Ignore Trump to Save the World
This endless election season is in its home stretch, and the political media is in autopilot, doing what they do best. And creating a disaster.
The Rachel Maddows and Amy Goodmans and Jane Mayers, making no secret of their disgust with Donald Trump, are covering the hell out of his lies and inconsistencies, his thin policy proposals, hyperbolic and inflammatory proclamations, his inappropriate comments and feuds with the Republican establishment, his shadowy finances and pending lawsuits. They’re tracking down people who can testify to his mental instability, poor grasp of issues, temper, short attention span, dishonesty in business, sexual harassment and his father’s association with the Ku Klux Klan. They’re making fun of his outlandish ideas about foreign policy (“Why can’t we use nuclear weapons against ISIS?”) while the night comedy show hosts make fun of his hair and dick jokes.
And every time they do these things, the normal stuff political reporters do, they are playing into his hands.
The media insists on covering this election as if it were normal. But it isn’t. They imagine that Trump doesn’t know how the game is played. That’s wrong. He isn’t playing that game. He is inventing his own, or perhaps borrowing the playbook of Mussolini, Hitler, and Ferdinand Marcos, all of whom were elected. The game he is playing has nothing to do with policy agendas or consistent positions on issues. It doesn’t have to do with convincing people he is honest, stable or qualified for the job. As poll after poll has shown, a significant percentage of voters who plan to vote for the man think he is neither qualified nor temperamentally suited to the job.
Trump’s strategy — and he does have one — rides on three things:
(1) Keeping himself in the media constantly. The day Hillary Clinton received the Democratic nomination, my coworker who works swing shift came in complaining that Trump had just given a press conference about nothing, and MSNBC covered it instead of Marilyn Mosby’s simultaneous press conference in which she announced she was dropping all charges against the cops who killed Freddie Gray. Last week, Rachel Maddow announced in delight that something had just happened that was “another first” for US presidential politics. The story? The formation of a group called “Let’s Move Melania into the White House” — a campaign, initiated by five older men who think Melania should be First Lady because she’s so hot. Maddow showed screen shots of their grammatical-error-filled press release and joked about the fact that their promised “good visuals” were nothing but a picture of a guy with a sign (flanked by two young women leaning on him). Charlotte Alter did a whole story on it for Time magazine. Its ridiculous, of course. But it got them on MSNBC and in Time, which doesn’t happen easily.
(2) Making white men feel ascendant again. This involves stirring up their anger and resentment on the one hand, and then casting himself as a tough guy stud, who’s going to give it to all the Black people and immigrants and women once he’s in power. It doesn’t matter that working class white men are not going to be any better off under him than they are now. They’re going to feel better because they’ll get to watch the people they think they’re better than get stomped down. And that’s going to happen, don’t doubt it.
(3) Creating a sense of inevitability, which carries with it a sense of security. If we expect something to happen and it does, that makes us feel safer. For Trump, that operates on two levels. One, which the linguist George Lakoff has pointed out at length, “Repetition. Words are neurally linked to the circuits the determine their meaning. The more a word is heard, the more the circuit is activated and the stronger it gets, and so the easier it is to fire again. Trump repeats. Win. Win, Win. We’re gonna win so much you’ll get tired of winning.” And the other is by defying expectations. Everyone expected him to drop out and he didn’t. Everyone expected him to lose and he didn’t. Everyone expected him to pivot to the traditional ways of doing things, court the establishment, and he didn’t. So now he is in a win-win situation. If people expect him to win, he wins, and if people expect him to lose, he wins. Hence that sense of inevitability: he can’t lose.
There is only one thing that can stop Trump: Silence. Clearly the guy cannot tolerate silence. He is the class clown. They can’t bear being ignored. Protest invigorates him. Criticism fires him up. Ridicule draws a stream of Twitter-vective and counterinsults that everyone then talks about for another news cycle or three. Anything anyone says about him feeds the beast.
It’s gonna take a ton of discipline because everything he says cries out for protest, refutation and satire. If you’re one of those people who believes it doesn’t matter who wins, or secretly or not so secretly hopes Trump wins, then go ahead and protest, critique, condemn and lampoon. But if you want Trump to lose, vote for whoever you want, Hillary, Jill, Gloria, Gary, Felix the Cat, vote your conscience but hold your tongue.
Caveat: The only thing that could undermine Trump is something so humiliating, it makes him look really small and pathetic. Khizr Khan’s pocket Constitution, brilliant as it was, didn’t do it. So please, if you’re going to make an attempt, make it YUGE.
#IGNORETRUMP #DON’TSAYHISNAME #THEWORLDDEPENDSONIT
