What They Are Really Saying: Breaking Down the Campaign Rhetoric

Donald Trump talks about making America great again.  Bernie Sanders wants the wealthiest to pay their fair share.  Hillary Clinton says she can keep the country on track.  These are the one-line summaries of the three remaining presidential candidates’ stump speeches.  To varying degrees they get applause and cheers.  And to a limited extent, they provide a means of identifying what each candidate stands for.  But what is each of them really saying?  What is the actual message they are trying to convey?  With the highest elected office in the country at stake, voters need to know what these three potential presidents really mean, what their rhetoric really conveys.  Here’s my take on each:

Donald Trump is far more easily criticized than understood.  He sounds more like a stand-up comedian (with a pocketful of one-liners) than a candidate with a policy agenda.  If Hillary Clinton is a policy wonk, Trump is an empty suit, or so he would appear.  And, in truth, he has little substantive expertise; indeed, when pressed, as he rarely has been, he sounds like he hasn’t thought deeply about a lot of what he sounds off about in his stump speeches.

It’s hard to see a depth of understanding about abortion, for example, when he stumbles through an answer about criminal penalties for women who would get abortions after the legal right to get them no longer exists; or to see a grasp of foreign policy when he says he wouldn’t take the use of nuclear weapons in Europe off the table; or to feel comfortable about his views on terrorism when he claims his previously stated plan to keep all Muslims out of the country was “just a suggestion.”

So what is Trump really saying in these (and all his other) seemingly ill-considered, if not outrageous, statements?  What is the message he is either trying to convey or at least is implicitly revealing?

To understand Trump, you have to ignore the specific rhetoric and instead consider the man that he is.  And what comes through as you approach his candidacy from this perspective is that he sees discontent in the country and wants to address that discontent.  Trump is not appealing to those who like what has happened in the last sixteen years.  He is saying, essentially, if you didn’t like the Iraq war or the way we have tried to combat the threat of Islamist terrorism, I’ll try something different.  If you don’t like Obamacare or feel left out of the economic recovery, I’ll try something different.  If you don’t like the gridlock that exists in our government, I’ll try something different.

And so on.  The message, in other words, is that he will bring a fresh view to the many problems that beset the country.  He is saying, essentially, the following:  “If you think I’m as great as I do, then you can trust me to find solutions, even if I haven’t figured them out myself yet.  Because I know how to make things work.  I’m a deal-maker and a builder, and that’s what I will be as the president.”

Bernie Sanders is a lot easier to understand, since he isn’t trying to hide anything.  Sanders is a socialist, which he qualifies with the adjective “democratic,” but all that really means is that he isn’t a Communist.

But what Sanders is saying in his speeches is all about bringing socialism into American society.  In his stump speeches he seems to be promising the equivalent of “a chicken in every pot,” as in, “let’s make college tuition free for everyone, and let’s make health care free for everyone, and let’s not allow big banks and big corporations to control our economy, and let’s make the top one percent pay their fair share.”

But what he really means is that income will be redistributed and the benefits of being wealthy will be reduced in favor of lifting up the standard of living for those at the bottom of the economic scale.  Sanders’s goal as president would be to emulate something akin to the Scandinavian countries where income inequality is far less pronounced and basic needs are far more fully delivered by the state as opposed to private industry.  His America would be far less tied to the military-industrial complex and much less militaristic in confronting terrorist threats and in policing the world.  It also would be less hospitable to corporate and financial interests.  There would be fewer billionaires in the country in a Sanders presidency and less impoverishment.

Hillary Clinton is the easiest of the three to understand, albeit at the same time she is the least exciting.  Hillary is a mainstream Democrat in the most traditional sense of the term.  She talks about lifting people up and making the American dream real for everyone without thereby intending to move the country severely to the left.  She says she wants to build on the Obama legacy, which is pretty much what she wants to do.

What she doesn’t say is that she wants to do it better than Obama, in that, for example, she wants to expand the coverage available under Obamacare and reduce the cost to those who are and will be covered.  She’d accomplish that goal by raising taxes on the highest income earners.  She’d introduce immigration reform that would offer legal residency to those undocumented immigrants who have established lives for themselves in the U.S.  She would also expand America’s military efforts against Islamist terrorism, most probably by increasing drone missile attacks and by sending more troops/advisers into harm’s way.

Clinton is the least likely of the three candidates to severely upset the status quo.  Her presidency would be the least problematic of the three.  She’d seek to move the country slightly to the left of where Obama has taken it economically and socially.  She’d maintain the country’s position as the leading military and economic power in the world and would be the most aggressive in using that power to protect the country’s interests and values.  She would be, in other words, a fairly typical mainstream Democratic president.

So now you know what they really mean.  Make your choice wisely.