But Priebus did not share this concern. It was a distinction without a difference, he argued. Whether the pledge was signed on Fifth Avenue or on Capitol Hill, all that mattered was Trump agreeing not to run as an independent.
Priebus raced to New York on September 3 and watched as Trump autographed a document with the RNC’s insignia and handed it back. The candidate then shooed Priebus out a back door of Trump Tower and went down to address the media by himself. “The RNC has treated me with great respect,” Trump told a packed press conference.2
The irony was nothing short of sublime. For the past several years, conservative malcontents in the activist and media classes had branded anyone they disagreed with a RINO, Republican in Name Only. Now they were falling for a presidential candidate who had spent decades as a Democrat, who had donated generously to liberal causes, who had hosted Bill and Hillary Clinton at his wedding, and whose only connection to the Republican Party was his name on a piece of paper.
As Trump danced in the end zone and Priebus sipped a frosty Miller Lite on his train ride back to Washington, I spoke to John Ryder, the RNC’s general counsel, to ask whether the pledge was legally binding. “Uhhh, legally binding?” he responded. “No. No. I think it’s politically binding.”
Ryder wouldn’t elaborate on what he meant by that. But two things were obvious. First, the pledge wasn’t worth the paper it was printed on. Second, and more consequentially, Trump had outmaneuvered the Republican Party. By drumming up a month’s worth of reality TV–style suspense over his empty threat to flee the GOP, he had starved his opponents of oxygen in the press, elevated his own brand above that of the party’s, and scared the RNC chairman into making accommodations that no candidate could rightly expect.
TRUMP WAS STILL SMILING LATER THAT MONTH WHEN THE REPUBLICAN candidates met for their second debate, at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley. Once again, Trump’s deficiencies and offenses were manifest. And once again, they did nothing to damage his standing. His poll numbers continued to climb after an evening spent dominating the cameras and the conversation. He called Rand Paul ugly. He called Carly Fiorina beautiful—by way of defending himself for having previously called her ugly. He called Jeb Bush “low energy.” And, as would become custom, he refused to back down. Having recently suggested that Bush would have had different immigration policies had he not married a Mexican woman, Trump scoffed at Bush’s attempt to force an apology.
It was a clarifying moment. In the run-up to the debate, Bush’s senior advisers, worried that the candidate’s Charmin-soft caricature was killing him, wondered aloud whether Bush should physically confront Trump; not necessarily punching the bully in the nose, but intimating a threat with his body language, mustering outrage over Trump’s insult of his wife. Instead, Bush’s approach had all the confidence of a puny kid whose father—or older brother—had just trained him to throw his first punch. (Trump would later recall his surprise at how Bush had barely raised his voice over the affront to his wife.)
After his two feeble attempts to force an apology failed—“I won’t do that, because I did nothing wrong,” Trump said, adding that he’d heard “phenomenal things” about Columba Bush—the scion of America’s premier political dynasty turned almost helplessly to the cameras and framed the discussion in more transcendent terms.
“We’re at a crossroads right now: Are we going to take the Reagan approach? The hopeful, optimistic approach?” Bush asked the audience. “Or the Donald Trump approach? The approach that says that everything is bad, that everything is coming to an end?”
THIS QUESTION ANSWERED ITSELF. THE COUNTRY WAS NOT FEELING terribly hopeful or optimistic, and truth be told, the sour mood owed as much to one candidate’s demonizing as to another candidate’s sermonizing. The reason Trump was able to get away with calling his rivals ugly, with insulting prisoners of war, with belittling women and using vulgar language, was that Americans, particularly conservatives, were becoming numb to the outrage culture.
On that very same night, just after the California debate concluded, the season premiere of South Park harvested this zeitgeist with flawless hilarity. The animated show, which follows the lives of a group of foul-mouthed elementary school kids, opened its nineteenth season with the introduction of a new villain, “PC Principal.”
Militant and overbearing, with a puffed-out chest and a brimming list of grievances, PC Principal bullies the children who possess anything other than fully enlightened views of the world. In the first episode,3 PC Principal punishes anyone in South Park who dares describe Caitlyn Jenner as anything less than “stunning and brave.”
Recruiting a like-minded army of young, white social-justice warriors, PC Principal sets out to reeducate South Park. What the show captured brilliantly was how the paroxysm of virtue-signaling had choked our capacity for engaging those with whom we disagree; how the fear of offending had diminished our ability to talk honestly and laugh openly. (Months earlier, Jerry Seinfeld made headlines by announcing that he no longer performed stand-up comedy shows on college campuses because of the students’ sensitivities.)
Against this backdrop, Trump’s talent for afflicting offense, and his aversion to apologizing, made him a demigod to portions of the population.
What South Park fans might have missed was the show’s subtler criticism of what had yielded the social-justice mentality in the first place: institutional racism and economic inequality, compassionless individuality and consequence-free bigotry. Indeed, the show lampoons the supercilious nature of the left and the reactionary nature of the right with equal effectiveness: In the season’s second episode, as a teacher at South Park Elementary launches a presidential campaign based on building a wall to keep out Canadian immigrants, PC Principal forces the school’s faculty to take “Canadian-language” classes to better serve their vulnerable migrant population.
The political guile of Trump was in reducing these nuanced and necessarily complex debates to their lowest common denominator. Taking the blanket complaint of “political correctness” and weaponizing it, he discovered that there was everything to gain from challenging the pearl-clutching ethos of the progressive base—even when he went too far.
That fall, Trump surprised exactly no one by affirming his support for the nickname of Washington’s professional football team. For the past several years, the left had waged an unrelenting assault on the name “Redskins,” calling it insensitive to Native Americans. In the spring of 2014, some months after Obama used his bully pulpit to call for the name to be changed,4 fifty senators (none of them Republican) sent a letter to NFL commissioner Roger Goodell urging him to take action.5 They called the team’s name “a racial slur” and asserted that “Indian Country has spoken clearly on this issue.”
In fact, to the extent that Native Americans had weighed in, a body of polling, research, and interviews suggested that most of them fell somewhere between indifferent and supportive. The previous fall, when the Redskins hosted a group of Navajo code talkers at a home game, honoring their World War II service with a ceremony on the field, the group’s vice president, Roy Hawthorne, told the Associated Press, “My opinion is that’s a name that not only the team should keep, but that’s a name that’s American.”6