Donald Trump as symptom

Zack Beauchamp observes that the media’s self-referential obsession with CNN’s admittedly indefensible decision to telecast a Trump rally as if it were an exercise in journalism misses a much more fundamental point:

But in the wake of CNN’s town hall, the media conversation is obsessing over these questions far more than the more fundamental issue of why Trump is newsworthy in the first place. He speaks a language and promotes a perspective that appeals to millions of people — to the point where he got 11 million more votes in 2020 than in 2016. Those people tuned in to the President Trump show every day and decided they wanted more.

And paying attention to what he said last night, and what the audience applauded, affirmed what we’ve learned about Trump and the far-right around the world in the last decade or so. The former president has weaponized a sense of grievance against mainstream American society, convincing a critical sector of voters who feel culturally alienated that he’s their champion against a mainstream that despises them.

In such an environment, the grievance-mongering about the 2020 election that consumed much of the CNN town hall makes a lot more sense. In the Trump worldview, 2020 is not merely an election their side lost; it is the grand conspiracy against Trump and his supporters, the political system and the media and the Never Trumpers and the courts all aligning to keep the Real Americans and their leader out of power.

When Trump said on Wednesday that “unless you are a very stupid person, you see what happened … that was a rigged election,” he’s not merely defending his own reputation: He’s letting his audience in on the secret that they’re the smart ones, and his opponents are either dumb or corrupt.

What we saw last night is what millions of our fellow citizens want out of politics. It’s profoundly dangerous — an existential threat to the survival of American democracy. The CNN town hall was depressing less because it was a bad decision by CNN, but because the spectacle underscored that Trump is not merely a media phenomenon but also an expression of a tectonic transformation in American and even global politics.

Whether or not CNN aired this town hall, Trump would still be the prohibitive favorite in the Republican primary. The important question is why — and what can be done about it.

Trump is merely the apotheosis of the white grievance politics that has been gradually taking over the Republican party is at least Richard Nixon’s “silent majority” campaign 55 (!) years ago. Ronald Reagan perfected the message that the real victims of contemporary American culture were white Americans, and Trump adopted it perfectly the world of the Internet and social media, with all pretenses, fig leafs, and masks ripped off.

I think Beauchamp is right that, while irresponsible and uncritical mainstream media coverage has played a role in all this, in the end this has been a fairly marginal factor in why Trump has managed to completely take over the Republican party. The main reason he’s been able to do so is that his message of white grievance politics championed by an authoritarian strongman resonates very powerfully with about 40% to 45% of the voting population, and because of our failing Constitution, that minority is given far more electoral power than it would have in a democracy.

In other words, everyone who dismissed Trump eight years ago when he glided down that gilded escalator — which was almost everyone — did so at least in part because of an understandable unwillingness to consider what the Republican party has actually been in the process of becoming since at least the 1960s. Trump is the logical and perhaps in a sense inevitable culmination of that process.*

*I highly recommend Rick Perlstein’s four historical studies of the beginnings of that process, that trace out in fascinating detail how American culture and politics from the mid-1960s to the early 1980s laid the groundwork for where we are today.