The importance of Trump’s fake moderation

I’ve seen some cynical “never thought the leopards would eat MY face” reaction to Emily Davies’s report about a young Biden-Trump voter who got fired by president Elon. I even share it to some degree. But I also think this is more useful and nuanced reporting than is sometimes the case in this genre and reveals some real dilemmas:

Besides, motherhood was her most pressing concern. Cooper, 24, and her husband were trying to get pregnant, but the doctor said that IVF might be their best chance. Trump had promised to make it free. That is what she thought about in the voting booth.

Now she was staring at her phone, learning that probationary workers in the Forest Service were the next to be fired by his administration. Cooperwould likely be one of them, her union head told her.

Her eyes watered. She knew it wasn’t personal. Every day brought new rumors of cuts, and her performance evaluation from last fall found her “fully successful” — the highest possible score. She reminded herself that she had done everything right: graduated college with a 3.5 GPA, finished her first semester of work toward a master’s degreein forestry with a 4.0, rescued two dogs and two cats from the local shelter, chosen a man who held her on the shower floor when she found out she had endometriosis, a condition that can lead to infertility, and told her, “It’s okay, there is more than one way to be a parent.”

She thought about the Facebook posts she had seen a few days earlier.

“It’s February 3,” her grandmother posted, “and we’re going in the right direction.”

“Any government employee who is afraid of transparency,” wrote the man who taught her AP government class in high school, “is a criminal!”

Cooperknew the people in her life meant well, but she wanted her future to be different from theirs. She had grown up watching her family struggle as her mother lost one job, then another, then another. She was justa few months shy of her graduate degree and close to a promotion that could nearly double her salary. Even $50,000 or $60,000 a year, she thought, could helpget her a house a few counties over, with better schools.

[…]

She also believed him when he said that Project 2025, the conservative blueprint for the next Republican administration that suggested mass cuts to the federal workforce, was not his plan.

So Cooper filled in the bubble next to his name, thinking of the daughter she wanted. She planned to name her Charlotte.

A couple points:

• I think the best way of thinking about this is Trump’s lies providing a permission structure for a cross-pressured voter in a heavily Republican community.
• The idea that Trump is a terrible candidate who should have been easy to beat is just wrong. He certainly has many negatives, but he is also very shrewd about knowing when to distance himself from party orthodoxy, and his cult-like hold on the party means that he can do so without significant intraparty pushback.
• While it’s impossible to prove a counterfactual like this, I personally am very confident that if Trump doesn’t lie about his positions on IVF, abortion, and Project 2025, Kamala Harris would be president today, and I think this story shows how it works.

Should these marginal voters have known he was lying? I suppose. But personally I’m much more inclined to blame all of the well-compensated reporters who repeated Trump’s lies at face value or with “brilliant gambit, sir” horse race meta-coverage:

How could that Trump voter have believed electing him would make IVF free? She must've been into fringey alternative media, maybe saw it from some influencer, professional media outlets would never oh no.

[image or embed]— Nicholas Grossman (@nicholasgrossman.bsky.social) February 27, 2025 at 9:22 AM

I don’t know how Democrats can deal with Republican candidates telling lies about their radical views with little impunity, but it’s definitely a problem the party needs to think about. I understand the impulse to attack voters like this as gullible or naive but we still have to figure out how to get their votes.