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Of all the attacks that Donald Trump has faced, Ted Cruz’s line that Trump embodies “New York values” has probably stirred the most sustained controversy.
It’s inspired liberal New Yorkers to rise to their city’s defense: How dare you associate Trump’s bigotry with our glorious multiethnic metropolis?
It’s been embraced by Trumpistas hoping to make their man look larger than life. (He’s a “New Yorker, born and bred,” The New York Post gushed in its hilariously unconvincing Trump endorsement, who “reflects the best of ‘New York values.’”)
And it’s been turned back on Cruz by pundits, late-night hosts and (of course) Trump.
Cruz probably just wanted to hit Trump’s once and future social liberalism, to make him sound alien to Iowans. But his line struck a nerve because, well, it’s absolutely correct. You can’t understand the Trump phenomenon without understanding how “New York values” have made his candidacy possible.
This starts with the New York media’s long-standing love affair with Trump, his intimate relationship with the city’s glossy magazines and tabloids and networks.
Why do Americans believe in the idea of Trump as the World’s Greatest Businessman, the playboy with the Midas touch? Because that’s the story a New York-based media — not talk radio but Time and Vanity Fair, not alt-right bloggers but prime-time TV — spent years and decades selling them.
Writing for The Intercept this year, Jim Lewis pointed out that “... it wasn’t some Klan newsletter that first brought Trump to our attention: It was Time and Esquire and Spy. The Westboro Baptist Church didn’t give him his own TV show; NBC did. And his boasts and lies weren’t posted on Breitbart; they were published by Random House. He was created by people who learned from Andy Warhol, not Jerry Falwell, who knew him from galas at the Met, not fundraisers at Karl Rove’s house, and his original audience was presented to him by Condé Nast, not Guns & Ammo.”
This gave Trump a huge advantage when he started pandering to the right-wing fever swamps. If some drawling Southerner in an ill-fitting suit had showed up on TV promising to send investigators to hunt down the president’s real birth certificate, much of the media would have covered him as a cross between late-career Sarah Palin and David Duke.
But Trump was a pal, a get and ratings gold. Trump was just playing a part. Trump was part of their scene.
So he kept getting (and still gets) the celebrity treatment — friendly interviews with favorable ground rules and softball questions — rather than the mix of ostracism and horror that a cultural outsider would have reaped.
In fairness, even kid-gloves coverage can be negative, and many of the liberal media types who built the Trump legend would now prefer to see it torn down.
But not the right-wing slice of that elite. Here, too, New York values have been crucial because Trump’s success has revealed how much the conservative media is infused with a distinctively Big Apple style.
Think of Sean Hannity and Bill O’Reilly and a host of lesser Trump-enabling Fox News personalities — most of them Northeastern white guys with outer-borough affects and more of ethnic Catholicism’s pugilism than its piety. Think of the Trump-voting Rudy Giuliani and the Trump-endorsing Post and even the not-quite-#NeverTrump Wall Street Journal editorial page.
They all have a style that reflects New York’s distinctive culture (worldly, striving, ever-so-slightly-impolite) and its distinctive right-of-center constituencies (Manhattan hedge funders, Staten Island cops). That means their conservatism differs, in large ways and small, from the conservatism of Utah or Texas or Wisconsin.
But big-time conservative media isn’t made in those places, even if it’s marketed to them. It’s made in Trumpland, and so it hasn’t been able to help itself from helping him.
If Michele Bachmann were running on Trump’s platform, Hannity wouldn’t be running nightly infomercials for her candidacy. If Rick Santorum were promising to make America great again, the Post and the New York Observer wouldn’t be endorsing him. If Mike Huckabee were leading in the delegate count, the Journal’s editorial writers would have long ago gotten over their doubts about Ted Cruz.
But for Trump, these gatekeepers are willing to overlook, to forgive, or at least to tolerate. Because he’s a New Yorker, just like them.
I’ve written before that the Trump campaign is a kind of comic-opera version of a demagogue’s rise, a first-as-farce warning about how our political system could succumb to authoritarianism.
One of its many lessons is that if authoritarianism really comes to America, it won’t come slouching out of the dark heart of Middle America, wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross.
It will have a flag pin, no doubt. But on the other lapel will be a button that says “I Love New York.”
Ross Douthat is a columnist for The New York Times.
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