Donald Trump as Willie Stark

Broderick Crawford as Willie Stark

Broderick Crawford as Willie Stark

Political experts trying to understand the phenomenon that is Donald Trump have been scouring American history for precedents. Some have pointed to Huey Long, the populist demagogue who all but ruled Louisiana as a dictator in the 1930’s. I can’t answer to this particular parallel, but I know that Robert Penn Warren’s fictional account of Long gives us some insight into Trump’s popularity.

I’m thinking of All the King’s Men, of course, and the moment that comes to mind is when, running for governor, Willie Stark realizes that he’s being played for a sap by the party establishment. He therefore decides to circumvent the party bosses and go straight to the people. Suddenly a man that was thought to be controllable is running the show.

Here’s the situation in the novel. The party bosses want Joe Harrison to be governor but figure that they have to split the “hick” vote. So they persuade Stark to enter the race, hoping that he and MacMurfee, the other candidate running, will take each other out.

The situation isn’t the same with today’s GOP but it has similarities. Rile up the base (the “hick” vote) with inflammatory rhetoric to gain their votes but then give the Wall Street wing what it wants (deregulation, corporate tax cuts, lax environmental regulation). Over and over again.

Trump has revealed just how much the Republican base loathes the party establishment. They feel they’ve been taken for a ride and therefore are not upset when Trump refuses to swear loyalty to this establishment. In fact, when Fox News tried to take Trump out in the first debate, his poll numbers soared.

In All the King’s Men, when Stark learns that he is being used, he turns the tables on the establishment. First, he pulls out of the race and throws his support to the other “hick.” Ultimately he wins the governorship and makes the party dance to his tune. As Michael Tomasky points out in a New York Review of Books article, the GOP establishment is worried Trump is on the way to doing something similar:

Republican Party Chairman Reince Priebus is clearly terrified of him. Even Fox News head Roger Ailes—the effective cochairman of the Republican Party for a number of years now—treats him gingerly. Karl Rove wants desperately for the party establishment to block him. They all wish he would go away, even while they must know that they are responsible for Trump because they have spent many years creating an audience that was just waiting for someone like him to come along.

Here’s an excerpt from the speech where Stark describes how the party establishment has played him for a sap:

“Those fellows in the striped pants saw the hick and they took him in. They said how MacMurfee was a limber-back and a dead-head and how Joe Harrison was the tool of the city machine, and how they wanted that hick to step in and try to give some honest government. They told him that. But—” Willie stopped and lifted his right hand clutching the manuscript [the speech he was going to give] to high heaven—“do you know who they were. They were Joe Harrison’s hired hands and lickspittles and they wanted to get a hick to run to split MacMurfee’s hick vote. Did I guess this? I did not. No, for I heard their sweet talk. And I wouldn’t know the truth this minute if that women right there—” and he pointed down at Sadie—“if that woman right there—“

I nudged Sadie and said, “Sister, you are out of a job.”

“—if that fine woman right there hadn’t been honest enough and decent enough to tell the foul truth which stinks in the nostrils of the Most High!”

What happens next is not a bad description of how the GOP establishment has been stumbling since Trump’s rise. Tiny Duffy, the establishment lackey monitoring Stark, suddenly realizes that the situation has gotten out of hand and tries to put an end to the speech. Instead, this happens:

Duffy was on his feet, edging uncertainly toward the front of the platform. He kept looking desperately toward the band as though he might signal them to burst into music and then at the crowd as though he were trying to think of something to say. Then he edged toward Willie and said something to him.

But the words, whatever they were, were scarcely out of his mouth before Willie had turned on him. “There!” Willie roared. “There!” And he waved his right hand, the hand clutching the manuscript of his speech. “There is the Judas Iscariot, the lick-spittle, the nose-wiper!”

As the scene unfolds, I think of Trump calling out the way that Fox News tried to stage manage him either out of the race. Duffy stands in for Megyn Kelly or Roger Ailes:

And just then as Duffy turned back to Willie, Willie made a more than usually energetic pass of the fluttering manuscript under Duffy’s nose and shouted, “Look at him, Joe Harrison’s dummy!”

Duffy shouted, “It’s a lie!” and stepped back from the accusing arm.

I don’t know whether Willie meant to do it. But anyway, he did it. He didn’t exactly shove Dufy off the platform. He just started Duffy doing a dance along the edge, a kind of delicate feather-toed, bemused slow-motion adagio accompanied by arms pinwheeling around a face which was like a surprised custard pie with a hole scooped in the middle of the meringue, and the hole was Duffy’s mouth but no sound came out of it. There wasn’t a sound over that five-acre tract of sweating humanity. They just watched Duffy do his dance.

Then he danced right off the platform. He broke his fall and half lay, half sat, propped against the bottom of the platform with his mouth still open. No sound came out of it now, for there wasn’t any breath to make a sound.

All of that, and me without a camera.

Willie hadn’t even bothered to look over the edge. “Let the hog lie!” he shouted. “Let the hog lie, and listen to me you hicks. Yeah, you’re hicks, too, and they fooled you, too, a thousand times, just like they fooled me. For that’s what they think we’re for. To fool.”

The crowd is tired of being fooled and Trump keeps channeling their disgust. What happens next is anyone’s guess but, in the book, Stark goes on to become governor.

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