Trump

Barry Purcell
Aug 9, 2017 · 7 min read

(or, Five Things I Learned From The Trump Presidency)

1. Trump supporters are not Trump supporters

Since 2008, a central plank of GOP strategy has been to target anything Obama said or did and worry about the justification afterwards. Oversimplified, hateful approaches energise the Republican base like nothing else, but in previous years, a Republican candidate has always been forced to dial it down during the presidential race proper, as both candidates re-positioned themselves to appeal to a broader electorate, or at least pretend to be presidential enough to represent all of the United States. This time, the candidate did not dial it down, and the crowd went wild.

This was not an unfortunate consequence of GOP policy; it was GOP policy. The Republicans have deliberately conditioned a huge chunk of their electorate to react with horror to anything the “federal government” did, and they are positively Pavlovian about anything with the word “Obama” in it. For the eight years prior to the Trump presidency, Republicans were mentally incapable of explaining any policy position without expressing it in terms of opposition to Obama. Sometimes opposition to Obama was the position, and the frustration and despair of their political opponents was the only measure of success.

The operation against any sort of political order was so successful that much of the Republican base overshot the runway and started lacking confidence in their own party. No one could have predicted that a candidate who is about as Republican as Arnold Schwarzenegger (which is to say, only when you ask what party they’re affiliated with) would take that Pavlovian response and build an entire campaign around it.

Trump voters are therefore less loyal to the Republican Party than they are to him. The Democratic Party missed a golden opportunity to “borrow” these conservative wildcards when they put up Hillary Clinton; Bernie Sanders consistently polled higher than Clinton against Trump. Ironically, with the entire party machine behind her, when Clinton got the nomination, she was on her own.

A vote for Trump was as much a vote against Washington as it was in favour of Trump, in the same way that a vote for Brexit in England was as much a vote against Westminster as it was in favour of Brexit. In both cases, an entire country was forced to deal with a series of consequences that the electorate could not have understood at the time. No one did.

However, there’s no point in pretending that Trump’s fans are racist, bigoted morons. They’re as much victims as anyone else. They literally don’t know any better, and they’re so stuck in their partisan head-space that any explanation is going to be considered antagonistic. They feel so disconnected from the political process (which they now control) that they will be happy enough to see an entire federal government drop off a cliff than admit their opinions might need adjusting. The only real difference between Trump supporters and everyone else is that they seem to have “an overwhelming need” to see all of their problems as “someone else’s fault”.

2. Authenticity is not truth.

More than any US Presidential campaign in history, the 2016 presidential race did not fall along party lines. There were Republicans who were nominally opposed to Democrats and vice versa, of course, but the real competition on the ground was between Authentic (Trump, Sanders) vs. Managed (Clinton, Cruz).

No one can doubt that Trump is authentic, in the sense that no one’s writing his speeches, he’s not consciously being influenced by special interest groups or even people whose job it is to advise him. Whatever his ties to Russia, he genuinely believes that no one owns him and he really is “just saying what everyone’s thinking”. The American people (and they are not alone) are so unaccustomed to this sort of authenticity that its appeal should be obvious even to people who hate him.

3. The Trump administration is not gaslighting America

Gaslighting someone in a relationship is supposed to mentally destabilize them to the point of ludicrous compliance or distraction (in the eponymous movie, it’s so the bad guy can recover some expensive jewellery without having to explain himself).

The lies of the Trump administration, on the other hand, are not designed to destabilize his political opponents, but to confirm the biases (i.e. validate the prejudices) of his power base (mostly Republican, but probably more disaffected non-Republicans than we think), and secondly, to signal his values and intentions.

For instance, this “Muslim ban” was never going to work, and everyone in his administration knew it. The purpose of the Muslim ban was not to ban Muslims, but firstly to assure his power base that “yes, we hate Muslims” and secondly, “we are planning to deal with this Muslim problem”. Whether or not anything happens after that is more or less irrelevant; the power base has been appeased.

These statements are not designed to guide national policy or get anything done. This is why Trump’s fans aren’t bothered by his mercurial and often mutually exclusive opinions. It’s not because they’re too stupid to notice; they just don’t care. When he says things that are clearly targeting Mexicans, or transsexuals, or Muslims, it doesn’t really matter whether or not anything happens as a result. The point of these statements is not even to attack Mexicans or transsexuals or Muslims: it’s to reflect his power base’s prejudices back to them and comfort them with the idea: “See? I’m just like you.”

4. Trump is not X

Trump is not Hitler, although you could certainly spot some fascist policies in among the clearly non-fascist policies. Trump might whine about Supreme Court decisions or unfavourable votes, but at no point is he amassing an army to intimidate them into submission. While he made fairly grandiose statements about rounding up Mexicans, he made no implications that it was for any other purpose than deporting the undocumented immigrants and the criminals.

Trump is not corrupt, at least not in the way that he’s for sale. Trump is so outside the loop that he balks at being referred to as a “politician”. I’m not sure he’s smart enough to understand the level of politicking necessary to be corrupt in a meaningful way. If Trump ever does get involved in any serious corruption, he’ll probably boast about it on Twitter.

Trump is not mentally ill. If Trump was mentally ill, an invocation of the 25th Amendment would be a very simple matter. As it is, calling Trump mentally ill is an insult to mentally ill people.

Trump is not a fake president. Many elections have been questioned after the fact, and often with good reason. However, no election has ever been de-legitimised as a result of subsequent investigations. Even Nixon, whose administration’s interference with the Democratic National Committee is beyond question, was merely forced to resign. There was never any question that the election he won by a landslide was anything other than legitimate.

Trump is not incestuous. He clearly is very fond of his daughter Ivanka, and has said many things about her which were so badly worded, they can only have been sincere. It’s unreasonable in my opinion to take sordid implications from bad wording (unless it’s for the purposes of humour, in which case: proceed).

5. Discussion is almost impossible

Any kind of resistance to Trump’s policies or behaviour is interpreted as a justification for that policy or behaviour. No matter how opposition to the Trump presidency is presented, his supporters will find a way to make that opposition “why Trump won”. There is no way to discuss serious issues with people who not only make up their own facts, but who change their position on a sentence-by-sentence basis.

Words like “values”, “integrity” and “commitment” don’t mean anything because they are almost entirely context-dependent. Any political can fill a speech with these words, confident in the knowledge that any mix of audience will construct their own narrative to hear validations of their personal opinions. The echo chambers are so discrete than nothing you say will reach its destination and there is so little contact between them that any real discussion is obviated.

Even after months of solid evidence linking a number of the Trump campaign staff to Russian government agents, the Trump administration can still say that there is no evidence linking anyone in the campaign to any Russians, and no one cares. You can explain that Trump hit majority disapproval in record time and no one cares. Because it just doesn’t matter.

If you arrange your argument so that there is no possible counter-argument, it seems like it’s water-tight to you, but it seems delusional to everyone not living inside your head. This is a very old trick called “unfalsifiability” and it’s a defining feature of religions, a certain brand of modern feminism, and a particular sort of Trump supporter.

The rejection of increasingly anti-democratic legislation is not, as the media seems to think, a blow to Trump or his followers. They will interpret it as further evidence that they were correct all along; that the Washington elites really are disconnected from “regular folks” and the media really are biased for reporting what happened.

Because of their misplaced allegiance, some Trump fans will spot these problems on their own. There are many sites devoted to the many Trump fans who seem to be waking up everyday. For the rest, however, it may already be too late.