If you can’t see any sense in the pro-Trump case, you’re looking at the wrong level.
“How can this election be close?”
It’s a cry of frustration I hear almost every day in one way or another, not just from Substack bloggers and TV talking heads, but also on social media and from personal friends.
Sure, there are about as many Republicans as Democrats in the country, and as many conservatives as liberals. But one of the two candidates is Donald Trump. I could easily imagine someone like Nikki Haley winning. But the case against Trump should be both obvious and compelling.
We all saw him raise a mob and send it to attack the Capitol in an attempt to overturn an election his own people told him he lost fair and square. We lived through his mismanagement of Covid, which led to hundreds of thousands of unnecessary American deaths. We see him day after day, rambling incoherently through interviews and unable to answer questions about the few policies he has proposed. We see key members of his first administration — like Chief of Staff John Kelly and JCS Chair Mark Milley — warn us that he is a fascist and should never again hold an office of public trust. We hear him repeat the words of past fascist leaders, telling us that his chosen scapegoats — immigrants, in preference to Hitler’s Jews (most of the time) — are “poisoning the blood of our country” and need to be rounded up by the millions. We hear him recite the eternal tropes of racism, claiming that immigrants have “bad genes” that make them criminals, but that he himself has “great genes” that make him smart. We hear him lie, virtually with every breath, about a bad economy, soaring crime, and an immigrant crime wave — none of which exist anywhere outside his imagination.
How is this election close? How is it still possible that he could win? Is half the country as far gone as Ruben Bolling’s version of Snoopy?
If you feel this frustration, imagine what it’s like for bloggers like me. Day after day, I motivate myself with this myth: If I could only explain things clearly enough, people would understand; and once they understood, the great majority of them would do the right thing. So the prospect of another Trump presidency doesn’t just make me fear for my country, it undermines my identity.
More and more it becomes apparent that the problem isn’t that half the country doesn’t understand. Many of them actively want a fascist government that will implement the cruelty they feel in their hearts. Many who aren’t openly rooting for that cruelty refuse to understand what Trump is, and no one can make them understand against their will. They will accept any excuse for his behavior, even excuses that shift from month to month and contradict the previous excuses.
Thank you for letting me get that out of my system. Now I can try to go back to being calm and reasonable.
A few weeks ago I took a long, leisurely driving trip from my home in Massachusetts out to west-central Illinois, where I grew up. I led a church service there, and then took a long, leisurely drive back. Along the way, I saw the lawn signs in neighborhoods very different from mine, and I heard campaign ads not just for the national race, but for a variety of close Senate races.
I think I understand something now.
Fantasies of crime. In the northwest neck of Pennsylvania, road closures threw me off of I-90 and sent me through a small town that sits between Cleveland and Buffalo, but is outside the orbit of either city. In a peaceful middle-class neighborhood I saw numerous yard signs that said
Trump safety
Kamala crime
I doubt the people who live in those houses are recent victims of crime or live in any realistic state of fear. I also doubt that they have looked very deeply into the crime problem nationally. If they had, they would know that crime has been dropping for decades, and was no better under Trump than under Biden and Harris. Crime briefly blipped upward during both the Trump and Biden years of the Covid pandemic, but in recent years the long-term decline has resumed.
Unlike many of the fantasy problems Trump presents in his speeches, he at least has proposed fantasy solutions to this one: deport all those brown people with criminality in their DNA, and stop making the police follow rules.
The trans “threat”. Trans people figure prominently in several of the ads I saw. One purported to compare the Trump military to the “woke” Harris military. The scenes representing Trump were of a drill sergeant screaming abuse at recruits. The ones representing Harris showed dancers of indeterminate gender. We are supposed to draw the “obvious” conclusions that these images are typical of Trump and Harris military policies, and that the abused recruits will perform better on the battlefield than the gender-fluid recruits.
An attack ad directed at Sherrod Brown said that he voted to allow men to compete in women’s sports. An anti-Harris ad said she supported paying for the sex-change operations of criminals in prison. It concluded “Kamala is for they/them. Trump is for you.” During the Olympics, Trump falsely said that a gold-medal-winning female boxer was a man who had “transitioned”, and implied that women competing against her were in danger. Republicans often attack the inclusion of transwomen in women’s sports by invoking the image of men beating up on women.
