After nearly a month of the president ruling by force rather than persuasion, you can still find pundits who believe that the Democrats, if they are going to save the republic, must be more than anti-Trump.
They have to be for something, not just against it.
It’s like these pundits have not been reading, or reading carefully enough, stories about Trump voters and what they say they believe.
If these pundits did read such stories with clear scrutiny, rather than slack-jawed benefit-of-the-doubt, they might ask themselves, as I have: How do you reason with people who are politically insane?
Consider this piece published today, in which the Wall Street Journal “followed up with nearly two dozen of Trump’s supporters and discovered a divergence: Some expressed regrets or concerns, while many were gleeful over his early actions to shake up Washington.”
The Journalquoted five. I’ll comment on three.
Staci White
This 49-year-old Omaha, Nebraska, resident voted for Donald Trump, because, she said, she “wanted lower prices and to stop fentanyl from coming into the US.” By “safer borders,” she said she had believed Trump meant “‘let’s stop the drugs from coming into the country.’”
“I didn’t know he was going to start raiding places,” she said.
“Now I’m like: ‘Dang, why didn’t I just pick Kamala?’”
Things like this give Democratic strategists false hope. It tells them that their Democratic clients have an opening. Such voters don’t like how far Trump is going, and because they don’t like it, they might consider voting for a Democratic candidate the next time around.
Anything’s possible, I suppose, but this woman is deluding herself.
That’s clear from her own words.
The Journal said Staci White “didn’t believe [Trump] would actually follow through on some of the more hard-line policies he touted during the campaign.” Understood is that among those policies was the rounding up and deporting of tens of millions of “illegal” immigrants.
She said she didn’t know Immigration and Customs Enforcement would be raiding business, churches, schools and public spaces. But that’s not true. She knew. She said she knew. She just didn’t believe it.
I say “delusional,” but a more charitable way of putting it is that she’s badly misinformed. That’s another thing you can tell from reading the piece carefully – that she’s highly attuned to rightwing media, which made a fetish of fentanyl being smuggled over the southern border.
The main role of the rightwing media is telling viewers that they don’t see in Trump’s word and deed what they actually see. In other words – “Don’t trust your lying eyes.” So it’s not a stretch for her to say that she didn’t believe the “more hard-line policies [Trump] touted,” because the rightwing media that she consumes told her not to believe them.
Delusional or misinformed, either is a bad basis for strategy. Strategies require trust in voters being capable of determining on their own what’s good for them. This voter is clearly not capable. She says she should have voted for Kamala Harris. Why would anyone believe that?
Todd Winant
Articles like this also reveal the frightening paradox of democracy: the American people are the ultimate sovereigns of our political system, but the American people also don’t understand much about politics.
What they do understand, and the Wall Street Journal piece makes this clear, is the fiction that’s created by the media they consume. And that fiction promises to make everything seem just fine, even when it isn’t.
Case in point is this 64-year-old “holistic coach” from Cornville, Arizona. Todd Winant told the Journal he had been a supporter of Robert F Kennedy Jr’s independent presidential campaign, but moved over to Trump, and is now “thrilled.” As evidence, he cited talks to “end the war in Ukraine,” Trump’s “immigration crackdown” and his “decision to put Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard, a former Democratic congresswoman now the country’s intelligence chief, in his cabinet.”
“My whole nervous system relaxed,” Winant said.
That’s the kind of thing you might expect a voter to say when he does not see anything wrong with RFK Jr’s insane vaccine conspiracies, including that they cause autism, or that mandates for them are tantamount to the Holocaust, and who does not see anything wrong with Gabbard’s sympathies for tyrannical governments like Russia’s.
To him, conspiracy theories are not conspiracy theories.
They are “the truth.”
Democracy depends on an informed citizenry, but the last election showed the citizenry can be made to believe pretty much anything.
The big tell that Winant does not think for himself, indeed, is so immersed in rightwing media that, for him, fact and fiction are now indistinguishable, was this: He said that Trump has “done more in less than a month than most presidents have done in their whole term.”
This is worship for the god-emperor, straight from the mouth of Sean Hannity or some other prime-time pundit, and a desire to overlook anything, no matter how evil – like the fact that planes are falling out of the sky due to Trump’s aggression toward air-traffic controllers.
In addition to declaring himself America’s savior; ruling by decree; starving institutions; encouraging violence and hate; replacing the rule of law with a spoils system; censoring a free press; and defying the courts, Trump is greasing the skids toward autocracy by corrupting the federal bureaucracy, replacing merit-based hires with cronies.
And the planes are falling.
That’s jim-dandy, I suppose, given that Trump has “done more in less than a month than most presidents have done in their whole term.”
Emily Anderson
Like Staci White, this 30-year-old resident of Duluth, Minnesota, told the Journal that she deeply regretted her vote for Donald Trump. Like Winant, she had been a supporter of RFK Jr’s brief indie campaign. She said she believes that Kennedy, as the new secretary of health and human services, is the best thing to happen since Trump took office.
Otherwise, she said, she is “horrified by Trump’s focus on deportations and use of Guantánamo Bay to hold migrants. She alleged that Trump has been too focused on ‘ridiculous’ flashy moves, such as banning paper straws and renaming the Gulf of Mexico the ‘Gulf of America.’ Her daughter’s occupational therapist has stopped taking new patients over fears that the practice will have its federal funding dry up.”
“I feel so stupid, guilty, regretful — embarrassed is a huge one. I am absolutely embarrassed that I voted for Trump,” Anderson said.
Again, this is catnip to Democratic strategists who might think a voter like this is gettable. But, again, such statements boil down to trust. Anderson said she feels “stupid, guilty, regretful — embarrassed,” because she’s “horrified by Trump’s focus on deportations” and by his “‘ridiculous’ flashy moves.” This, after saying that she was drawn to Kennedy’s campaign and its “focus on getting toxins out of food.”
First, this is Trump we’re talking about. He made it clear during the campaign that he was going to focus on deportations. Indeed, he made deportations the solution to every one of America’s problems. Second, and again, this is Trump. He’s nothing but “‘ridiculous’ flashy moves.”
Then there’s the big tell: “getting toxins out of food.”
Our food industry has a lot of problems, and there are many legitimate complaints, but even the harshest critic is not going to call bad things like high fructose corn syrup a “toxin.” That’s conspiracy theory, again.
Which brings us back to the beginning: this is a voter who is so mired in conspiracy-laden rightwing media, the kind that makes an insane anti-vaxxer like Kennedy into some sort of countercultural hero, that we should doubt whether a voter like this can really hear anything that the Democrats are saying if what they are saying is based in reality.
Anyone who tells you that all the Democrats need to do is modulate their policies in order to position themselves ideally with moderate voters does not, or will not, acknowledge and recognize the very deep and deeply unsettling irrationality that is destabilizing the republic.
How do you reason with people who are politically insane?
I don’t know.