Five Myths About Trump
Why We Keep Underestimating Him
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This was the month that Donald Trump boshed aside his competitors for the Republican nomination to install his considerable arse in the party’s driving seat. Barring a court ruling, he will be the main challenger to Joe Biden come November. He’s currently leading Biden in national polls; the consensus is that he has at least a 50% shot of returning to the White House.
Huh? What? How? Lots of people are already acting like this is normal, but it’s important to be astonished. If, on January 7th, you’d asked any political observer whether it was likely or even possible that Trump would be where he is today, they would have laughed you out of the room. His brand had already been damaged by the election loss he refused to accept, but his involvement in a riot at the Capitol seemed definitive and terminal. I don’t recall any experts saying, ‘He’ll be back’, and why would they have done? There was surely no coming back from a failed insurrection. Well, look who’s here.
I am interested in how we - that is, liberals or centrists or whatever - misunderstand Trump’s enduring appeal. We keep getting it wrong. Badly wrong. Few commentators believed he would win in 2016. When he did, it was said that his chaotic, divisive governing style would condemn him to electoral oblivion in 2020. But although he lost, his vote held up quite well. In the year after January 6th he was portrayed as a sorry figure from the past, playing to his gallery of ghouls at the golf club. Yet in 2024, here he is, this orange zombie, unkillable by events - and here we are, wondering once again how he does it. We appear to be very slow learners.
Contempt is the enemy of judgement. When you despise someone it becomes very hard to even think about, let alone understand, why others like them. There is also something about Trump’s political style which acts like a cyberattack on our analytical faculties. He kicks up such a sandstorm of outrage, hysteria and anger that it’s easy to lose sight of more conventional reasons for his resilience.
What follows are five myths that I think are distorting our view of the Trump phenomenon.
Myth #1: Trump Is a Culture Warrior
Myth #2: Trump Is a Chaos Agent
Myth #3: Trump Is a Hawk
Myth #4: Trump Is a White Supremacist
Myth #5: Trump Is a Shaman
Myth #1: Trump Is a Culture Warrior.
Like other myths identified here, this one has some truth to it. Yes, he takes deliberately crude stances on social issues and throws nail bombs at opponents and critics. Yes, to many of his supporters he’s an avenging hero sent to rain down hell on politicians, journalists and bureaucrats. But his appeal is not all about vibes.
One of the less appreciated factors in Trump’s victory over Nikki Haley in New Hampshire is that he ran on policy, while she ran on culture. His TV ads focused relentlessly on two issues: immigration and social security. On the former, he attacked Haley from the right, on the latter, from the left. At his rallies, he hit on those issues too, before embarking on the garish riffs that win him media attention.
Haley’s ads, by contrast, were about the kind of meta-narrative stuff pundits enjoy: exhaustion with the Trump-Biden style of politics, generational change. The reporter Ryan Lizza described the experience of watching the evening news in New Hampshire, during the campaign, like this: “Three positive Haley ads in which you learn she’s a fresh face but almost nothing about her policy positions followed by two Trump attack ads that are purely about her policy positions.”
Similarly, in 2016, if you looked beyond the shit-show you would have seen Trump making a series of big policy promises: to grow the economy, to reduce immigration (and build the wall), to pull out of trade agreements, to appoint conservative judges. Meanwhile, Hillary Clinton ran on the slogan “I’m With Her”.
During Trump’s presidency, jobs grew, wages outpaced inflation, stocks boomed, inflation stayed low. Legal immigration was slashed and if Trump didn’t make the same impact on illegal immigration, his supporters took his erection of the wall as a sign he was doing something about it (under Biden, it has surged). He pulled out of the TPP and adopted a much more aggressive stance towards China. We know how he changed the make-up of the Supreme Court. Trump told his voters what he would deliver, and for the most part, he delivered it.
It’s worth discussing immigration specifically. In the US and UK, I often see it classified as a ‘culture war’ issue, along with the implication that it’s somehow undignified to take it seriously. That’s crazy. First, because culture does matter, at least for any nation that regards itself as more than a legal jurisdiction. Second, immigration has material impacts, some of them negative, and saying so shouldn’t be a partisan or ideological move. Third: most voters, wherever they are, regard control or oversight of who is coming in and out the country as one of the most important functions of government.
An increase in global migration from poorer countries to richer ones is one of the central geopolitical facts of the age. Neither left or right can shut their eyes and wish it away. Even liberals who view mass immigration as desirable ought to be able to acknowledge its costs and the need for limits and controls. But they find it painfully hard to do so, at least to do so authentically. In the US, this blind spot has allowed the right to take the centre ground.