Again, these ads seem directed at people whose lives are not affected by the issues being raised. The Algerian boxer Trump attacked was not trans. The actual number of transwomen athletes in school sports is tiny — about 40 out of 500,000 NCAA athletes, according to one report — and no women’s league in any sport in the country is dominated by trans stars. The real stars of women’s sports — Caitlin Clark, for example, or Serena Williams — were identified as female at birth. Transwomen who have taken puberty-blocking drugs have only minor advantages over other high-school or college-age women. The problem of transwomen beating down “real” women is itself not real.
Of course, there is a real men-beating-women problem in our society, but Republicans do not seem concerned about it. Whenever proposed legislation would protect women — say, by closing the “boyfriend loophole” in laws the prevent domestic abusers from owning guns — the opposition will be almost entirely Republican.
Similarly, the number of trans soldiers in our military or trans inmates in our prisons is tiny. Kicking out the one or making the other pay for their own surgery is not going to perceptibly improve the daily lives of MAGA voters.
Immigrants “destroying our country”. The third major argument, which I hear more from Trump himself than in TV ads, is that immigrants are “destroying our country“. The examples Trump offers are horrifying: In Springfield, Ohio “They’re eating the dogs. They’re eating the cats.” Aurora, Colorado is a “war zone”, occupied by “an army of illegal alien gang members and migrant criminals from the dungeons of the third world”.
But none of that is true, and even local Republican officials push back against Trump’s false claims. Such lies can’t be aimed at winning votes in the communities he’s talking about, because local people can simply open their eyes and see that the world he’s describing isn’t real.
So the target audience must be elsewhere.
Something similar is going on in Trump’s rhetoric about American cities, especially major cities in key swing states: Milwaukee is “horrible”. Philadelphia is “ravaged by bloodshed and crime”. If Harris is elected, he claims, “the whole country will end up being like Detroit.” (Harris and Detroit struck back with this ad, about how the city has rebuilt itself: America will be like Detroit? “He should be so god damn lucky.”)
“These cities,” Trump said in a 2020 town hall. “It’s like living in hell.”
Those comments aren’t intended to earn votes in Milwaukee, Philadelphia, and Detroit — Democratic strongholds where people can simply open their eyes and see that on the whole life is not particularly hellish. Rather, they’re aimed at suburban and rural voters who never go to the cities because they believe terrible things about them.
What’s going on? I set out to explain how this election can be close, and so far I haven’t. If you think of politics as being about problems and solutions, none of the arguments Trump and other MAGA Republicans are making add up. They are offering to solve problems their voters don’t have, and to protect them from people who do them no harm. (Trans people, for example, have issues with their own genders, not yours. Crime in Atlanta hurts Atlantans, not people in Marjorie Taylor Green’s district, where the largest city, Rome, has 37,000 people. If undocumented immigrants affect your life, it’s probably by picking the vegetables you eat or washing the dishes in your favorite restaurant.)
So how do all these arguments work? Why doesn’t it matter that so many of them are easily debunked? And how do they coalesce into a coherent whole? Fortunately, we don’t have to figure this out for ourselves, because we can call in a MAGA expert: Tucker Carlson. Speaking at a Trump rally in Georgia Wednesday, Tucker pulled it all together:
If you allow people to get away with things that are completely over the top and outrageous, if you allow your 2-year-old to smear the contents of his diapers on the wall of your living room and you do nothing about it, if you allow your 14-year-old to light a joint at the breakfast table, if you allow your hormone-addled 15-year-old daughter to, like, slam the door of her bedroom and give you the finger, you’re going to get more of it, and those kids are going to wind up in rehab. It’s not good for you and it’s not good for them.
No. There has to be a point at which Dad comes home. [loud cheering] Yeah, that’s right. Dad comes home, and he’s pissed. Dad is pissed. He’s not vengeful; he loves his children. Disobedient as they may be, he loves them, because they’re his children, they live in his house. But he’s very disappointed in their behavior, and he’s going to have to let them know: “Get to your room right now and think about what you did.”
And when Dad gets home, you know what he says? “You’ve been a bad girl. You’ve been a bad little girl and you’re getting a vigorous spanking, right now. And no, it’s not going to hurt me more than it hurts you. No, it’s not. I’m not going to lie. It’s going to hurt you a lot more than it hurts me. And you earned this. You’re getting a vigorous spanking because you’ve been a bad girl. And it has to be this way. It has to be this way, because it’s true. And you’re only going to get better when you take responsibility for what you did.”
