Why Donald Trump Won in 2016, Why He Could Very Likely Win Again in 2024, and How to Keep That From Happening
In the past week, I did something I have not done since the winter of 2015: I watched a Donald Trump rally in its entirety.
This would seem to require some kind of explanation, so let me say: I am a registered independent and currently a card-carrying member of the American Solidarity Party. I have never voted for Donald Trump. I never will vote for Donald Trump. I like to think I have a coherent, principled approach to politics--which is another way of saying that I am a registered independent signed up with a third party who has not strongly supported a candidate for public office in the last ten years. Even from that standpoint, however, the kind of politics Donald Trump, indeed the kind of public life, the kind of mass media, the kind of America Donald Trump represents is entirely anathema to me.
However: in the Year of Our Lord 2015, I was one of those foolish ones who believed that Donald Trump was, more or less, a sideshow clown: that he had no hope of actually winning the primary, and even less hope of actually winning the Presidency. I continued to believe this up to the day Leonard Cohen died: that is, Election Day. This makes me like most people who predicted such things.
Nonetheless, looking back on that heady time, the one nagging thing that clung to me throughout the campaign season, and made me question my own reason and better judgment, was the actual experience of watching a Donald Trump campaign rally. I was frankly taken aback by the experience; as a hostile outsider, I was surprised, shocked by how compelling I found it, and how much even I was drawn in, against my better judgment, to the narrative it presented. In contrast, when I watched Hillary Clinton's DNC speech, I was taken aback by how obviously foolish her approach was and how totally uncompelling it was. Nonetheless, I continued to follow the political circus, waiting for conventional wisdom to be vindicated, and stuck with my own better judgment to the bitter end.
Next year, we will have another election day; where Donald Trump will once again be running for Presidency, and will most likely be running against Joe Biden. Conventional wisdom is once again that he stands no chance; especially with his recent indictment. De Santis is the future of the Republic Party; Trump is the past. The Republicans did poorly in the midterms; the RNC and most Republican politicians blame him for this, and have always hated him anyway.
However, to discharge my conscience and peace of mind, I decided to make one last test: to watch another rally all the way through. If it was at all like the 2016 rally, I would then mentally prepare myself for Donald Trump winning again; and I would then totally check out of electoral politics for the next 12 months. After all, I am in no way conflicted about my vote; the only reason to follow primary and electoral events closely would be out of doubt and fear over the outcome. This time around, I could escape that unpleasant process.
So: what was my conclusion? As stated in the title, after watching the rally, I think it overwhelmingly likely that Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee for President; I think it quite likely that he will be President again. So I am done with election season.
Before I completely check out, though, I thought I would discharge my conscience about what has always been staringly obvious to me about Trump, his appeal to voters, and how to beat him. Articles on these topics have been, since 2015, a cottage industry; and every one I have seen has been, to me, not only wrong but directly counterproductive. Indeed, I am frankly shocked by how little anyone, anywhere seems to have learned from Trump and his political success, across the board. It is this, above all else, that makes me think he will likely win again in 2024.
Before I leave America to its fate, I will do my Civic Duty by explaining what is actually responsible for Trump's remarkable political success, and how it might be possible to avoid making the same mistakes as 2016, and actually beat him this time.
Trump is Adam Sandler
As a preamble, I should say that the 2020 election tells us, really, almost nothing about how to beat Trump in 2024. The Pandemic was an unrepeatable, once-in-a-lifetime event; and in a massive psychological disruption, Americans by and large wanted safety, stability, and a return to "normal" more than anything else. Joe Biden was, more or less, the candidate of normalcy, if only due to having been in politics so long. Trump was also an incumbent, which seriously hampered his normal style of politics and electioneering. Biden thus (barely) won, and there were celebrations in the streets, and also some riots. And life went on.
When one watches a Donald Trump rally, the reasons for his success become, at least to me, simply obvious. Of course, any number of people seem to watch these rallies and not come to the same conclusion; but, I would argue, they are generally hampered by being secular American professionals whose sense of morality is largely if not entirely defined by social etiquette and speech codes. Donald Trump, self-evidently, does not follow polite, professional codes of speech and behavior; he thus appears to those whose morality and sense of self is tied up with these codes as a barbarian, a boor, an evil man, a representation of all they hate and fear and (perhaps) secretly desire.
Seeing this and then seeing his success, professional-class Americans draw the to-them obvious conclusions that his supporters are simply monstrously evil, like him; and finding that most Americans do not in fact live and die by professional-class speech and etiquette codes, they conclude that most Americans are irredeemably evil, or in more common parlance, racist. The conclusion they then draw from this for practical politics is that they need to do everything they can to enforce their speech and moral codes by punishing and being mean to Trump as much as possible, and that it will work, and restore order to the world. The obsession with finding some way to punish Trump over the past eight years has been, frankly, astonishing; but reflects this basic perspective on the world. There is a moral order to the world; Trump has broken it; therefore he must be punished. That this is hard to do and does not work and in fact tends to backfire is by this time rather obvious, and will only grow more obvious as Trump's indictment unfolds.