Illegal immigration is highly unpopular even with registered Democrats and Biden supporters. The Americans most under threat from mass immigration tend to be working class and/or black - groups which have been trending away from the party that is meant to represent them. Trump has been able to win voters over simply by treating illegal immigration as a problem to be solved.
In short, Trump’s opponents get so mesmerised by his theatrics that they take their eye off his policies. His voters don’t.
Myth #2: Trump Is a Chaos Agent
After this month, a popular theory among liberals will be put to the test. The theory is that Trump’s current strength in national polls is an illusion. He has been out of the public eye for most of the last three years. People have forgotten how chaotic he is, how stressful it is to have deal with the constant drama he generates. Even voters who check the Trump box in opinion polls aren’t necessarily taking the prospect of his return seriously. Once he moves to centre-stage, and once Democrats raise the alarm for American democracy, Trump will fade.
This may come true and I hope it does, but I’m a little sceptical. First, because voters were told, ad nauseam, in 2016 that a Trump presidency would be utterly disastrous for America and American democracy. But it wasn’t - at least, most voters didn’t think it was. The economy grew. No new wars broke out. Elections continued. Opponents were not prosecuted. Trump was certainly a weird and erratic occupant of the White House and for many voters, perhaps most, an objectionable and annoying one. But in substance his presidency wasn’t a radical break with previous ones. It will be very hard to persuade voters that next time will be different. (January 6th will have harmed him but most voters think of it as a riot in which he became foolishly embroiled rather than as a plot to overthrow the state.)
In fact for a lot of voters, Trump represents the opposite of chaos. He represents toughness on crime, control over the country’s borders, and resistance to modern trends, social and economic. He is the restoration of order. Democrats under-estimated how many voters viewed the country, or at least their town, as chaotic when Obama was president. This might be why inflation is so politically damaging to Biden, by the way - it magnifies a sense of things slipping and sliding out of control. Pollsters say that many voters regard 2019, the last year before the pandemic, with especial fondness, as a highwater mark for the economy, before inflation began its dirty, destabilising work.
Finally, there is the question of whether Trump’s competitor can plausibly claim to represent stability. Biden has two problems here. One is the memory of that chaotic withdrawal from Afghanistan in mid-August 2021, from which his approval rating never recovered.
The second is that two wars in which America is heavily involved broke out on his watch. While it’s not clear that Biden could have done anything to prevent them, his opponents will argue otherwise, and the wars make it harder for him to draw a sharp contrast with the Trump years. Biden’s firm stance on military aid to Ukraine will take him further away from the median voter over the year ahead. Which brings us to the third myth.
Myth #3: Trump Is a Hawk.
If you asked people, including me, what they were most scared of when Trump assumed the presidency last time, it was that he would somehow trigger World War Three. His “strong man” brand, his personal belligerence, the insults he directed at world leaders, all led us to assume that he would pursue a belligerent foreign policy.
Once again, we were confusing the shitshow with the substance. Trump ran on opposition to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In office, he was notoriously friendly to Vladimir Putin, and although he took a confrontational stance against China on trade, he did not trouble them militarily. His approach to North Korea was classic Trump: the rhetoric was “fire and fury” but the actual, tangible policy was prudent and peaceable. He got closer to a deal on NK’s nuclear weapons than any previous president.
Now he wants to withdraw from the war in Ukraine. Trump recently suggested that if China attacks Taiwan, America should do nothing about it. That’s to say, Trump is considerably more dovish than Biden. That doesn’t necessarily make him a less dangerous president - weakness is provocative and all that - but to an electorate tired of overseas entanglements, his isolationism is attractive.
Myth #4: Trump Is a White Supremacist.
This one has been repeated so many times in liberal circles that it has assumed axiomatic status. But there’s no evidence that Trump believes in the superiority of the white race, or that he hates Blacks and Hispanics, or that he sympathises with the KKK. One can point to racist remarks but (here I agree with Scott Alexander) he does not have an ideological belief in white supremacy, and if you interpret his politics through that lens you’ll be led astray. He is not a racist so much as a nativist who believes in promoting the interests of American inhabitants over immigrants (however that line is drawn). Yes, the two stances are not always easy to distinguish, not least by racists themselves - I’m sure some of his supporters are straightforwardly racist - but they are not the same.
