Don’t let them forget Trump or shirk who they’ve become
Following up on the post below, here’s a great piece by Brian Beutler from his excellent newsletter Off Message. He recaps the infuriatingly terrible media response to Trump’s “vermin” comments, proving just how inured they’ve become to his escalating extremism. He notes that the outcry from regular people finally jolted them out of their reflexive “that old Trumps says the darndest things” reaction. But what do we do?
But the question now—as days turn into weeks, and fresh stories vie for our attention—is whether this will be a passing kerfuffle, or one Republicans, as long as they support Trump, can never live down.
Reporters have no shortage of Trump outrage porn to cover, and if Democrats can’t differentiate the vermin libel as something that transcends his more typical offenses, it will fade like most of the others. That’s the main source of my small misgivings over the couch-fainting, pearl-clutching way liberals have responded to it. “Ack, Hitler said that!” True enough, he did. But every reference to Hitler comes fraught not just with the repugnance of his words and deeds, but with danger and fear—of invasion, and war, and death camps. It grants Trump the air of menace he wants to cultivate. He and everyone in his orbit derive juvenile pleasure when good people flinch at their provocations. They are much less happy when they get caught taking things too far. That’s when the artifice falls away, and they clam up like bullies who realize they’ve antagonized someone who can kick their asses. That’s when they start turning on each other.
So what could Democrats say or do to transform the vermin libel into a red line? Why is it that, seven years later, the word “deplorables” remains a galvanizing term for Republicans and an embarrassment for Democrats? Was it that Republicans recoiled in fear that Hillary Clinton might tie up the deplorables and send them down a river in a basket? Or was it that they used it to undermine her claim to want to be president for all Americans—and then kept saying that?
Clinton fairly but unwisely described Trump’s most bigoted supporters as “deplorables” on a Friday evening. That Monday, Trump responded, “She revealed herself to be a person who looks down on the proud citizens of our country as subjects for her rule,” and insisted, in deep projection, that anyone with “contempt in your heart for the American voter” should not run for president.
I think Democrats can exploit the vermin libel in much the same way. So that there’s no forgetting, even after Trump’s gone. But they have to want to.
[…]
“Too many voters have forgotten that Trump is a deranged clown who isn’t up to the job,” wrote Pod Save America’s Dan Pfeiffer.
True, but: Why did that happen? Was it inevitable? If it wasn’t inevitable, shouldn’t Democrats have labored harder to keep memories fresh, since, unattended, they are short? And now that the forgetting is underway, how much damage has been done? Is it reversible? Can a professional campaign and a few well-produced ads jog memories that have faded over three years?
I’m actually staking a lot of hope on the answer to that last question being “yes.” The trauma and scars of the Trump presidency are real, which means mass forgetting should be slower, harder. When he’s tormenting us nonstop again, people will remember. Or at least I hope they will.
[…]
“Trump is more mentally fit for the presidency than Biden” is a false contagion of an idea, and it can only spread through a combination of lost knowledge (about Trump) and new impressions (about Biden).
Biden’s enemies have gone to great lengths to foster those impressions, and spread them. Democrats have done much less work to preserve our collective memory of the Trump years.
If the net effect of those decisions is to turn the question of fitness for the presidency on its head, why couldn’t it also upend our perception of other things? Those same Trump loyalists have gone to similarly great lengths to spread the idea that the Biden economy is tattered and miserable; most Democrats have shied away from directly refuting that assertion for fear of seeming insensitive to a struggling minority. Coincidentally, a strong public consensus has emerged in favor of the idea that the economy is bad when (broadly speaking, for most people) it is very strong.
Coincidentally, or perhaps not.
The consensus could just as easily reflect the effectiveness of propaganda—mostly on the right, but some on the left—over material reality, and the Democrats’ acquiescence to it.
So what is to be done? If the tools required to make the vermin libel a lasting liability for Republicans include repetition, and the tools required to remind people that Trump is a crook and a lunatic include repetition, what’s the best way to introduce people to the idea that the economy is much stronger than public opinion suggests?
