If we're lucky, Trump may follow the Ventura model

In these early days of the Trump epoch — particularly in response to the new president's inaugural address — nothing has distressed elite commentators more than the angry pessimism of Trump's vision of America.

The inaugural displayed "a dark and gloomy view that cast the world's richest nation as a victim," lamented E.J. Dionne of the Washington Post. His conservative colleague, George F. Will, decried the speech as "dystopian" when it "should have been a civic liturgy serving national unity and confidence."

The Star Tribune Editorial Board agreed that Trump's land of "carnage" seems a "stark" and unfamiliar place.

And so poured forth a mainstream cataract of consternation.

There's no denying (and, by now, no real surprise in) the essential rudeness and stylistic crudeness of Trump. His portrait of desolate middle-class Americans wandering a graveyard of rusting factories is at best grimly exaggerated.

And yet, if we are to avoid a national nervous breakdown — and, more importantly, if we hope to retain the clarity to distinguish the daily displeasures likely to accompany having this boor in the White House from genuinely threatening excesses that can't be tolerated — we need just a little perspective.

Should Trump prove as dangerous as some fear, the whole people, his current admirers included, will need to be rallied to oppose him.

But if every oafish remark and ill-mannered antic is treated as a crisis, folks may grow numb and unprepared for real trouble if it comes.

We should ask: How wholly abnormal is Trump's rhetoric? What if it's just a flamboyant caricature of the signature political pathology of our time. Could Trumpism be a result, not the cause, of the mess we're in?

After all, is an upbeat, balanced, unifying message about this nation's economic condition the normal theme of America's left? Was that Bernie Sanders' message? Or Elizabeth Warren's? Or even Hillary Clinton's, as she strained to win over progressive Democrats who found her insufficiently militant?

America, Sanders often said, is a nation marked by "not justice" but "a rigged economy" and "corrupt political system" that was "designed by the wealthiest people in this country to benefit the wealthiest in this country at the expense of everybody else."

Clinton routinely decried the "systemic racism" of America's entire criminal justice system.

"[O]ur middle class has been chipped, squeezed, and hammered," proclaimed Warren, the Massachusetts senator. "People feel like the system is rigged against them. And here's the painful part: they're right. ... ." Meanwhile, "[t]he Republican vision is clear: 'I've got mine; the rest of you are on your own.' "

Sounds as bleak as Trump's nightmare. And here's the "painful part": The above was Warren's portrait of America in 2012, when Trump was nowhere in sight and mild-mannered Mitt Romney was the GOP villain.

A thought experiment: Exactly how much brighter would liberal moods be if Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio were America's new president today?

Before you answer, think back to noted liberal commentator Jonathan Chait's influential and inflammatory New Republic essay in 2003: "Why I Hate George W. Bush."

Among other creepy things, Chait (who remains at large) wrote: "I hate the way he walks ... . I hate the way he talks ... . I suspect that, if I got to know him personally, I would hate him even more. ... ." And he assured readers the feeling was common among Democrats: "I have friends who ... describe his existence as a constant oppressive force in their daily psyche."

In short, toxic tribalism has been boiling over in American politics for quite awhile — and yes, it goes back at least to the Republican hatred of the Clintons that never waned and largely transferred to Barack Obama.

As a leading Trump detractor on the right, Will wistfully harked back to "a cheerful man" who stood in Trump's place in 1981. Ronald Reagan donned a movie star grin every morning the way Trump puts on his pouty glare. But what did Reagan — another outsider who shook up the establishment — actually say in his first inaugural address?

He said the nation suffered "an economic affliction of great proportions ... that crushes the struggling young and the fixed-income elderly alike and threatens to shatter the lives of millions ... cast[ing] workers into ... human misery and personal indignity."

Morning in America came later.

Trump, to be sure, is no Ronald Reagan. As a Minnesotan and one of former Gov. Jesse Ventura's official "media jackals," I cling to a far more modest comparison — hoping the president may yet follow, in some fashion, the Ventura model.

When Minnesota elected the former pro-wrestling heavy and B-list entertainer in 1998, it got a thin-skinned, self-serving hooligan for a governor. His manners never much improved. Conflicts of interest, obnoxious public outbursts, unending food fights with the press — it went on and on.

Yet on policy, Ventura appointed competent grown-ups to key administration jobs and mostly followed their advice.

Ventura undermined the dignity of his office — or so many critics (including me) said at the time. But in practical terms he proved a workmanlike governor. And it's really not clear that any lasting harm came to the governorship or the state from his circus act.

The presidency is different, of course. Among many other things, what a president says is taken to heart by foreign leaders, some of them dangerous, and by brave men and women who we ask to risk their lives to fulfill a commander in chief's orders.

Mark Twain said Wagner's music was "better than it sounds." Something like that is probably the best we can hope for from Trump — but it's something. The challenge — for the media, other public officials and the general public — is to start distinguishing what really matters from what doesn't.

And then to work toward a less bitter, reckless and disordered politics so this doesn't happen again.

D.J. Tice is at Doug.Tice@startribune.com.