The mystery of Donald Trump's New York landslide

Donald Trump won the New York Republican primary in a landslide. He captured well over 50 percent of the vote and earned the overwhelming majority of the delegates — quite possibly 90 or more out of the 95 available — and every county except the island of Manhattan, from the tony precincts of Westchester County to lunch-bucket territory like Erie County. Trump, in a three-way race with John Kasich and Ted Cruz, took a slightly larger share of the Republican vote in New York than Hillary Clinton, who represented the state in the Senate, did of the Democratic vote. Apparently, New York loves The Donald.

It's no shock to see a politician win his or her home state, and in this primary season only Marco Rubio failed to achieve that particular victory. (Ted Cruz won his home state of Texas, as John Kasich did Ohio, though neither won with a majority of the vote, and the rest of the Republican field dropped out before facing the voters in their home states.)

But Donald Trump is not a typical politician — and his platform, such as it is, certainly makes an odd fit for New York.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Trump has been ostentatiously critical of immigration, while New York has consistently had one of the largest immigrant populations in the country — not to mention that the Statue of Liberty stands tall in its harbor, with Ellis Island right nearby.

Trump has called for tariffs on Chinese goods and inveighed rhetorically against financiers who don't build anything — while New York City, as the country's principal financial center, reaps outsized benefits from the free movement of goods and capital.

New York's right-wingers have generally defined American interests in broad terms and favored strong support of our allies; Republican skepticism of foreign entanglements was historically more of a Midwestern phenomenon. But Trump has called for getting tough with freeloading allies, suggesting they pay for Americans to defend them or defend themselves — and go nuclear if necessary. Pat Buchanan was never notably popular in New York. Why should Donald Trump, running on a not-dissimilar platform, garner so much more support?

Moreover, New Yorkers know Trump from before he was a reality TV star — we know him from reality. And we've been making him the butt of our jokes for three decades. Why on earth would we want him to be president?

One possibility worth entertaining is that, precisely because New Yorkers know him best, they are most comfortable ignoring what much of the country has found either alarming or appealing about his message.

I've argued before in this space that Trump's appeal has less to do with issues than with attitude. His ethos — that he's a winner, and that to win again, America needs to focus on winning — appeals to the fed-up contingent of all ideological stripes, holding together a coalition that encompasses plenty of moderates along with more conservative voters.

But even I am taken aback by the willingness of some well-informed observers to assume away, blithely, the entirety of Trump's platform.

Consider Trump's endorsement by the New York Post. Without batting an eye, the Post endorsed Trump while simultaneously calling for him to jettison his unorthodox views on trade and foreign policy, and even to abandon the idea of building a wall between the U.S. and Mexico — which is probably the signature issue of the Trump campaign. Plus they urged him to stop acting like a reality show contestant and start behaving in a more presidential manner. In other words: They endorsed Donald Trump on the assumption that he will turn into someone completely different from the man who has been running for president, while retaining whatever special charisma he has been blessed with that makes him a winner.

In part, this is surely bandwagoning, getting behind a winning horse before the race is quite over. But it may also reflect experience. The Post has observed Trump for decades. They may have good reason to assume that his views are highly malleable, and that what he cares about more than anything is winning — or, rather, being able to call whatever he has done lately a win.

If you discount Trump's most-inflammatory rhetoric along with his stated policy preferences (such as they are), then it's not hard to understand how he could be lumped in with other tough-talking, no-nonsense-posturing, law-and-order candidates who are moderate on social issues — like Rudy Giuliani and Chris Christie — who would have obvious appeal to New York Republicans. The mystery then becomes how Trump fared well enough to get to April 19 as the front-runner — how someone like Trump ever played outside of New York.

Ross Douthat, writing in The New York Times, makes a fascinating argument for how Trump got as far as he has. In a nutshell, it boils down to this: Trump was able to turn himself into a champion of what you might call the "fever-swamp right" because he had already established himself as respectable (or, at least, acceptable) in the eyes of the New York media. The mainstream media hyped his celebrity for decades because it was a profitable show. And the New York-based conservative media read Trump as one of them — a Giuliani/Christie type, but also a successful entrepreneur. Armed with their tacit support, or at least indulgence, Trump could go fishing for votes in unsavory places without risking being consigned to the outer darkness.

It's an interesting way to explain how Trump won both New Hampshire and South Carolina, both Alabama and Massachusetts. But it implies that the fever-swamp-bait part of Trump's message is precisely what made him appealing to Republican voters in places that generally don't love New York or New Yorkers — that a Palin-style politics of ignorant resentment and jingoism is just what right-wing populism is, full stop. If Trump poses a unique threat to the republic, the exploitation of that tendency — which has been going on for far longer than the Trump campaign — bares far more of the blame than the New York media's chumminess with The Donald.

Meanwhile, the chief irony of Trump's New York landslide is what it says about the real import of his insurgent campaign. Few Americans have benefitted more from the conventional Republican agenda than wealthy New York suburbanites who are members of his golf clubs. If Trump is winning their votes, that suggests the smart money is betting that, far from being a populist in any meaningful sense, he wouldn't govern all that differently from a conventional Republican.