The first conclusion to draw from a Donald Trump rally, however, is simply that it is a lot of fun. It is entertaining; and, despite how it may appear to other people, fun and entertaining in a largely positive and feel-good way.
To begin with, Donald Trump is simply fun to watch; he is at heart an entertainer of the type of Jerry Lewis or Adam Sandler, a grotesque, unpleasant, but somehow identifiable figure that holds your attention, gets a reaction, can be laughed at without shame, but at the same time somehow draws in your sympathies until you identify with his successes and failures, joy and pain, as your own. The more you watch Trump, the more soothing you find his voice and mannerisms, and the more natively and deeply endearing you find his childish affect.
For this is one of Trump's secrets: that despite his viciousness, he is at heart a childish and child-like personality. He openly desires and exults in praise and affirmation; he openly reacts with anger and hurt to criticism and cruelty. And he performs these reactions in real-time, twisting and turning with every passing breeze, and in so doing gradually and inevitably wears you down and draws you in. After watching Trump for a while, your own emotions become naturally knitted to his own; you laugh with his laughter, cry with his tears, get angry with his anger. In particular, Trump has precisely the egoism of a child; the world revolves around him, and everything is broken down and reacted to according to a simplistic, but incredibly raw dichotomy between vindication and shame. Trump is incredibly petty--but then so are small children, and so, when push comes to shove, are most of us deep down, especially in the Internet age.
This, too, is the main thing responsible for the strange, mirror-like correspondence between Trump's fandom and anti-fandom. People who hate Donald Trump, as much as those who are sympathetic to him, are drawn into his open, raw, childish play of emotions, victories, and humiliations; and quickly come to want and value nothing more than Trump's pain and humiliation, no matter how petty or counterproductive. Half or more of Trump's victories are simply handed to him by his opponents, who exult in his pain and provide him with all the petty humiliations he could ever want, failing to understand that in the end, sympathy is stronger in most people than hate, and that the more they humiliate Trump, the more they are bonding him to those who, even remotely, identify with him.
If you watch a Donald Trump rally, this is a refrain you will hear again and again, from his own lips: that my pain is, somehow, your pain, that my enemies hate me only because they hate you, that in attacking me they are really attacking you, and therefore that my victory over them will, by the same transference, be really your victory after all.
American comedy is really a very strange thing, even by the standards of world comedy; and for a long time, it has been centered on these grotesque, vicarious figures of pain and triumph. It is no surprise that for most of his career Donald Trump has made his living precisely by playing such a figure on TV.
Consider, on the other hand, the villain of an American comedy; a superior figure of class and sophistication and morality and etiquette, immaculately dressed, perfectly composed, sneering, perhaps with a British accent, removed, "elitist," and to himself obviously superior to our grotesque, unconventional hero, whom he pettily puts down in every way possible, delighting in his humiliation and showing no sympathy at all for his pain. When actual societal elites, or even ordinary professional-class people, attack Trump, they almost inevitably come off as precisely this sort of character; and Trump looks all the better by contrast, his foibles, even his genuine faults, nay, even his glaring and monstrous faults and sins and crimes, magically transformed into the innocent foibles of an American comic hero.
Here, then, is the first massive lesson to take from Trump: that if you want to beat him you must not be drawn into his cycle of shame and triumph, that you must not attack him or his followers in a way that comes off as petty or bullying or superior.
Democratic Political Rhetoric
This, though, is only one part of what Donald Trump does that makes him so uniquely successful. His principal advantage, I think, is a much more political one, and one that could certainly be done better than he does it, though I have never seen any other political figure try for the past eight years.
What Donald Trump spends most of his political rallies doing, whether in 2023 or 2016, is to follow a simple rhetorical pattern: (1) things are very very bad, (2) including this bad thing that no one else talks about but which affects you and your life directly, and (3) I feel your pain and humiliation deeply and in fact it is to some measure simply my pain and humiliation, especially since (4) it is in fact my enemies' fault, and therefore I promise that (5) if we beat my enemies, (6) I will personally fix it.
