“Behind every image, something has disappeared. And that is the source of its fascination.”
Jean Baudrillard, Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared (p. 32).
According to a New York Times report, “At the midpoint of his term, Mr. Trump has grown more sure of his own judgment and more cut off from anyone else’s than at any point since taking office. He spends ever more time in front of a television…”
During his 2016 campaign, the Donald confessed to developing positions on national security and foreign policy by watching retired generals on the Sunday shows. These days Trump has access to the FBI, CIA and other intelligence organizations — but has repeatedly conveyed that he does not trust them. Hence, he reportedly continues to rely on the media to understand world events, over and above law enforcement officials and intelligence analysts. He recently berated intelligence officials as “naïve” urging them to “go back to school” for contradicting his assessments on North Korea, Russia, Iran and ISIS.
Yet even as Trump neglects his daily intelligence briefs, he thumbs through the print editions of the New York Times, New York Post, Washington Post and Wall Street Journal every morning – while cable news plays in the background. Fox, MSNBC and CNN are reportedly “on” constantly, and typically simultaneously, in whatever room Trump finds himself. The president closely monitors how he is depicted in the media, and is known to be especially eager for positive coverage (and sensitive to negative coverage) – even to the point of proposing that the U.S. should launch a new state-run television network to produce positive stories, since the mainstream media isn’t doing it enough. Many of the President’s statements and positions seem to be direct responses to television news coverage on a given day… or occasionally, stories from his Twitter feed.
Of course, one consequence of Trump’s epistemological diet is that if mainstream media are systematically wrong about something, the President’s thinking would likely be distorted in the same direction. We can see this reality at work with regards to Trump’s commitment to “build the wall.”
Trump’s Popularity Rut
In December, Trump declared he’d be “proud” to shut down the government if Congress didn’t provide sufficient funding for his border wall – vowing to keep it shuttered “as long as it takes” to get a deal. We ended up with the longest government shutdown in history. Yet because he ended the standoff empty-handed, the President has vowed to shut down the government again in February if Democrats refused to offer concessions. Unsatisfied with the agreement that ended up on his desk after negotiations, he has now declared a state of emergency to build a barrier without Congressional approval – and deployed thousands of troops back to the U.S.- Mexico border – to ward off a “virtual invasion” from Mexico.
In the leadup to the 2018 midterm elections Trump also deployed troops to the border after warning of an “invasion” by Central American refugees. His political team ran a campaign ad on the dangers of immigrants that even Fox News viewed as too extreme. Shortly after the midterms, as his administration came under fire for deploying tear gas and pepper spray against asylum seeking migrants, Trump doubled down on his xenophobic talking points to the point where even Ammon Bundy — a noted Trump supporter who led the 2016 armed occupation of the Malheur National Wildlife Refuge — declared, “He’s basically called them all criminals… it’s all fear-based, and it’s frankly based upon selfishness.”
When one’s rhetoric on immigration is so extreme it alienates Fox News and right-wing militiamen, one has truly lost the plot. Indeed, according to a recent report by a Republican polling company, this approach may have cost Republicans the House.
Consider that Trump can claim to have fulfilled many key campaign promises already: the number of unauthorized immigrants living in the U.S. is at the lowest level in a decade; he’s renegotiated NAFTA and is reportedly turning his attention to the TPP; he fulfilled his campaign pledges to withdrew the United States from the Paris Accords, the Iran Deal and the Syrian Civil War. He made diplomatic breakthroughs with North Korea. ISIS has been significantly rolled back. Trump not only passed a travel ban on people from many “terror-prone” (i.e. Muslim majority) countries, it was successfully defended in the Supreme Court. He has already appointed two conservative Supreme Court justices, transformed the lower courts and reversed-course on a number of pivotal cases. His administration has dramatically reshaped government regulations and enforcement. He signed into law the most sweeping criminal justice reform in decades. He passed permanent tax cuts. Despite occasional shocks, the economy continues to hum along — with unemployment near record lows.
Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell recently described the last two years as “by far the best and most productive” of his 32 year political career. It’s not hard to see why. Nonetheless, his party delivered results that were almost precisely the historical average for inaugural midterms – both in terms of seats gained/ lost and the popular vote swing. Trump’s approval rating chronically hovers around the low-to-mid 40s. Why? Because the President continues to alienate white voters:
In 2016, Trump was able to eke out a win, despite getting a smaller share of the white vote than Mitt Romney, due to his relatively strong performance with blacks and Hispanics; exit-polling suggests he won roughly 8% of the former and 29% of the latter. These numbers were virtually unchanged in 2018. In fact, support seems to have ticked up a little with black men (thanks Kanye). However, his party still suffered significant attrition: Most of the votes Republicans lost (and Democrats gained) in 2018 came from suburban, educated, middle to upper-middle class whites. Trump’s rhetoric and actions in the leadup to the midterms seem to have violated their bourgeois sensibilities to the point that many were willing to defect regardless of his ‘accomplishments.’
Misunderstanding Trump Voters
Mainstream media outlets (and a good deal of academic literature, for that matter) consistently assume that because Trump says racist things and won most white voters, he must have won most white voters because he says racist things.
Yet, as I demonstrate in a recent study for The American Sociologist, Trump’s racialized remarks were likely more of a drag on his support among whites than a key to his electoral success. Indeed, political scientist Matthew Grossman revealed that one of the most common negative words associated with Trump by his own supporters was “racist.” Much of the research “proving” Trump’s voters are bigots suffers from prejudicial study design and glaring methodological or inferential errors. For instance, one widely-covered essay alleged that whites voted for Trump out of a sense of “status threat.” Yet the study data actually revealed that, on balance, immigration was a losingissue for Trump: his positioning on this issue made whites 5% more likely to vote for Clinton than they otherwise would have been.
Studies consistently show that educated, relatively well-off whites tend to be more sensitive to racialized language than most other Americans. They tend to be more concerned than most about decorum, civility, and ‘proper’ leadership. Yet the prevailing media narrative is that a plurality of these voters supported Trump because of his lack of decency rather than in spite of it. And Trump seems to be increasingly buying into their caricature of his own supporters and their motives. Jane Coaston recently described the President as campaigning “like a Manhattan liberal parody of a conservative.” Spot on.
The irony, of course, is that most pundits and analysts have never understood how anyone could reasonably vote for Trump. As a result, they consistently underestimated his prospects for victory. They don’t seem to “get” his base, and they never have. Yet despite this reality, and his own regular characterizations of the media as an “enemy of the American people,” Trump nonetheless seems poised to let them lead him off a cliff.
“What comes to mind here is Borges’ fable of the people ostracized and pushed to the other side of the mirror, who are now merely the reflection of the emperor who subjugated them… in the fable these people begin to look less and less like their dominator, and one day they come back through the mirror. This time, says Borges, they will not be defeated.”
Jean Baudrillard, Passwords (pp. 43-4)