Trump Essentials (1)
#1: He Is A Suicide Bomber, And That His Appeal
For nearly a decade, the American mainstream has failed over and over again to understand what Donald Trump is, what he means, how he works.
Most lethally, newspapers and conventional political commentators and scholarly analysts continue to assume that if they could only demonstrate that his planned policies will cause economic damage, will result in political chaos, will badly damage the reputation and power of the United States in the existing world-system, will empower authoritarianism at all levels of American life, will utterly eviscerate the rule of law, that many of Trump’s voters would change their minds.
It’s a profoundly hard-wired impulse for educated centrists and liberals, often backstopped by some kind of epistemological fairy tale like rational choice. “If only we could educate them!” If only they knew, if only they could see the big picture, if only they weren’t in thrall to Fox News, X and TruthSocial.
If there’s any failure of education worth talking about, it’s squarely in the precincts of the political mainstream, not out there in MAGA-land. No matter how many times they see the reality of things staring them in the face, they retreat into their tropes like a child sucking their thumb and clutching a blanket after accidentally watching most of a horror movie because of a parental lapse.
Many of Trump’s voters know exactly what he is. They know he’s going to blow the status quo to smithereens and they want him to. They want him to be incompetent, they want him to be senile, they want him to be cruel. They want him to violate every one of the Ten Commandments in public view. They’re rooting for him to emulate Cody Jarrett and detonate himself up on top of the vast infrastructure of the 21st Century American nation-state, taking as much of it with him as he can.
They don’t know what will follow. They don’t care. Whatever follows, it won’t be theirs. That is to say, us. The core of his followers are millenarians. They expect a new world to arise spontaneously from the ruins of the old one. I don’t think many of them are actually ethically Christian in their eschatology any longer—that was evident in the Left Behind books and many other similar imaginaries. They are not hoping to be called to Heaven, they’re just hoping for the tribulating signal to fight for the scraps of a ruined modernity.
It doesn’t matter if you stutter in frustration with my take, “But they are actually doing fine! some of them are actually pretty rich! but they still have social power! It’s not in their self-interest!” History is replete with social coalitions and groupings that decide they’d rather do as much damage as possible in the time that is given to them even if they could co-exist and hold on to a share of social and cultural power.
Nothing you tell a convinced Trump voter about Trump’s qualifications, problems or likely actions matters to them. In fact, you are only convincing them more. Everything you fear and loathe about Trump is a recommendation to them.
Image credit: Sieur de Montauban, Explosion of Magazine, from the Pirates of the Spanish Main series (N19) for Allen & Ginter Cigarettes, 1888, Metropolitan Museum of Art Collection.
The problem isn't to reach convinced Trump voters, it's to peel off enough undecideds and Repubs who genuinely dislike Trump. Some subset of the arguments you mention at the outset seem like the best approach, though not a guaranteed path to victory.
The Trump-lovers aren't the only unreachable group unfortunately. There's also a big group (Susa Collins is the archetype) for whom being a Republican is such a central part of their identity that they can't shift. Even among those who have rejected Trump, only a minority have been willing ot advocate a vote for Harris.
I like this only in the sense that you aren't wrong, even though I wish you were. It is becoming increasingly clear to me that we are dealing with a vast number of people who really do want to burn their playhouse down just because they can.