and to rage at their oppressors, and presents himself as their persecuted billionaire champion, they gulp it all down.
As effective as this Trumpian theme has been, one category of Republican politician seems particularly reluctant to adopt it: non-white ones. “No more whining,” Nikki Haley, a former governor of South Carolina and a daughter of immigrants from India, likes to instruct voters. “No more complaining. Now we get to work.” Vivek Ramaswamy, a former entrepreneur whose parents also immigrated from India, published a book called “Nation of Victims” in which he regrets that, for Americans of whatever race or ideology, thinking of themselves as victims is “one of the few things we’ve all got left in common”.
Tim Scott, a Republican senator from South Carolina, is campaigning for the Republican nomination on the most classic version of the party’s faith. His America has not become a shadowland in which a heartless, fanged establishment sucks the life out of everyone else. It remains, instead, a sunny upland welcoming anyone with the grit to haul themselves up to it by their bootstraps. “I am so proud to be an American,” Mr Scott said recently at a gathering of voters in Rye, New Hampshire, rendering the word “proud” in a hushed,…
2023-09-14 06:55:18
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