If Democrats interpret public opinion to mean they should be delicate about their economic messaging, that they should reinforce the primacy of people’s struggles, they will in essence feed the false perception, and compound the problem. Why do that work for the people who want to beat you?
But if the right move is to contest public opinion in the realm of ideas, it means politics is more about information warfare and less about governing excellence than we might like. I believe this because I’ve spent half of a life-long journalism career watching elections turn on bullshit. But I think even skeptics recognize it when it takes a toll, as it often does, in other countries.
The notion that political popularity is a variable that’s highly dependent on the trajectory of material conditions is very reductive. Obviously it’s better to succeed than to fail, and it’s easier to husband public approval in prosperity than in recession. But what people expect of their political leaders is constructed socially, not an inherent property of the human mind. Russian public opinion does not appear to be tightly linked to material conditions. Public opinion in Mexico doesn’t seem to turn on conditions there either, and it makes sense as a theoretical matter that people in societies with incompetent governments will lose faith in the idea that politics is about improving material conditions, and start making their assessments of leaders based on other things.
In the Republican nation of America, where government is and should be incompetent, perceptions of the economy have become a pure proxy for partisanship, good when the president is on team red; bad when on team blue.
We’re evolving into the propaganda society we imagined we were too advanced to become.
This may be an insoluble problem (though if any progressive billionaires want me to take a stab at solving it, my Venmo is easy to find). But even if it can be solved, Democrats will for now have to shape opinion through the system as it exists. They could attempt this by scampering to address every last economic indicator that isn’t pointed the right direction, and maybe they should. I’d never fault an officeholder for trying to make people’s lives better. But they’ll have more success moving the arrows of public opinion by transmitting opinion than they will by transmitting money.
Here’s the advice:
I’d suggest: Say what you mean bluntly on the topics you want people to care about. Don’t outsmart yourself. Don’t let your paranoid suspicions about how your opponents will react or your fears about playing into their traps overcomplicate the task of conveying simple ideas.
If you think the vermin libel disqualifies Trump, say so. It’s a much simpler way to introduce the idea than comparing Trump to Hitler and hoping the masses a) agree with the comparison and b) decide it is disqualifying on their own. The economic message should be similarly blunt. “We’ve built the best American economy in 70 years, after Trump destroyed the last one.”
More than any particular poll or paper liability, I worry about the way the party strains to explain Donald Trump’s enduring strength as a candidate against Joe Biden. The kids call it cope, but whatever it tells us about the state of the Democratic psyche, it also suggests something much worse—that strategic weaknesses keep going unaddressed.
For the weeks and months following Donald Trump’s campaign announcement, the whipping boy was inflation. When the government tamed inflation, it became an under-theorized “lag” in public sentiment about the economy. When polls suggest Biden’s age explains his poor polling, we’re told the point is moot because Donald Trump is also old. When Biden trailed Trump in the late summer, we were reminded that Barack Obama also trailed in head-to-head polling at the same point in 2011. Now that it’s November, we’re due for a new hypothesis.
Those who insist good policy is destiny will try to find it in economic data. For most of my career, they embraced the view that job and GDP growth were skeleton keys to political success. They continued making that argument under Biden until it ceased to be true, at which point they insisted it was inflation, then specifically gas prices, then a hangover effect from inflation, then housing prices. You can call it a curve fitting exercise, I think of it as Dems trying to tug carpeting into every corner of a room that’s too big. The missing piece is storytelling.
I can’t argue with any of this. Relentless repetition is key. Trump knows that and he’s right. It works/. Even when you think you’ll scream if you have to say it again, do it anyway. There is a cacophony of news and information in our culture and it’s the only way to break through. And he’s right: Keep It Simple Stupid.
I don’t know if Dems will get the message. They are still caught in the argument between “popularism” kitchen table issues and bold confrontational politics, using the wedge issues like abortion and democracy. I think it’s more than fine to tout accomplishments but in a country where people think the economy is in a great depression despite all evidence to the contrary, the latter is the better choice.
