Try to see Trump as his voters see him
How did this happen? Here's how.
How could this happen?
Here’s what I can offer, as perhaps, a kind of consolation: try to see Trump as his voters saw him, not as “we” did.
I don’t mean the MAGA faithful, or the Christian conservatives that, together, make up around 30% of the American voting public. We know what they see. I mean the other 25%, the people who made the difference in this election. Rightly or wrongly (I think very wrongly), these people were not focused on ‘threats to democracy’, or Donald Trump’s felony convictions or mental health, or abortion or climate or the things many progressives think about. They were focused on other things, and in these dark hours, I’ve found it personally helpful to reflect on them, not because they are right, or point to things that Democrats should’ve done or said, but simply to lessen the surprise and confusion that so many of us are feeling right now. That is, to make the darkness visible.
First, despite many positive economic indicators, a lot of people are falling behind, and they know it. Food prices remain high, housing costs are high, good jobs for non-college-graduates are increasingly scarce. Overall, there is, as I wrote about last spring, a widespread sense of economic dread that is not reducible to facts and figures. Harris is basically an incumbent, and while she had plans and empathy, she is stuck with the status quo. Mostly, she could never tap into the rage and grievance like Trump did. Really, no other politician can. He’s a unique figure.
Of course, most readers of this newsletter know that Trump’s plans will make all this worse. The real economic problems aren’t due to immigration or inflation; they’re due to a ballooning wealth gap. One look at the skyline of Manhattan makes this plain. Plus tariffs will make inflation much worse. Plus presidents can’t just manage the economy, in our capitalist system. All these facts are true, but in order to believe them, you have to believe the people telling them. Which many, many Americans do not.
Second, American society is changing rapidly. In terms of gender norms, we are undergoing uncertain revolutions around how men and women should relate to one another and what gender even means. Progressives embrace these changes, but conservatives, especially male ones, do not. Young men are adrift, aware that behavior acceptable only a decade ago is now being censured, and feeling like they can’t be the kind of men they want to be. Donald Trump is a gigantic middle finger to all of this.
In terms of race, America is far less white than a generation ago, with many more non-white people in positions of power. On the surface, conservatives may say they are not racist at all, because they insist that racism is about conscious animus and they don’t have it. In fact, though, most racism is due to unconscious bias, which all white people (including me) possess. That shows up in weird ways. It’s how a fellow CNN commentator can look me in the eye and say that Trump’s comments about immigrants “poisoning the blood” of America and having a genetic predisposition to crime are not racist, which is of course preposterous. It’s how “illegals” can be blamed for crime, even though immigrants commit crimes at a lower rate than native-born citizens, and how they can be blamed for taking jobs, even though, in fact, they are “taking jobs” at lower rates of pay than most native-born people would accept, because they’re trying to gain an economic foothold in America. None of this makes factual sense. It makes emotional sense, even spiritual sense. America is changing, and the majority of Americans are uneasy with those changes.
Even the very term “illegals” makes anti-immigrant views look like they’re about the rule of law, rather than about race. It’s not that they’re Mexican, it’s that they’re breaking the law! And so, many of us were hopeful when Trumpists said the quiet part out loud — demonizing Puerto Ricans, for example. At last, the mask of decency was ripped off, revealing the racism underneath. Trouble is, too many Americans wear similar masks, even to themselves. So sometimes people say things that are politically incorrect. No big deal.
Which, of course, is the third thing that mainstream Trump voters see in him: his “honesty,” meaning that he tells the emotional truth, even if he struggles with the factual stuff. He “talks plainly” and says the thing that others are too afraid to say. He intuitively taps into and articulates the rage, pain, and grief that many people are feeling.
And if he’s politically incorrect, all the better. Lots of Americans hate “political correctness,” “wokeness,” and the like. We don’t yet know how much resentment of these trends played a role in people’s votes, but Republican strategists emphasized it all the time, sensing that it was part of the vengeful national mood. People fucking hate being told how to speak, what to say, what opinions are allowed and not allowed. They don’t buy the progressive argument that speech acts cause harm, and even if they did, straight white men rarely experience this harm (though they protest loudly when they do). And it is true that social mores have changed quickly in this domain as well. I’ve experienced it myself. And a lot of people who are not MAGA nativists have qualms about “cancel culture” and speech policing, whether grounded in reality or not.
