Pearls and Irritations

How do we understand the appeal of Donald Trump to more than 45% of American voters? Here are some reasons why he could win the 2024 presidential election.

Factor 1

First, we live in strange apolitical times in which most people are busy with work and pleasure: from shopping to screen and other entertainment, and other play – eating, gardening and sport.

Many people neither know anything about politics nor care about it.

Populism shapes politics, and it is not just a tabloid term applied to exaggerated linguistic gestures like the repeated Trump/Vance lie about Haitian “illegals” eating pets in Springfield, Ohio.

Factor 2

A second factor is socio-economic and cultural change.

Today, new “cool” inner urban elites bring value changes, including identity and sexuality politics.

Those young elites also gain from the digital economy and the cultural industries, while older and regional workers, semi-skilled and unskilled, face diminishing employment opportunities as much traditional manufacturing goes offshore.

The international pattern of rural and regional, less educated and male voters following populist leaders on the right partly flows from such changes.

This is compounded by contemporary economic pressures, declining real wages since 2008, rising housing markets overtaken by financialisation by investors, and more recent everyday cost pressures.

Factor 3

Half a century of neoliberalism with globalisation has delivered rising inequalities across society, even in times of economic growth.

In the era of dominant oligopolies, rising prices and inflation, and insecure jobs and job loss (after COVID and from AI replacing human beings in jobs) have worsened the contemporary sense of insecurity.

Factor 4

Fourth, there are populist conflicts and resultant scepticism, often unreasonable, about political institutions, politicians, experts, science and other elites.

In politics, the resulting vacuum is often filled in popular dreaming by the desire for a strong leader.

In the populist schema of the people versus the traditional elites, an alternative Big Man Leader becomes their standard bearer.

Now the everyday discontents expressed in populism are politically weaponised by right and extreme right parties and leaders.

The result is spreading political disillusionment accompanied by bitter divides.

The People v the Elites becomes repainted as Virtue v Vice and our Good leader v their Evil principals.

The Trump version takes the Republicans to Project 2025 and evangelical right MAGA extremism.

His opponent, Kamala Harris, is caricatured as both insignificant and incompetent and as a crazy “leftist, Communist and fascist” threat to America.

Leadership traits

How does Trump fit here as a potential leader?

How can a convicted felon, fraudster, habitual liar, racist and misogynist, xenophobe, with a civil conviction for rape, and now on trial for attempted electoral fraud, misappropriation of classified documents, and potential trial for insurrection against the state and constitution have appeal?

Why do people identify with bizarre rhetoric, including the languages of grievance, threat and retribution, including execution, and racist language drawn from Hitler and Mussolini?

Trump’s characteristics, his political persona and psychology, have been described as those of an authoritarian populist and/or a malignant narcissist.

Narcissistic qualities

The psychology at a distance DEL diagnoses begin with the psychiatrists DSM-5 description of Narcissistic Personality Disorder.

NPD is defined as comprising a pervasive pattern of grandiosity (in fantasy or behaviour), a constant need for admiration, and a lack of empathy, beginning by early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts, as indicated by the presence of at least five of the following nine criteria:

• A grandiose sense of self-importance;
• A preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success, power, brilliance, beauty, or ideal love;
• A belief that he or she is special and unique and can only be understood by, or should associate with, other special or high-status people or institutions;
• A need for excessive admiration;
• A sense of entitlement;
• Interpersonally exploitative behaviour;
• A lack of empathy;
• Envy of others or a belief that others are envious of him or her; and
• A demonstration of arrogant and haughty behaviours or attitudes.

Cruel twist

Trump adds several factors, including malevolence and revenge, even beyond his original “You’re Fired!” reality television mantra.

Like professional wrestling, talkback radio and Fox News, great audience appeal comes from his cruelty, mocking and threatening opponents.

Another tendency is projection, accusing his enemies of his own vices: electoral cheating, destroying the US Constitution, lying, naked self-interest and fake news. Trump’s populist and maverick licence for folly and incoherence now extends to crime.

Trump’s appeal to wealthy voters is more conventional. His promise of even more tax cuts to those on higher incomes makes clear economic sense for them.

Tribalism

Trump’s tribalism works at the top levels of the Republican Party. Most Congressional Republicans know his one demand: loyalty, or obeisance from his followers, who ignore his dubious past. The Cult of the Leader rules.

Trump also has significant support in the mid-West rust belt, among working class, non-college educated and older whites, and some poorer blacks and Hispanics.

Journalist Don Lemon [in his MSNBC interview on 17 September] suggests that black men under economic pressure, desiring empowerment, can identify, wishingly, with his agency – bravado, flying around in planes and gold toilets. In other words, identifying with a validation of the American capitalist dream –despite their own economic difficulties.

Trump’s strongest support comes from men. Yet many wives of rust belt workers or unemployed men, identifying with their husbands’ situation, get on board.

How could this happen?

How could this happen given his last presidential term saw only benefits for the rich and no return of industry to the rust belt? Strangely, the disempowered feel emotionally strengthened by associating themselves with the power and simplicity of Trump the performer.

The policy knowledge vacuum is central. Emotions supplant policies in a populist era, along with the disappearance (or rejection) of rational political discourse.

The leader fills that vacuum. Trump, despite the hair and the make-up, comes across as a confident, smiling, very big man, like a large and shining tree, offering solidity and order. In fact, despite being the embodiment of chaos, to his supporters the celebrity demagogue is the ordinary people’s straight-talking hero.

Trump presents as a nativist embodiment of the nation, defending America, adding Christian reference as America’s saviour and playing the victim.

Harris, especially given her family’s Jamaican and Indian origins, is depicted as a threat, an impediment to MAGA, “Making America Great Again”. Given that many of his supporters share his misogyny, that strengthens his chances of victory.

Simple speech

His simple speech (primary school level) and his threats, many close to the performance of his favourite TV program, WWE or World Wrestling Entertainment, somehow strike a chord. It is wrongly perceived as a kind of gut honesty, different from the careful phrasings of his opponents’ “polliespeak”.

Emotions, not policies or justice, explain Trump’s appeal in 2024, despite his damaged history. Like populists in Europe, the emotional hot button issue is immigration, pressed by Trump who uses abusive language and proposes mass deportation of millions of people.

Most progressives in the developed world see Trump, admirer of Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orban and North Korea’s Kim Jong-un, as a laughing stock, a celebrity clown. They also know that Trump, a “dictator for a day”, and longer, is not just a clever performer. He is also a great danger to peace and stability, to democracy worldwide, and to arresting climate change.

Progressives, in America and beyond, recognise one scary possibility: he could win.

Republished from The New Daily of September 22, 2024.