When I watched the Donald Trump rally in 2016, I was taken aback more than anything else by the simple, staring fact that he constantly talked about political and societal issues that I had never heard any other national politician talk about, and talked about them in moving and emotive terms, and promised to fix them. In 2016, this included the opioid crisis, a massive societal disaster that still, somehow, does not seem to have become a national political issue, as well as the economic globalization and outsourcing of industrial jobs that had devastated large parts of the country but which until then had somehow not been a national political issue. In 2023, it included the problem of airplanes being delayed constantly and airports being unpleasant places, a somewhat petty, but still absolutely real problem that affected and continues to affect enormous numbers of ordinary Americans. It also included ample discussion of the problem of inflation and high grocery bills, as well as a repeated promise to prevent World War 3 and bring an end to the war between Russia and Ukraine in the few months between his election and inauguration. In-between, it has included things like toilets flushing poorly and lightbulbs making you look orange; and, of course, lurid accounts of (largely) fictitious millions flooding the Mexican border every day to steal your jobs, rape your children, kill, and destroy.
The fundamental question, though, is not whether the problems Donald Trump talks about are important or petty, real or fictitious; in fact, in any given rally, he will talk about problems falling into each of these categories and more. The point is that he has what is at heart an actual political rhetoric, an actual democratic rhetoric, that is based around the idea that sympathizing with ordinary people's problems and fixing them is the core concern of politics. So, indeed, it is, or would be, in a truly democratic state.
Of course, Trump's rhetoric, especially in 2023, is to a real degree not just democratic but religious, eschatological, messianic; but then such rhetorics have always been at the core of American politics, also, from the City on a Hill to the last best hope for freedom to the War on Terror to Change You Can Believe In.
Here, though, is again precisely where Trump's enemies and interlocutors fall into an enormous and open trap. For many elites and professional-class people, the problems Trump lists are in fact not problems at all, at least for them; or they are necessary results of economic disruption or social progress or innovation or other more cherished values. They are, at the very least, not problems amenable to easy political solutions. Even if they are genuine affected by the problems Donald Trump talks about, however, Trump's native political opponents naturally are not sympathetic to Trump and so naturally (and largely correctly) see his promises to fix them as obvious lies. Far from being reassured by Trump's rhetoric, they are enraged and irritated and befuddled; and they draw the to them obvious conclusion that everyone who falls for Trump is either fanatically delusional, really believing his childish lies that he will fix everything, or else stupid beyond belief.
This is an incorrect conclusion, though. The question in American national politics is always that of alternatives. And if you watch a regular political speech, by any kind of ordinary American politician, and then turn to watching a Donald Trump speech, the contrast is very clear indeed. Most American politics exists on a lofty, ideological plane that rarely touches ordinary life; it avoids rhetorical anger, grief, and consolation; and it is based to a large extent around the projection of professional expertise and knowledge and competence to explain away problems or promise complex, technical fixes to them. There is perhaps no better representation of this style of politics than Elizabeth Warren, who, as they say, had a detailed policy plan for everything, and was happy to explain them to you.
Here, though, is the problem; most Americans do not trust professional-class experts; or at the very least, they do not look to professional-class experts for genuine solutions to their immediate, pressing problems. They especially do not look to professional-class experts to make them feel better.
What makes Trump so uniquely successful, then, is that he offers to anyone who finds himself in any one of the categories of people with problems that he mentions a straightforward alternative and a straightforward bargain. On the one hand, they can trust professional-class experts, who will very likely not acknowledge their problems as real problems, will not share their grief or pain, but remain distanced and superior, will not reassure or console them, and will at best offer complex, long-term plans that they have no ability to understand or evaluate, plans which they have spent their entire adult lives hearing about even as their lives have by every straightforward economic and social metric got continually worse and worse.
Or, on the other hand, they can follow and identify with and support Trump. At the very least, they will get out of this some genuine feelings of consolation, as a public figure publicly acknowledges their pain and identifies with it; hopefully, they will get some vindication out of it as well, as Trump makes those who have caused or at least ignored or explained away their pain suffer, if only in petty ways; and even more remotely and hopefully, Trump after promising publicly to fix their problems will likely at least try to do something about these problems, and so make them feel better, and perhaps even actually benefit them in some way large or small by fixing or at least alleviating their genuine problems.
This, then, is I think the most important thing to understand Donald Trump's appeal: that an ordinary person with problems does not have to be stupid or delusional to believe that they will get a better deal with Trump than with ordinary politicians.
Of course, the big potential downside to Trump is that by doing all of these things, he will likely disrupt the status quo and potentially cause other problems. But the more people's general perception of their lives is negative, the more willing they will be to prefer disruption to stability, uncertainty to more of the same. And unfortunately, it seems to me that people in 2023, after the pandemic, after the War in Ukraine, after inflation and rising gas prices and further atomizing effects of the Internet, are more ready than ever to prefer disruption to stability. The Trump rally I watched recently climaxed with an extended passage in which, to piped-in sad piano music, Trump listed the problems with America in a crescendo of "We are a nation in decline. We are a nation that...we are a nation...we are a nation..." before turning on a dime, as the music shifted, and promising to fix all these problems.
How to Beat Trump
So: how, then, do you beat Trump?
