COLUMN: The secret of Donald Trump's success

I’ve written before about my journey from New York City to Kalispell, Montana, and more particularly my peculiar odyssey from big-city liberal to Main Street conservative, so it was with some amusement that I watched Ted Cruz try to brand Donald Trump as a purveyor of “New York values.”

 My goodness, if the things Donald Trump has been saying in his presidential campaign represented “New York values” I never would have had to leave New York in the first place to find sanity!

Yes, Trump did tell Tim Russert in a 1999 interview when asked about gay marriage (on which he had no comment) and gays in the military (“It would not disturb me”) that he looked at life through a New York prism:

“I mean, hey, I lived in New York City and Manhattan all my life, so my views are a little bit different than if I lived in Iowa, perhaps…”

Well, no kidding. Trump was just stating the obvious. We ARE shaped by our environment. Growing up in New York and being surrounded by New Yorkers throughout his life, Trump was obviously affected by what Cruz crudely called “New York values,” and which are better known as Democratic Party values.

On the topic of abortion, Trump told Russert in 1999, “I hate the concept of abortion. I hate it, I hate everything it stands for. I cringe when I hear people debating the subject. But you still — I just believe in choice. And again, it may be a little bit of a New York background, because there is some different attitude in different parts of the country, and I was raised in New York, grew up and worked and everything else in New York City.”

Those quotes probably looked like a magical elixir to Cruz, who has been battling Trump for first place in the Iowa caucuses, but when he brought up the charge of “New York values” at the last GOP debate, Donald Trump was ready with a response.

“New York is a great place. It’s got great people, it’s got loving people, wonderful people. When the World Trade Center came down, I saw something that no place on Earth could have handled more beautifully, more humanely than New York. You had two 110-story buildings come crashing down. I saw them come down. Thousands of people killed, and the cleanup started the next day, and it was the most horrific cleanup, probably in the history of doing this, and in construction. I was down there, and I’ve never seen anything like it.

“And the people in New York fought and fought and fought, and we saw more death, and even the smell of death — nobody understood it. And it was with us for months, the smell, the air. And we rebuilt downtown Manhattan, and everybody in the world watched and everybody in the world loved New York and loved New Yorkers. And I have to tell you, that was a very insulting statement that Ted made.”

With this heartfelt speech, Trump demolished Cruz, and based on my own experience I don’t think Trump was wrong. And it was no accident that he went back to the events of 9/11 to talk about his own values and those of New Yorkers. For many of us — yes, even New Yorkers — that attack on our own soil changed everything. It certainly did for me, and I believe it did for Trump as well.

Everyone knows I am a dedicated conservative today, but 16 years ago I voted for Al Gore for president. Was I wrong? You betcha. But was my transformation the real thing. Absolutely.

Here’s how I described it in a column in July 2012.

“One morning, on my way to work I got hit by lightning — the lightning of God talking to you loud and clear and telling you that everything you know is wrong.

“I am referring to the events of Sept. 11, 2001.

“Do I have to explain why? ...whether liberals want to talk about it or not, 9/11 was the wakeup call to remind us that evil is real. George Bush, to his credit, saw this almost immediately, and started sounding like an itinerant preacher (or like Abraham Lincoln) recognizing that the Great Divide is not between Democrats and Republicans but between good and evil. He didn’t have to convince me. I woke up and saw a burning tower with people falling from the sky, and then watched an airliner fly into the side of a second tower in a giant fireball. I didn’t need anyone to explain evil to me.”

Trump was right to hold up those firefighters who died in the Twin Towers as heroes who demonstrated “New York values,” but he would have been even more right to say they represented American values, and that as president he would try to unite us behind those traditional values instead of divide us based on our state, our party or our religion.

Another column I wrote — this one in January 2008, long before anyone contemplated a Donald Trump presidency — foretold some of the turmoil of the 2016 political season by considering the marked difference between a pandering politicians and a real leader:

“If we were being honest, we would have to ask what kind of a president we want, and not just which candidate we think will win. If we were being honest, we would have to ask ourselves if we want Rush Limbaugh or Tim Russert picking our presidents for us, or whether we should squeeze into the election booths beside them, so that we may have a small say in our own future.”

Considering how the establishment Republicans and political pundits have tried to thwart the will of the people in the current campaign, those words are nearly prophetic. I believe the people are rising up, and demanding their place at the table, and if they are denied, there will be hell to pay.

In that same column, I quoted Ralph Waldo Emerson’s famous dictum from “Self-Reliance”: “A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines.”

It is just that “foolish consistency” that Ted Cruz and a pack of political journalists are demanding from Donald Trump, but Trump has Emerson on his side when he sheds his past and dismisses it as irrelevant:

“Why drag about this corpse of your memory, lest you contradict somewhat you have stated in this or that public place? Suppose you should contradict yourself; what then? ... Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day. — ‘Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.’ — Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.”

Donald Trump does use “hard words,” and sometime he contradicts himself, but it appears he has tapped the spirit of the American people and the spirit of Emerson’s self-reliant man. Certainly he has filled the bill for what I said the American people were looking for in a leader in 2008:

“What we are all looking for as we scan the horizon for a true leader is someone who will risk being misunderstood, someone who will say what he or she thinks without consulting a poll, someone who is spontaneous and original and not just a suit of clothes filled up by hot air, someone who (as Emerson said) will ‘affront and reprimand the smooth mediocrity and squalid contentment of the times.’”

There, if you care to know it, is the secret of Donald Trump’s success, and the reason why neither Ted Cruz, nor Jeb Bush, nor any other Republican candidate has a chance to catch him.

Frank Miele is managing editor of the Daily Inter Lake. If you don’t like his opinion, stop by the office and he will gladly refund your two cents. E-mail responses may be sent to edit@dailyinterlake.com