The left’s vitriolic assault on the personal flaws of Trump is crucial to delegitimising his political election win hence the liberal elite’s torrent of rage and resentment directed at Trump, grossly exaggerating his malfeasance whilst ignoring the strengths of populist policy which is the core of Trump’s working class appeal.
Personality and character, however, do play a meaningful part in Trump’s substantive disruptive political impact. Trump is a political novice, a man of sometimes unsavoury traits, a Playmate-dating womaniser with the sexual morality of an alley cat, and a history of personal and business scandal. His voters, however, were aware of all this (the media diligently saw to that) but they were willing to look past it all and focus on Trump’s promised disruption of a bipartisan conventional politics that had so failed American voters over decades.
Trump was in touch with the voters. Indeed, personality-wise, Trump was one of them. Trump, for example, has made inarticulateness a strength that ordinary people can identify with. His ad-libs, his rambling and tumbling half-finished sentences, his casual attitude to grammar, his predilection for combative blunt-talking via Twitter, his joking and humour, his hyperbole and exaggeration (attributes that normal people accept in themselves) are an essential part of his political differentiation.
Trump’s voters take Trump ‘seriously but not literally’ (hence their support despite his stuff-ups), whereas the Trump-haters take him ‘literally but not seriously’ (hence their constant state of apoplexy, and delusion that catching Trump out on some matter of detail will undermine him politically). It’s not the precise detail of what Trump says, or misspeaks, that matters politically (except to the ‘fact-checkers’ who compete in toting up his lie-count most of which is underwhelming nit-picking) – it’s what Trump means that matters. His voters get this.
Anti-Trumpists love to mock Trump’s Twittering ‘unpresidential’ style but his persona is an essential part of his substantive political challenge, his challenge to a political status quo that rewards a profit-making US-based globalist elite with ever greater riches from free trade, open borders and military outreach and which leaves behind, for a native American working class, a festering political, economic, social and cultural rot.