I’m listening to some talking heads on TV this morning and realizing for the 2,750,236 times that political conventional wisdom is deadly. I won’t go into details but suffice to say that while many of them are reluctantly admitting that the economy is good they seem to be at pains to explain that Joe Biden is still a great big loser and there’s nothing much to be done about it. Yeah, ok, I exaggerate a bit but it’s not far off.
Anyway, this piece by Brian Beutler for his newsletter (which is fantastic, by the way, you should subscribe if you can) was a tonic this morning. If only the talking heads on TV would get the message:
Once upon a time (about seven years ago) a Democratic Party critic whose identity would probably surprise you conceded to me that, whatever flaws leading American liberals might embody, Donald Trump is worse—a person, he said, who has “no redeeming qualities.”
That description has stuck with me all this time less because of its insight (tens of millions of people already felt the same way) than because of how durable it’s been. Given a four year term, and three more years out of power, Trump never once conducted himself in a way that might one day give his obituary writers material for a “to be sure” paragraph. (“To be sure, the paper towels he threw at hurricane victims were brand name…”)
When Hillary Clinton debated Trump in 2016, and was asked what if anything she admired about him, she referred to his offspring. “I respect his children,” she said. “His children are incredibly able and devoted, and I think that says a lot about Donald.” But even this almost-backhanded compliment was wrong! His adult children are wretched egomaniacs, liars, and thieves. The only one who seems truly devoted to his father, Donald Trump, Jr., is the most degenerate and least capable. He’s also the one Trump himself holds in the greatest contempt.
Trump is just a bad man. The patriarch of a bad family. A person who came closest to demonstrating a trace of humanity not after any national tragedy, but when he lamented the regrettable-yet-necessary killing of Harambe.
It’s this irreducible thing about Trump that makes me so frustrated with the upper echelons of the Democratic Party. Beating a bad person in a popularity contest should be easy.
Trump would of course have millions of devotees no matter what. He’s a skilled con artist and a famous celebrity. A substantial portion of humanity apparently loves a good bully and lives to be servile. But mobilizing the greater millions who are on to his con and hate the way he treats people seems much easier than, say, beating a devoutly religious family man in the midst of a stalled-out economic recovery.
Scouring the news this week, I came away once again with the sense that the Trump opposition has grown fatalistic about Trump’s large and steady base of support, and flummoxed over how to organize against him given how badly Biden’s has frayed. So I thought it might be a good time to revisit the simple premise: Joe Biden is pretty good; Donald Trump is one of the worst people in American history.
For his recently launched New Republic podcast, Greg Sargent interviewed Jim Prokopiac, a Democratic candidate running in a special election for a Pennsylvania state house district near Philadelphia.
Like most frontline candidates Prokopiac has decided or been advised not to dwell on Donald Trump. “To a certain extent their perception is already baked in,” he said. “I’ve had people who in previous elections—Democrats—who have said, ‘You know what, lay off the Trump stuff. We already have our opinion on Trump, you’re not changing us. Tell us what you’re going to do.’ And so I think to a certain extent some of that’s baked in, and we can say all we want about what’s going on and for more blue-collar people, they already have their opinion.”
Naturally I hope Prokopiac wins. And a win is a win even if it doesn’t come about as a referendum on Trump. But this strikes me as a naive way to think about human behavior, and about how persuasion works.
-If a partisan Democrat doesn’t want to talk about Trump, fine—but they’re already a partisan Democrat! If they need any motivation at all it’s simply to remember to vote, and reminding them that we’re in a twilight struggle for American democracy will galvanize them at least as much as the details of a pension reform plan.
-If a registered, Trump-curious Democrat said “lay off the Trump stuff, I already have an opinion on Trump,” I might interpret it as the pleading of a person who’s trying to avoid the torment of cognitive dissonance. They like Trump even though they know they shouldn’t. I would want to make sure that person knew both recent revelations about Trump, and the degree to which civil and criminal fraud is at the heart of all of his legal troubles. If he’ll defraud voters and charity donors, what makes you think he doesn’t see you as a mark as well?
-If a pro-Trump Republican, festooned head to toe in MAGA gear, said “lay off the Trump stuff, I already have an opinion on Trump,” I probably wouldn’t sweat it. That’s a partisan, pro-Trump Republican! But I would still try to tickle their lizard brain, at least until I heard the click of a shotgun—you’re being manipulated by a con man, don’t you want to take your independence back? You’re stronger than to fall for the false promises of a lying crook.
Democrats and liberal elites are paralyzed by this idea that Trump sentiment is “baked in.” But nothing in politics is baked in. You can’t add more cocoa powder to a baked cupcake, but you can always change the salience and public awareness of issues with effort. Three years ago, liberals believed Trump’s unique corruption was “baked in,” but now between him and Biden it’s much closer to a wash. How did that happen? It happened because conservatives understand nothing is fixed, and so they set about trying to rehabilitate Trump and slime Biden. So far they’ve been quite successful.
The same thing can work in reverse. Persuasion is not just about getting people from zero knowledge to partial or full knowledge of Trump’s corruption. It’s getting them to dwell on things they already know. At an individual level, that can make the difference between a voter and an abstainer; at a herd level, increasing the salience of derogatory information can demoralize large groups. If James Comey had made his final comments about Hillary Clinton’s emails in September 2016, and the Access Hollywood tape had surfaced in late October, rather than the other way around, Clinton would’ve won.
And at the end of the day, this job should be easier for Democrats than Republicans. They have much more real, verifiable material to work with because Joe Biden is pretty good, but Donald Trump is one of the worst people in American history.
There’a lot more at the link and I urge you to read it. I think some of this problem stems from the somewhat self-righteous decision by the media to not show Donald Trump out of a misplaced belief in their responsibility to protect the public from the unpleasantness of Donald Trump. It may have been good for their audience but the effect was that there has been no mechanism to maintain public awareness of what a monster he is even as the right worked 24/7 to rehabilitate him. Democrats have been complicit as well, perhaps hoping that he will just go away. He’s still here.
Beutler concludes his piece with this, which is right on:
But one thing that would help is a bit more confidence among leading Democrats in the simple truth that Joe Biden is good, while Donald Trump is one of the worst people in America. It’ll be easier to elect Democrats adhering to that Manichean creed than with appeals that abstract away the top of the ticket on the theory that people’s views are set in stone.
This is the key.