The Nature of the Thing

Tom Nichols isn’t a popular guy around her but I think he’s right about this:

The belief that at some point Trump voters will have finally had enough is an ordinary human response to seeing people you care about—in this case fellow citizens—associate with someone you know to be awful. Much like watching a friend in an unhealthy relationship, you think that each new outrage is going to be the one that provokes the final split, and yet it never does: Your friend, instead of breaking off the relationship, makes excuses. He didn’t mean it. You don’t understand him like I do.

But this analogy is wrong, because it’s based on the faulty assumption that one of the people in the relationship is unhappy. Maybe the better analogy is the friend you didn’t know very well in high school, someone who perhaps was quiet and not very popular, who shows up at your 20th reunion on the arm of a loudmouthed boor—think a cross between Herb Tarlek and David Duke—who tells offensive stories and racist jokes. She thinks he’s wonderful and laughs at everything he says.

But what she really enjoys, all these years after high school, is how uncomfortable he’s making you.

And this, in brief, is the problem for Kamala Harris in this election. She and others have likely hoped that, at some point, Trump will reveal himself as such an obvious, existential threat that even many Republican voters will walk away from him. (She delivered a short statement today emphasizing Kelly’s comments.) For millions of the GOP faithful, however, Trump’s daily attempts to breach new frontiers of hideousness are not offensive but reassuring. They want Trump to be awful—precisely because the people they view as their political foes will be so appalled if he wins. If Trump’s campaign was focused on handing out tax breaks and lowering gas prices, he’d be losing, because for his base, none of that yawn-inducing policy stuff is transgressive enough to be exciting. (Just ask Nikki Haley and Ron DeSantis, who each in their own way tried to run as a Trump alternative.)

Trump’s electoral coalition is more complicated than center-left liberals like to think; like any plausible winning coalition in US politics it contains factions with different interests who often don’t care for one another. Not all of these factions are wildly enthusiastic for Trump; some will pull the lever because they know they’ll benefit from his tax policy or know that they want to see the kind of Supreme Court Justice that he’ll appoint, but otherwise don’t particularly care for the man. These folks are surprisingly untouchable because they know exactly what they want from the political system and don’t care overmuch about the other things Trump might do. It’s possible that genuinely catastrophic international or economic outcomes (if Trump actually manages to pull off deporting 20 million migrants, for example) could change the minds of some of these folks, but for the most part they think politics are cynical and dumb and don’t care at all about appeals outside of their narrow focus of interest. There’s nothing weird about these people; they’re all kinds of problematic but they essentially vote their interests.

And then there are the enthusiasts. It is a common error in spaces like this comment section and Bluesky to make the claim that Trump remains popular because the mainstream media has treated him with kid gloves, to the extent (at the far edge of these claims) that mainstream media outlets in the United States want Trump to win because (they’re owned by billionaires, he’s good for the bottom line) reasons. The truth is that coverage of Trump in the mainstream media is relentlessly hostile compared to coverage of any Presidential candidate before 2016. Mainstream news figures are more willing to call out Trump’s fictions and lies than with any other candidate in memory, including Sarah Palin, George W. Bush, Al Gore, Bill Clinton, Richard Nixon, etc. All that is as it should be, and doesn’t preclude the argument that even the mainstream media treats Trump too lightly and regularly engages in “sanewashing.” Trump has earned the negative coverage and then some! But while it’s wrong to declare that it doesn’t matter, (there are lots of GOP factions and some of it matters to some of them) it certainly does not matter as much as we would like it to.

Steven Reisner:

The Democrats and the mainstream press completely miss the big picture; they think they can combat this alternative reality by zeroing in on Trump’s lies. “Fact checking” has become the self-soothing fantasy of a neurotic press—useless because the real issue is that Trump and his followers live in a completely separate reality. There is no fact-checking exercise that could get us to a common ground because in Trump’s reality, and the reality of nearly half the country, whatever helps the sociopath score points against the Democrats is the truth.

The Trump Cycle Runs as Follows:

1. Trump says something horrible and insane
2. The New York Times tries to make sense of the thing, rendering it more intelligible and less dangerous
3. Bluesky collapses onto its collective fainting couch
4. Trump says the thing again, only three times louder and five times as crazy.

If Trump thought that coverage of his crazy was hurting him, he’d perform less of it. It’s evident that he’s not particularly worried that harsh depictions of his person, character, rallies, and supporters in the Washington Post and the New York Times will actually hurt his electoral chances. This becomes powerfully evident when something seeps into the coverage (Puerto Rico) that he actually regards as a threat; at these moments his campaigns moves into action very rapidly on both the offensive (finding another shiny object) and defensive (rejecting Trump’s responsibility for the remarks) sides of the ball. The problem isn’t that the New York Times has refused to cover many of the moments that would kill a normal campaign (it has), the problem is that these are not campaign-killing moments for Trump voters.

I think that there are broader problems with how we (the center-left liberals who tend to populate LGM) don’t try very hard to understand the reasons why Trump voters have such enthusiasm for the man. If we refuse to even consider to any answers the questions “What does Trump do well?” and “What does Trump offer the voters who are so enthusiastic for him?” with terms other than “badness,” and “more badness” then we’re conducting political malpractice. All the hand-wringing about various “Cletus Safaris” from mainstream media orgs masked, I think, both a lack of insight into his voting base and a lack of curiosity about it. To be blunt, if you still think that this part of his vote can be affected by headlines in the New York Times, then I regret to say that you actually need to read (and perhaps conduct) a few more Cletus Safaris.

The unfortunate reality is that Donald Trump will likely be remembered, regardless of the outcome on Tuesday, as one of the most consequential figures in 21st century American political history. He has changed one of America’s two major political parties in ways that were basically inconceivable a decade ago. Even if Trump loses on Tuesday the next era in American politics will probably be called the “post-Trump era,” as opposed to the last eight years which, notwithstanding his defeat in 2020, will likely be remembered as the “Trump Era.” It’s awfully important that we try to get a grip on the nature of the man and the nature of the phenomenon, something that I don’t think we’ve done a very good job of thus far.