How come after we’ve won the 2020 Presidential election, we’re even now worrying about Trump? How is Trump, the loser, still dominating the news cycle?
One of the selling points for voting for Biden was that we would stop hearing that horrible name, Trump. The news media was supposed to stop reporting on his inane tweets. We were promised we’d stop seeing his despicable face on our TVs.
And while we’re talking about the bitter after-taste to our sweet victory…
How is it that 74 million of our fellow Americans voted to keep Trump in office, even in the light of his epic failure to protect the country against this pandemic (not to mention his countless other failures and crimes)?
And what about these ridiculous right-wing conspiracy theories we keep hearing about? How can so many people believe this stuff? And how come GOP leaders aren’t putting a stop to it? Have they no shame?
And isn’t the balkanization of the media leading us toward a civil war?
Relaaaaax. It’s not as bad as all that. Let’s put this moment in perspective…
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It’s true that Trump got almost 74 million votes, but Biden got almost 80 million — six million more. He’ll receive 306 electoral college votes to Trumps 232. That’s not a close election.
In fact, Biden’s margin of victory is greater than Obama’s in 2012.
This was never going to be an easy election, despite the polls. Incumbents always have an advantage. Voters usually want to stay the course and stick with the devil they know. We on the Left can get so focused upon Trump’s odious personality — his racism, sexism, vulgarity, pettiness, tribalism, and so on — that we fail to see the real set of political traits that have made his candidacy so formidable, which has nothing to do with those things:
- He inspires passion in his base by championing their most cherished causes. In short, he knows the importance of Fan Service. This gives him advantages in fundraising, local organizing, and controlling the GOP. He can bully GOP members of congress by threatening to primary them.
- At the same time, he robbed the Democrats of one of their core constituencies, unions, by appealing to blue-collar workers with promises of trade deals that protect their interests. This went against GOP orthodoxy, but he compensated the corporate world with an over-the-top tax cut.
Trump badly mishandled the pandemic, but he also stamped his name on the stimulus checks that went out to voters. And before the pandemic the economy seemed to be doing well. [1]
So, putting aside Trump’s outrageous personality and just looking at his administration’s policies, this was bound to be a competitive election. If Trump hadn’t botched his response to the pandemic he probably would’ve won. (When the news media is reporting that the USA has 4% of the world’s population but 25% of the world’s coronavirus cases, it’s impossible to spin that as a success.)
Trump’s outrageous personality is not really what any of this is about. Some people cast their votes based purely upon that, but his outrageousness seems to have gained him as many votes as it lost him. To us Trump is a liar, a cheater, a hypocrite, a white supremacist, a traitor, and a rapist; to them he is a straight-shooter, a business wizard, an exposer of hypocrisy, a cultural defender, a patriot, and a suave lady’s man.
Trumpism is really all about an unsustainable economic policy that prizes short-term gain over long-term stability and well-being. And it’s about exploiting the vulnerability people have to believing fantasies when they’re under stress. That’s what con artists do.
That brings us to the right-wing conspiracy theories.
Trump feeds on magical thinking. He sparks it, nurtures it, and capitalizes upon it. His business empire is based upon it. His book The Art of the Deal says,
The final key to the way I promote is bravado. I play to people’s fantasies. People may not always think big themselves, but they can still get very excited by those who do. That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts. People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular. I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration—and a very effective form of promotion.
Another name for that is, of course, lying. And Trump knows how to sell not just spectacular fantasies, but also nightmarish ones. Remember that his entrance into national politics was as the spokesman for Birtherism. He has his supporters terrified of the deep state, Hillary’s emails, Mexican rapists, Hunter Biden’s business dealings in Russia, and anti-Christian socialists who hate America.
But the magical thinking going on today on the Right — while Trump is certainly exacerbating and exploiting it — is part of a phenomenon that is bigger than Trump.
After the World Trade Center fell, 9/11 Truthers subscribed to a conspiracy theory that said it was an inside job. Many of them were liberals. One survey found that more than half of Democrats polled believed George Bush either assisted the terrorists or knew about the attack and purposefully took no action. When the chips are down, we’re all vulnerable to this kind of crap.
Coming into 2020, Trump’s supporters felt absolutely sure he was cruising toward an epic victory. The economy was doing well. Trump had delivered on many of his campaign promises. The liberals were trying every trick in the book to stop him, including a bogus (to them) impeachment. But it wouldn’t work. This time he’d win not just the electoral college but the popular vote.
Then the pandemic happened. It just seemed too weird. It had to be another evil liberal ploy. Anyone who could put two and two together could see it.
So, that’s what happened. Now a large number of people are choosing to believe a bunch of bull feces. What do we do about it?
Firstly, don’t panic.
The conspiracy theories are a concern. We have to take them seriously and combat them. But these are dark times even setting aside Trump’s disastrous Presidency. Let’s recognize that the pandemic is having a profound psychological effect on people. It shouldn’t be too surprising that paranoid fantasies might arise from that.
And even before the pandemic, our country has absorbed a huge amount of technological, cultural, and political change very quickly, some negative and some positive — mass shootings, terrorism, smart phones, our first Black President, the ACA, gay marriage.
We’re going through a period of adjustment. America is suffering from adjustment disorder. That means there’s going to be some strange group-think.
But we on the Left can chill. Our democracy has weathered worse. Those conspiracy theories will eventually die out, or at least go back into hiding. Yes we’ve got real problems. But we’re not on the brink of a civil war.
Biden’s victory will stand.
There will not be a military coup.
I’m not saying it will all be smooth sailing from here on out. On the contrary…
- We can expect Trump to be a particularly vocal ex-politician, like Sarah Palin but even worse.
- And the Trump family has developed a taste for politics. We haven’t seen the last of them. They will be tough opponents.
- In the meantime, conservatives hold enough power to prevent the Biden administration from being very effective. Don’t expect big achievements.
- And Democrats are now underrepresented in the judicial branch as well as in state legislatures, which hamstrings us. We’re being outplayed. We’ve got to up our game.
But the world isn’t ending just yet. It’s safe to push back from the edge of your seat and recline a little. Stop watching CNN and reading news on your phone. It’s okay. Focus on other parts of your life now. Breathe.
Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2020 William Bloom
- [1]Two notes about that. Firstly, Biden’s retort to Trump touting the economy was that Trump was taking credit for the recovery that actually began under Obama. Biden was correct. But Biden could also have made the point that the recovery that began with Obama would have been even stronger except for GOP obstructionism. Secondly, Biden could have drawn more attention to Trump’s wild deficit spending. It’s easy to make the economy look good in the short term when you take on $3.9 trillion in debt. But it’s stupid to explode the deficit like that when the economy is already doing well. Somebody eventually has to pay that back.↩