Trump, obviously, is its great antithesis: yet another middle finger pointed at polite, liberal America. As I’ve written about before, his vulgarity is a big part of his appeal.
Will this retrenchment have an effect on society? Partly, I think. I do think our society is about to get a lot meaner, nastier, and more violent; it’s one of the things I fear most about the coming years. And I think we’ll see a lot less of so-called “identity politics” in mainstream settings. Then again, a lot of the Left’s obsession with “safety” came precisely as a response to Trump’s first term making American society unsafe for so many people; that could happen again. Moreover, for some portion of the electorate, “wokeness” also includes representation, like the diverse casts of Star Wars and Disney princess films that so infuriate the manosphere, and that representation exists for economic as well as ideological reasons. It’ll be ‘interesting’ to see how Hollywood reacts to this week’s seismic shift.
But whether it works or not, if we see Trump as Trump’s voters do, you can see the appeal of spitting in the face of all this.
Certainly it’s core to Elon Musk’s embrace of him, which may have helped put him over the top, together with Trump’s promises to dismantle regulations Elon doesn’t like. All this is of a piece: no one likes regulation, fine print, and government forms, and no one likes the nanny state dictating what you’re allowed to do or say. Maybe in a few years we’ll miss some of these guard-rails as we choke on dirtier air and watch storms devastate our cities, but who knows. Maybe Elon will save us.
Finally, let’s remember that a lot of this “seeing” is heavily mediated. For decades now, I’ve been unhealthily obsessed with Fox News and its endless biases, lies, and distortions. Nothing has been done about it. On the contrary, the media universe has gotten far worse: there are outlets far to the right of Fox (which Trump had criticized as being too liberal), ‘independent’ outlets like the Bari Weiss world which are conservative in all but name, and the loathsome universe of Joe Rogan, Ben Shapiro, and their many imitators, conspiratualist-religious conservatives like Russell Brand, Jordan Peterson, and on and on and on.
A lot of what middle America — again, not just MAGA — sees is determined by these media outlets. In fact, almost every trend I’ve talked about here has been blown out of proportion by right-wing and ‘independent’ media: illegal immigration and crime, transgender issues, wokeness, feminism, economic dread, cancel culture, all of it. You’d think from reading the ‘independents’ that obnoxious college students are the biggest threat our country faces. And you’d think from watching Fox News that Kamala Harris is a dumb communist who wants to let in all the illegals and make America a hell-hole like San Francisco. (Which is not a hell-hole.)
So I don’t mean to suggest that what America sees is accurate, or even really a matter of ‘seeing.’ It’s equally about watching and listening to media that, due to audience capture and funding and ideology and various commercial interests. Unless we someday address this problem (and plenty of others, like Trump getting $400 million from four people), there’s no way we can have real national conversations. We exist in different mental worlds; we can’t talk about solutions if we’re talking about entirely different problems.
And make no mistake, what Trump is going to do will not solve most of these problems; on the contrary, we are headed into uncharted waters. America has fucked around with fascism, and is now going to find out.
At the same time, a lot of these waters are charted. As Childish Gambino put it, This Is America. On the one hand, our country is part of a global zeitgeist reacting against globalization, technology, and social change. And on the other, our country has always, always been this way. We have always been haunted by our original sins of genocide and slavery, always uncomfortable with admitting it. Our society and usually our government have always been ruled predominantly by rich, straight, white, Christian men. We are bamboozled by spectacle, taken in by con men and besotted by strong father figures. We have always been this way. This election is not an aberration; it’s more like (no pun intended) a regression to the mean.
And we are also human, often controlled by the forces of greed, hatred and delusion. These are not the only qualities which we possess; humans also have capacities for compassion, collaboration, and love. But they are the qualities that often dictate our actions, especially our political actions. Do the better angels of our nature prevail sometimes? Yes. Did they prevail this time? No, they did not.
No other words, this week, except: take care of yourselves. Don’t look on the bright side. Accept the dark. This is part of how life is. Not the only part.
A regression to the mean. Perfect description of what just happened. Thanks for your words today, Jay, they were comforting.
Beautifully reasoned and expressed. My own eloquent words have deserted me, as I alternate between grief, anger, and numbness.