That’s not said in the spirit of hate. It’s not said in the spirit of vengeance or bigotry. Far from it. It’s said in the spirit of justice, which is the purest and best thing there is. And without it, things fall apart. …
Not only do I think Donald Trump’s going to win, I think that the vibe shift has been so profound. … What you smell around you is the return of freedom, it’s the return of the country you grew up in. …
[The Democrats] need to lose. And at the end of all that, when they tell you they’ve won: No! You can look them straight in the face and say, “I’m sorry. Dad’s home. And he’s pissed.” [1]
How does that pull it all together? Most of us don’t parent teen-age girls we wish we could spank, so how does this little vignette capture why we should vote for Trump?
Let me explain: If you’re looking for the problems of ordinary American life, you’re looking in the wrong place. Trump is not talking about how you’re going to pay for college or find a job or afford a house or get healthcare or retire without starving. The problem his campaign is all about is on a different level altogether: You feel dislocated in today’s world.
That’s why his slogan is backward-looking: Make America Great Again. When is “again”? Back in July, the folks at Salon posed that question to people at the Republican Convention:
What we found is that, whether they’re 30 or 70 years old, the typical RNC attendee thinks America was “great” when they were kids. They believe America lost its way coincidentally right at the time they were maturing into adulthood.
For whatever reason, they now find themselves living in a world very different from “the country you grew up in”. Maybe it’s all the people chattering in languages they don’t understand. Maybe it’s being told that it’s racist or sexist to talk the way they’ve always talked. Maybe it’s having to deal with people who don’t look like either men or women to them, and being told that they’re the problem when they can’t keep track of which name or pronoun to use. Maybe it’s not being able to assume that everybody’s Christian or heterosexual, or not knowing what’s funny now, or hearing music that doesn’t sound like music. Maybe it’s not being able to get a real person on the phone, or receiving 100 pieces of junk mail for every letter they actually want, or dealing with women who earn more than men. Maybe it’s not recognizing half the countries on the globe or being reminded about George Washington’s slaves or hearing “land acknowledgements” about the Native Americans who once occupied the property where they live.
The core MAGA message is that all these problems are really one problem: The world feels wrong now, because people don’t know how to behave.
All the apparent problems Trump talks about are just symbols, just ways to get his hands around this larger, more ineffable problem. Illegal immigrants, terrorists, criminals, transsexuals, women who get abortions — they’re all just people who don’t know how to behave. And that’s why it doesn’t matter if he’s making up his facts or that some particular thing never really happened. People don’t know how to behave, and they make the whole world feel weird and scary That’s real.
Similarly, all the solutions he talks about are really just symbols of one solution: We need to put somebody in charge who will be strong enough to make people behave.
That’s what Tucker spelled out: Dad needs to come home, the old-fashioned kind of Dad who yells and judges and punishes. He’ll tell the bad kids they’re bad, and he’ll keep spanking them hard until they learn to be good.
And then America will be great again, like it was when all of us were children.
[1] This clip got a lot of play on social media and elsewhere, but most of the response focused on the spanking-little-girls aspect and ignored the fascist threat at the end: Even if Kamala Harris wins, MAGA will try to install its strongman.
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Salon found ‘whether they’re 30 or 70 years old, the typical RNC attendee thinks America was “great” when they were kids.’ Life was great because kids are not aware of everything going on in the country, and the world. For kids at least, ignorance really is bliss.
From the MAGAs I know in my own family, I have the impression that it isn’t just “Dad’s going to make people behave, then the world won’t feel scary and weird” but more aggrieved, like “Dad’s going to punish you for not being respectful enough toward your siblings.”
There are two ways to get a chair: (a) Make one, or (b) Take one. It is much easier to take someone else’s chair than to get tools, lumber and skills to build your own. While much of the West’s affluence over the past few centuries appears to be based on Making, a very large amount of it was really built on Taking (military, political, economic and cultural imperialism). Now the rest of the world has grown up and containing what the West can Take from it. The best long-term solution is to focus on Making as much stuff as possible (and reconcile to oneself that the gravy days of taking from others in the world were over), but the Trumpers are more pragmatic. They want someone who will just “Take Back” our unfair share (and don’t care if it is “wrong” or detrimental in the long-term with retaliation and productivity decline).
As the son of a Midwest farmer, I know that while making is important, distributing fairly is also a factor. For example, the world currently produces plenty of food, and yet there is hunger.