Well, above all else, you beat Trump by doing what Trump does--acknowledging people's problems, sympathizing with them publicly, expressing anger and sadness about them rhetorically, and promising to fix them--and doing it in a way that seems more genuine and reliable and more likely to lead to positive results for people.
Again, Trump is to a large extent transparently unreliable. It should not, in the abstract, be all that hard to come off as more trustworthy and more likely to fix problems than he. To take an obvious example, Bernie Sanders in both 2016 and 2020 would have handily beaten Trump, precisely because, as a more old-fashioned and less professional-class political figure, he consistently identified real problems in people's lives, expressed rhetorical anger about these problems, identified rhetorically with people's pain, and promised to fix them. In so doing, he came off as vastly more reliable than Trump, in his knowledge of actual problems in his American life, in his idea of what was causing these problems, and in his plans to fix them.
However, Bernie Sanders in both 2016 and 2020 was undone by the straightforward fact that the Democratic Party is deep in the grip of the professional classes. Instead of Bernie Sanders, in 2016 we got a Hillary Clinton who ran on the platform that that things had never been better, that those who thought they had problems were racists or worse, perhaps really responsible for their pain or at least deserving of it, and the only thing to do was to keep going "FORWARD!"
It was not always thus; even Barack Obama, while in many ways the embodiment of professional-class concerns and aspirations, won office by showing genuine, if somewhat distant, concern and care for ordinary people's problems and by promising massive change to improve their lives. Within the Republican Party, too, conservatives had frequently run on perceived problems in their base's lives and promises to improve them, and had been comfortable expressing anger and sadness in the process.
Here, though, is the truly horrifying thing, to me especially: that it seems that the success of Donald Trump has had virtually the opposite effect it should on American politics. Far from the progressive left growing more comfortable expressing rhetorical anger and consolation and promising to fix real, practical problems, they have grown less so. Biden appears to be trying to run in 2024 entirely on the idea that inflation, gas prices, the War in Ukraine, and so forth, are simply not so bad as people think after all.
Fear and hatred and fascination with Trump have led the progressive establishment Left and Right alike to be afraid of what they consider "populist rhetoric," which as stated above is to a large degree simply democratic and classical American political rhetoric, assuming that even acknowledging problems will give aid and comfort to extremists like Trump, let alone promising to fix them or affect them in any major way. Progressive politics have somehow gotten even more academic, even more technical, even more based around trust in experts, while adding on a new degree of open contempt and hatred for their opponents and the American electorate at large; and in so doing they have somehow, miraculously extended Trump's political lifespan or even brought him back up out of the grave.
Even on the right, "populism" has so far largely consisted of strange ideological projects like national conservatism, race-baiting, and/or new content-free strategies of "owning the libs," or focusing one's politics entirely around symbolic victories and making your enemies feel bad. This is, again, in large part a reaction to Trump and his success. After all, didn't Trump break social codes, didn't he do race-baiting, didn't he give people vicarious satisfaction by owning the libs? Well, yes, he did; but he also did other things, like acknowledging people's problems and promising to fix them. Watching Trump go up against De Santis, for all the media talk, does not look like watching a clown go up against a responsible politician; it looks like watching someone who seems at least vaguely aware of people's problems and promises to fix them going up against someone who wants to maintain the status quo while owning the libs as much as possible along the way, as consolation prize and sideshow.
Of course, I acknowledge, freely, my own unique position relative to this debate and conflict. My own politics are fairly radical, and, I hope, substantive as well; I am a Distributist, an anti-capitalist, and many other things besides. To me, then, the strategy to take to beat Trump seems obvious: be genuinely radical, but in a more positive, substantive way, and in so doing make peace with some kind of old-style democratic rhetoric of anger, vindication, and consolation.
Of course, for our current political system and establishment, this is not so simple. Since at least the 1990s, substantively radical politics have been off the table, and politics has gotten more and more technical and abstract and ideological and more and more based around symbolic issues and conflicts. From this perspective, Donald Trump merely represents one more step along the road to a completely contentless, completely pornographic politics; and the way to respond to him also appears entirely obvious. Continue with the same substantive politics, but make it less complex, less hard to follow, less substantive, more symbolic, more rhetorical, meaner, and more grotesque. This is more or less what Biden did in 2020, and he won that election. So why am I to suggest something different?
Well, if nothing else, I think it would be in the interests of the common good to question our fundamental political models and systems, and to attempt to substantively address the many economic and social problems that ordinary Americans feel deeply, and above all the general malaise sense of things falling apart and institutions crumbling and there being no future that has gripped America since the pandemic.
I am not a politician, however. So in the meantime, having as I said discharged my conscience about why Trump has been successful and how to beat him, I will go on my way. I am not necessarily and absolutely predicting his victory in 2024. He may well lose; and someone much worse may be waiting in the wings. Still, don't say I didn't warn you.
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