(People often mention Charlottesville and “very fine people on both sides” at this point, but that episode has been misrepresented. You can read the transcript of that press conference and make up your own mind. To me it’s pretty clear he was making a distinction between “fine people” who were there merely to protest the toppling of a statue, and racists who were there to engage in violence. He wasn’t saying that the racists included some fine people! And I think it’s perfectly reasonable to assert that people can be against statue-toppling and not be racist. In the aftermath of Charlottesville a plurality of black voters said Confederate statues should be left where they are.)
Trump’s outlook is quite straightforward: he likes people who are on his side, whatever colour they are. Hence his active courting of minority voters, which went unnoticed by much of the media but which reaped considerable rewards. In 2020 he performed better with minority voters than he did in 2016 (and he quite well with them then). His current strength in national polls is partly down to Black and Hispanic voters switching to him from Biden.
Wouldn’t you expect a white supremacist to do badly with, er, non-whites? If he was what the left says he is, he wouldn’t be seeking theses votes and he certainly wouldn’t be winning them.
Myth #5: Trump Is a Shaman
It seems like we only have two modes: Trump is a total loser who will never win, and Trump is unbeatable because he has a profound, shamanic connection with the American electorate, which no conventional politician can ever hope to fathom or break. These are two sides of the same coin, both of them products of his ability to bork our ability to reason dispassionately. I do actually think he has some kind of spiritual connection with a good number of voters for whom he is basically a figure from the Book of Revelations, but there aren’t enough of them for him to win. He needs the voters who vote for more prosaic reasons. I wouldn’t make any predictions with confidence, but from being very underrated I now think Trump’s chances in November are slightly overrated, for a few reasons:
Inflation has subsided, the economy continues to grow, wages are going up, and the stock market is bullish (a factor that’s more politically important in the US than it is in the UK or most other places). Democrats must hope the Houthis don’t disrupt trade to the extent that inflation returns.
The polls are not good for Biden but they haven’t been for a long while, and despite that, when Americans have actually voted over the last couple of years, Democrats have done well and Republicans, specifically MAGA-supporting, election-denying Republicans, have done poorly. I am sceptical that Biden’s age, the Democrats’ biggest problem, will be quite enough to change that pattern.
In the (London) Times, Gerard Baker cites some interesting data from the New Hampshire primary: “According to exit polls, Trump won 74 per cent of registered Republicans to Haley’s 25 per cent. Among the independents who voted, Haley won 58 per cent to Trump’s 39 per cent…And more than a third of all those who voted in the primary said they wouldn’t vote for Trump in November.” I don’t put much weight on the numbers themselves since American voters generally come home to their party in general elections. But if you think of Trump as, essentially, an incumbent, then perhaps he didn’t do as well in these primaries as it seems.
The Biden campaign has been very slow in getting into gear but is now shaping up and there are signs it will be effective.
It will focus on the economy, on abortion, and, judging by this brutal ad, it will try and fight the age/senility issue to a draw.
Right, that’s enough thinking about this awful election. I’m now going to close my eyes and pretend it’s not happening. Wake me up on Wednesday 6th.
In his book Fantasyland, Kurt Anderson explains Trump this way: "America was created by true believers and passionate dreamers, by hucksters and their suckers-which over the course of four centuries has made us susceptible to fantasy, as epitomized by everything from Salem hunting witches to Joseph Smith creating Mormonism, from P. T. Barnum to Henry David Thoreau to speaking in tongues, from Hollywood to Scientology to conspiracy theories, from Walt Disney to Billy Graham to Ronald Reagan to Oprah Winfrey to Donald Trump. In other words: mix epic individualism with extreme religion; mix show business with everything else; let all that steep and simmer for a few centuries; run it through the anything-goes 1960s and the Internet age; the result is the America we inhabit today, where reality and fantasy are weirdly and dangerously blurred and commingled." As many Americans see themselves as the chosen people they feel they need a leader who embodies their "specialness" - a fearless individualist who will promote the US over every other country. Mix in the ingredients that Anderson describes and you have Trump. It will be interesting to see later this year if the centre holds. We could be in for a wild ride.
Good, well-reasoned piece, although characterizing Hillary Clinton's policy planks in 2016 as simply a slogan ("I'm with her") is perhaps a tad reductive. And even though she lost the election, she won the popular vote, so her campaign (and presumably her policies) actually appealed to more voters than Trump's. But thanks to the strange and antiquated US electoral system, Trump won.