Reading the text of Carlson’s speech (I can’t stomach viewing it), it seems to me like a fairly direct invocation of George Lakoff’s “Strict Father” frame; see e.g. https://press.uchicago.edu/books/excerpt/2016/lakoff_trump.html
Not sure how to counter it, beyond something along the lines of “Dad comes home, and he’s drunk”.
“Dad comes home, and he’s drunk.”
Give some elaboration, it could work
Dad comes home, and he’s drunk, and he beats the s*** out of you, for nothing. Do you really want that to keep going on?
Exceptional article by Lakoff. This gets to the heart of why the base Trump has built is a cult, and cares not a whit for an analysis of the consequences of his policies, nor will be swayed by logic.
Trump is Big Daddy, and they like they way he makes them feel and gives them permission to act out against all the enemies the hate media they marinate themselves in daily tell them they are surrounded by and will attack them, should they ever venture beyond their safe enclaves of relative isolation.
Doug, you and I are pretty close to the same age – and also close to the same age as the Trump voters who want Dad to spank the bad kids until they start acting good again. My question is, why doesn’t Trump’s message work on us? Why do we see things like civil rights as progress, rather than a threat? Maybe it’s nothing more complicated than going to college, since college graduates these days are more likely to be Democrats. But if that’s the case, what changed? It’s easy to say that working-class voters are turning to the Republicans because they’re missing out on the American Dream, but it’s been that way for decades.
It’s not clear if we’re witnessing a major realignment, or if it’s simply that Trump is just the latest demagogue appealing to an subculture of xenophobia, racism, misogyny, and fear of the future that has always been present in America to some degree.
I think the answer to your question –“Why doesn’t Trump’s message work on us?– lies at least partly in Lakoff’s dividing people into “strict father” and “nurturant ‘parent” types. The strict father type is older, more primitive, more tribal. the nurturant parent world view is more advanced, more civilized, more modern. Because of that relationship between the two world views, one of the things that happens is that fear can make people regress to the more tribal stance. This is why people who start watching Fox can become right wing strict father types easily — they regress from all the fear propaganda. Republicans know this, and do it on purpose. but some of us are more solidly Nurturant Parent types, and are less susceptible to the type of fear they are peddling — we know people of other ethnic groups, and know they are just people.
Which type we are is partly from how we were raised, and partly from other influences and our own thought processes. Either way, most people have a lot of trouble even imagining how the other side sees the world. Strict father types cannot imagine what it could be like to see everyone as equals, and Nurturant parent types have trouble imagining what it’s like to see everything as a hierarchy. Strict father types cannot see how talking to your kids about their behavior could possibly work as well as spanking and punishing them, while nurturant parent types know that punishing kids just makes them rebellious and they still don’t understand why the rules are the rules.
Another way of looking at this is through the lens of: Moral Mode 1 is people who feel we should behave morally to everyone. Moral Mode 2 are people who believe they are only obligated to behave morally to their own in-group, and everyone else is resources to be used and reviled. Again, the Moral Mode 2 is the more primitive, more tribal, way of looking at it, and explains the cruelty we see in Trump’s followers.
The fear, confusion, and divisiveness we see around us lately is designed to make us regress to a more primitive world view.
“Why doesn’t Trump’s message work on us?”
Maybe it works best when coupled with a lot of Fox News reinforcement…
I agree with the comment that fear amps up the tribal effect.
Part of the difference is how important retribution is in your responses. As in “People are breaking the rules. They need to be punished.” (My wife thinks there’s an inborn or trained-in-early factor here, because she says she has it and has had to work to overcome it. She still has a recurring fantasy where all the bullies in the world — which takes in Trump and a lot of his allies — suddenly drop dead. As far as I know, she’s not working on making this happen.)
Intertwined with education is a sense of scarcity vs. abundance. If you believe there’s enough for everybody (as might be more likely if you’re making a professional class income), there’s room for systemic generosity. But if there isn’t, then making sure that your people get enough becomes a higher priority. I worry that ignoring climate change will create the world MAGA pictures, where the world really can’t provide enough for all of us.
Someone once said “People get the kind of government that they deserve.” In my humble opinion, if the citizens of this country don’t get off the shit-eating dime and become better informed, then they DESERVE to be governed by the likes of Trump. (It’s just unfortunate that the rest of us have to be in the “same boat” with them!!!).
Thank you For your great analysis. I don’t want To go back. I like this new worlds/o DJT.
I grew up on the i90 halfway between Erie, Pa and Buffalo. Someone burned a cross downtown while I was in high-school. It’s not the polite place it looks to be.
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