So, Trump won in Iowa and New Hampshire. We knew he would. Much of the corporate press relentlessly urged the narrative that their latest favorite long shot, Nikki Haley, was “surging” and would show impressive gains versus Le Grande Orange (my apologies to Rusty Staub). It didn’t happen. She didn’t even finish second in Iowa. The truth is that Trump’s followers are more committed to him than ever. As countless commenters have noted, the more the Left, the corporate media, the Deep State oppose him, the stronger he gets. That’s because his followers instinctively distrust them and with good reason.
But, and I’ve been guilty of this myself, the idea that Trump’s unshakeable following is all about issues or the “Swamp” misses the mark. In fact, presidential politics is seldom if ever just about issues. It’s also about personality, positioning and messaging. And that’s where Trump trumps the others.
After all, who was Vivek Ramaswamy but a younger, smarter, more articulate, more successful in business, more honest Trump? From the start, his pitch was exactly that, but his candidacy never achieved lift-off. He polled 7% in Iowa and then quit. So why didn’t Trump stalwarts jump to him?
Because they like Trump and they don’t much like him. But again, why?
To answer that, I’ll go back 36+ years to the contest between Michael Dukakis and George H.W. Bush.
At the time, Joan Didion was on the Dukakis campaign plane and, in her wonderful book, Political Fictions, she recounted an event thereon. The plane landed at the San Jose, California airport and everyone disembarked onto the tarmac, Dukakis and his press secretary equipped, oddly enough, with baseball mitts and a ball which they proceeded to chuck back and forth for a short time closely attended by some 40 reporters. They then returned to the plane.
The point of the exercise was to have Dukakis depicted by the attendant reporters and photographers as a “regular guy,” you know, like your neighbor, the type who hangs out on airport tarmacs in Brooks Brothers slacks, a necktie and wingtips and tosses a ball around with a buddy, similarly attired. Right, him.
But, amusing as it was, the patent absurdity of the skit was not Didion’s point. Her far more observant and important one was what the “candidate tossing ball” shtick and its reporting by the campaign press demonstrated.
What we had in the tarmac arrival with ball tossing, then, was an understanding: a repeated moment witnessed by many people, all of whom believed it to be a setup and yet most of whom believed that only an outsider, only someone too “naïve” to know the rules of the game, would so describe it.
This was a campaign event, like many others, that took place, in Didion’s words, “only in order to be reported.” Presidential campaigns are a stage set whose purpose is the creation and dissemination of a narrative that may or may not have much to do with reality. In 1988, it was “Dukakis, regular guy” vs. “George H.W. Bush, tough Texan,” i.e., each narrative bearing roughly the same relation to reality that cotton candy bears to food.
Crucially, campaign reporters know this and go along with it. Didion’s compatriots knew the baseball shtick was farce, but dutifully played it as serious and, because they did and because the campaign knew they would, showed themselves to be insiders, those in the know. On the inside were Dukakis, his team and the reporters; on the outside was everyone else, the chumps, the uncool kids, not in on the joke, aka, you and me. Didion titled her essay “Insider Baseball.”
Trump’s great genius and his great sin (depending on your point of view) is that he exactly inverts the relationships Dukakis used and took for granted. With Trump, it’s the campaign reporters who are the outsiders and everyone else who’s on the plane, enjoying the ride. Trump has long held up the press to much-deserved disdain, advancing the narrative that he and his millions of followers are on one side, the inside, and the press are out in the cold somewhere. Naturally, the scribes play into his hands. Videos of Trump speeches usually include both his jibes at the press and “optics” of reporters sitting in stony silence, forced to listen, the butt of the joke, deferring their revenge.
It’s good theater and accomplishes its goal – to make his supporters feel like part of the team, in on the joke, the latter being literally true. In this podcast, journalists Matt Taibbi and Walter Kirn make the salient point that much of Trump’s act is in fact comedy – Trump pretending mid-speech that he can’t, like Biden, find the exit from the stage – that the MAGA crowd instinctively gets while the press fumes.
And of course there’s nothing like a common enemy to galvanize exactly that sense of togetherness (“We happy few, we band of brothers!”) and the press couldn’t have been more accommodating over the last seven years in playing the villain. As night follows day, they treated Trump’s routine about not being able to find the exit, not as the comedy it was, but as fact – see, Trump’s mentally incompetent too! Of course they did, as he knew they would.
While his politics strongly appeal to his followers, his messaging is sometimes pure genius. It is the very heart and soul of populism.
This article originally appeared at The Word of Damocles.
