Do Americans get the leaders they deserve?
“One of the most maddening aspects of the 2024 election is the extent to which so many voters viewed Trump as a mostly normal political candidate,” writes David French in The New York Times. This is the same Times, a paper not celebrated for its headlines, which boasts several online examples this morning of the new Trump normal.
I’m resisting the urge here to substitute another D-word in that famous line from The Sixth Sense (1999):
Most Americans are not political geeks. They don’t have the time. They have other interests. They have other hobbies for when they are not tied up in jobs and bills. They ferry kids to soccer practice and dance classes. A shrinking number attend church, another demand on their time. They are not low-information voters. They are busy, some with multiple jobs. They are not interested in mastering the details of policy proposals. When they go to the polls, they contract out that work to politicians who, for whatever evanescent reasons, seem to reflect themselves back to them. Or else reflect back an image of themselves they’d rather see.
It’s what they see in Donald Trump that should scare you.
Trump’s most-aired ad from October, French writes, was
all about inflation, Medicare and Social Security — arguing that” Kamala Harris “will make seniors already struggling with high prices ‘pay more Social Security taxes,’ while unauthorized’ immigrants receive benefits.”
Trump was marketing more vodka he doesn’t drink and sneakers he doesn’t wear. But still standard political stuff, French observes. Except the headlines on the Times landing page are anything but. Americans will suffer another two or four years of Trumpism before contemplating (if ever they do) “whether politicians have taken care of prices, crime and peace, and then ruthlessly punishes failure.” In between, they disengage.
Because the majority votes and then checks back out, politicians hear almost exclusively from the most engaged minority. My colleague Ezra Klein, has written, for example, about the power that “the groups” — progressive activist organizations — exercise over Democratic policy. They demand that politicians focus on issues that might be important, but that are often not matters of majority concern. Or, even worse, they demand political fealty to positions that majorities reject.
In many administrations, this dynamic results in a kind of tug of war between the activists who demand attention to their pet causes and the political realists who grab the candidate’s arm and tap the sign that reads, “It’s the economy, stupid.”
In his first presidency, Trump hired aides that would restrain his impulse to pursue an agenda of all grievance, all the time. He fired most of them and won’t make that mistake again. Kitchen table issues are not what get him out of bed.
Throughout the campaign, Trump ran with two messages. On the airwaves, he convinced millions of Americans that they were electing the Trump of January 2019, when inflation was low, and the border was under reasonable control. At his rallies, he told MAGA that it was electing the Trump of January 2021, the man unleashed from establishment control and hellbent on burning it all down.
But here is his fundamental problem: The desires of his heart and the grievances of his base are ultimately incompatible with the demands of the majority, and the more he pursues his own priorities, the more he’ll revive his opposition. He’ll end his political career as an unpopular politician who ushered in a Democratic majority yet again.
French assumes here that Trump will survive another four years, that before dying in office he won’t succeed in centralizing power in an Executive branch he bequeaths to J.D. Vance and Elon Musk, already a shadow president.
French concludes:
Senator Roger Marshall of Kansas defended the Gaetz pick, saying, “Trump was elected to turn this place upside down.” That’s what Trump thinks. That’s what MAGA thinks. But MAGA should beware. If Trump’s cabinet picks help him usher in the chaos that is the water in which he swims, then the question won’t be whether voters rebuke MAGA again, but rather how much damage it does before it fails once more.
Perhaps the real question is not who next faces the voters’ wrath but whether voters will retain another chance to express theirs once Trump weaponizes his. Maybe voters usher in another Democratic majority. Or maybe the republic falls like the House of Usher with Roderick. That is, if world doesn’t face another Red Death worse than COVID-19 first.
Many Americans not of the MAGA persuasion focus on sustainability. What may matter to that more than clean energy is the sustainability of the American experiment run by an electorate that has no time for it.