The Trump Show

One thing that I’ve heard a lot of lately is the assertion that 47%, give or take, of the voting public is in the process of voting for Donald Trump for president right now because 47% of the voting public is made up of terrible people: people who are voting for Trump because he’s a racist and misogynist and nativist and authoritarian with fascistic tendencies. I’ve even heard it claimed that men vote for Trump because they too want to have sex with a porn star when their wife is home with a newborn baby, and get away with it, as well as getting away with all the other criming and grifting. These are bad people: bad hombres as Trump would put it.

I don’t think this is a very accurate description of what’s going on. Yes a lot of Trump’s support is definitely a product of racism and misogyny and nativism and a love for or at least tolerance of authoritarianism, and some people do vote for Trump because he’s a parody of a wrestling heel who gets away with everything.

But . . . just asserting that half the nation is made up of “bad people” is way too simplistic. Trump obviously has strong appeal for tens of millions of people beyond the Fuck Your Feelings types, and I’ll confess I’ve struggled with the question of why, since I find him so viscerally repulsive. Yes I know the fact that people like me find him so utterly disgusting is a big part of his appeal to the MAGA base. But Trump’s appeal has to go way beyond that base, because it makes up only part, and maybe not even a majority, of the people who vote for him.

Here’s a transcript of Trump’s Latino Town Hall on Univision last night. This is a completely characteristic passage, in response to a question about what he’s going to do about inflation:

Well, thank you very much. Look, this is a problem caused by this administration. Four years ago, you had no inflation. Now you have record-setting inflation. What they’ve done to this country is incredible in so many different ways, incredibly bad. We have people complaining about groceries, about prices, about rent, about everything. Interest rates went from 2% to 10% and you can’t get the money. You want to buy a house. You can’t buy a house anymore. You can’t do anything.

(03:57)
But the biggest thing I hear about is just what you said, groceries, the food. So we didn’t have inflation. We had a great situation for everything, for virtually everything. When they came in, they spent and they also blew my energy policies up. So we had inexpensive energy. Now you have the most expensive thing on the list is energy. That is such a big category that it leads to everything. Everything else follows.

(04:23)
Everything follows energy. We have more liquid gold under our feet than anybody else. There’s no other country that has liquid gold like we do. That’s oil and gas. We’re going to bring your energy costs down, and with your energy costs, everything is going to come down. We’re going to also make jobs available so you can afford, literally much easier. We’re going to have many more jobs that we have right now.

(04:45)
We set a record. We had the greatest economy in the history of our country. Now we have a lousy economy primarily because of inflation. So we’re going to get rid of the inflation. We’re going to drill, baby, drill. I’m going to get your energy costs down by 50%, 5-0, 50%, over the course of 12 months, which will be easy to do because we have more energy than Saudi Arabia. We have more energy than Russia, anybody.

This of course is just a bunch of outrageous lies, utterly unconnected to reality. Inflation is currently much lower than the postwar historical average (2.4% YOY). Interest rates on 30-year mortgages are in the high sixes, while having been around four and half percent for most of Trump’s presidency, before crashing during the pandemic. The US is currently extracting more oil and natural gas out of its territory than at any previous point in the nation’s history.

But the thing is, Trump is a really good liar of a certain well-known type. That type is the totally sleazy salesman who just tells the audience exactly what it wants to hear, with zero regard for the truth. This is the liar as bullshitter, to invoke the famous Frankfurtian distinction: Trump is the kind of liar who is totally unconcerned about whether what he’s saying is true or not, which in a strict analytical sense makes him not exactly a liar, since a liar has to care enough about the truth to violate it. Trump just doesn’t care, at all. He’s totally unconstrained by standards of veracity, plausibility, logical consistency, basic human decency, or anything else.

And you know what? A lot of people like that. They really do. They like being lied to in this way because some of them are too stupid to realize that’s what’s happening, but more of them, I suspect, just don’t care that they’re being lied to, because they just want someone to tell them what they want to hear.

I mean in an extremely perverse way there’s a certain charm to it, which helps explain why Trump can get away with what he does. People like being lied to, especially by someone who lies in such an outrageous way that on some level it’s entertaining. And that’s what Trump is all about: politics as entertaining schtick. (Now being manifested as the politics of dancing).

There’s a lot of evil in America, like any other country, but there’s also a breathtaking amount of stupidity and laziness and, closely related, a hunger to be entertained by a Really Big Show, no matter how ridiculous that show might be from the perspective of logic and empiricism and our old and increasingly alienated friend, basic human decency.

I’m not denying that underneath all that there be monsters: fascistic passions and loyalties taking advantage of all the racism and sexism and nativism which characterizes our past and our present, and will be with us in the Keynesian long run no doubt. But I’m trying to describe the essence of something else that’s happening here, although what it is ain’t exactly clear.

Here we are now; entertain us.