To understand the rise of Donald Trump here in Iowa and around the country, you must first understand that Americans have always been suspicious of experts. The honest, brutal truth is that we actually despise experts.
From well before the country’s founding, Americans have for better or for worse taken care of ourselves the best way we see fit.
It is why the Internet is such a wonderfully American thing. It shattered the iron-grip monopoly that experts had seized over us in nearly every aspect of our daily lives (with, of course, help from the federal government). The Internet liberated us.
Your gas furnace is broken? Don’t call a plumber. Just check out some YouTube videos and fix it yourself!
An ailment got you down? Just scoot on over to WebMD and tap in your symptoms and — presto! — you are diagnosed. And you could probably cure yourself just as quickly if the experts would just throw open the pharmacy doors where all the drugs are kept.
The people most horrified by the rise of Mr. Trump are not liberals or Democrats or the politically correct. It is the experts. And nobody finds Mr. Trump more despicable than the experts in the Republican Party.
George Will wrote the other day that Mr. Trump’s “comprehensive ignorance and boundless confidence demonstrate that he does not know what it is to know things.” I am not sure about that, but certainly Donald Trump is not an expert in all the things the expert class cherishes most dearly in our elected officials.
And that is why so many normal Americans instantly fell in love with Donald Trump. The experts — in both parties — have been in charge for a very, very long time. And they have screwed things up so far beyond recognition that people now feel it is probably time to let a non-expert into the White House to screw things up for awhile.
Take President Obama, for instance. He is perhaps the greatest expert to ever occupy the White House. He went to Ivy League schools. He became an expert on constitutional law. He even lectured about his expertise on this at a university. He was a community organizer and sped through his paces in the Illinois legislature and the U.S. Senate.
And behold the mess he has made of everything from foreign affairs to the economy to the health care system. And don’t forget, he now holds the record in American history for the number of times the Supreme Court has unanimously struck down his idiotic proposals as unconstitutional, causing the non-experts among us to question the man’s claimed expertise in constitutional law.
Yet, among Mr. Obama’s greatest admirers is The New York Times, the highest reigning council of experts in the land.
Have you ever wondered why The New York Times and all the pseudo-intellectual liberals who worship at the alter of its cloistered editorial page admire the Islamic Republic of Iran so much?
It’s because that is a country governed like it should be: with an iron-fisted, highly secretive “Assembly of Experts.”
And whom did America’s Assembly of Experts just endorse for the Democratic nomination? Hillary Clinton, calling her (in The New York Times’ endorsing editorial) “one of the most broadly and deeply qualified presidential candidates in modern history.”
Perhaps that’s so, if “broadly and deeply qualified” means “thoroughly corrupted, scandal-scarred and without any principle whatsoever.”
Donald Trump was asked last week if, as he had been accused, he suffered from a “Messiah complex.”
To the ecstatic delight of his supporters, Mr. Trump just shrugged and replied, “I just want to make America great again.”
• Charles Hurt can be reached at charleshurt@live.com. Follow him on Twitter at @charleshurt.