“I alone can fix it” doesn’t work unless you can get massive buy-in to the idea that it’s terribly broken.
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It was like getting bad news from your oncologist. The dreadful numbers — 52 and 42 — seemed to indicate a deadly metastasis, worse than any prognosis we’d previously been given. Our democracy had 15 months to live.
The shocking news came in the form of an ABC News/Washington Post poll that, among registered voters, showed Donald Trump — whose stated plans for a second term are outright incompatible with the democracy we have long taken for granted — beating Joe Biden in next year’s election by that suddenly gaping double-digit margin — 52 to 42.
The poll came in for immediate criticism: It was an “outlier,” a radical departure from the recent polling consensus that the election was essentially a dead heat. Trump’s sudden surge might be attributable to various methodological quirks, including the order in which the poll’s questions were asked.
The placement of the “Who would you vote for?” question near the end of the survey — an approach defended by the ABC/WaPo pollster, Langer Research Associates, as appropriate to surveys this far in advance of an election — meant that respondents to that “money” question might be influenced by their previous (negative) answers to a series of other questions, such as on Biden’s handling of the economy. Question order biasing is a known effect, though rarely one of such magnitude.
There certainly were no obvious “organic” reasons for such a dramatic lurch in Trump’s direction, no economic disaster (yet — though the MAGA/GOP, at Trump’s urging, is doing its level best to shut down the government and gin one up), no White House scandals (though the Hunter Biden indictment is being flogged by MAGA media for all it’s worth), and certainly no “total exoneration” for Trump on any of the battery of criminal and civil charges he’s facing.
Just an ever deeper plunge into his personal acid bath of derision and division, threat and invective. Seemingly everyone who opposes or rules against him — from special counsel Jack Smith to Judge Arthur Engoron — is “deranged,” and retiring Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, among others, is deserving of execution. Hard to square all that with a sudden surge in the polls.
Indeed, even the Post itself cast doubt upon the poll’s results and faced withering criticism from pollsters and pundits alike for deciding to go forward with publishing the suspect poll.
It’s the old fascist/authoritarian playbook: Sow division, distrust, resentment, fear, rage, and an overwhelming sense that nothing is working the way it should, and then present yourself as the alternative, the backlit savior-with-the-simple-solutions (never spelled out) who will deliver us from this hellscape, which you have ginned up.
So perhaps, like Mark Twain’s, our democracy’s obituary is premature. But while we await more polls, new numbers, a possible reprieve, we are compelled — even if we take the ABC/WaPo numbers with a shaker of salt; even if we go with something closer to the prior consensus of a dead heat, bearing in mind that the vagaries of the Electoral College are such that a popular vote dead heat translates into an easy Trump win — to ask just what the hell is going on in America such that this election is even competitive.
I’m going to propose a very simple, and very dark, answer to that question:
Donald Trump f**ked up our politics and our country, and now Trump is as popular as he is because so many see our politics and country as f**ked up.
I can’t prove it, of course, but just take in everything you can observe about the national political scene and trajectory and ask yourself whether this thesis doesn’t make ineluctable intuitive sense.
It’s the old fascist/authoritarian playbook: Sow division, distrust, resentment, fear, rage, and an overwhelming sense that nothing is working the way it should, and then present yourself as the alternative, the backlit savior-with-the-simple-solutions (never spelled out) who will deliver us from this hellscape — which you have ginned up.
“I alone can fix it” doesn’t work unless you can get massive buy-in to the idea that it’s terribly broken.
So your campaign must be relentless.
Nothing is legitimate — from the election to the Department of Justice and the FBI, to DAs and judges and the judicial system, to the media, to the rule of law itself.
Everyone is corrupt, weak, deranged, treasonous.
Discourse itself is degraded — the way we all talk to, think about, and feel toward one another.
The joys of resentment, contempt, and hatred are fertilized and cultivated like hothouse flowers.
The times must feel dark, chaotic, disorienting. There must be, in the collective imagination, American carnage.
That’s the set-up for the punchline and Trump, were he doing standup, would be killing it.
Because, whether we’re looking at the 52 percent in the suspect ABC/WaPo poll or the 46 percent in a recent dead-heat NBC poll, Trump’s projected constituency extends well beyond the 25 to 30 percent that is the consensus ceiling of his hard-core MAGA cult, well beyond even the single-source info zombies who swallow whole everything they hear on Fox “News.”
In essence, Trump seems to have won over 1 out of every 3 of his voters from somewhere outside the MAGA bubble, somewhere closer to the rational center, including independent voters and a surprising, if not shocking, number of younger voters and voters of color.
This startling success is transpiring in spite of — or is it, in some cases, because of? — his multiple criminal indictments on 91 felony counts; his blatant strategy of delay of judicial process; his steady stream of legal defeats; his increasingly vicious and dangerous rantings against opponents (Did you know that Joe Biden was a “wretched old vulture trying to finish off his prey?”), prosecutors, judges, legislators, military personnel, journalists; his spewing of lie after bald-faced lie; and the continuing exposure of his frauds, sexual predation, and corrupt, if not outright psychopathic, behavior.
What Trump has done is to collect the stray rays of dark energy, stoke them, amplify them many fold, and converge them into a political beam of enormous destructive force.
And also in spite of the fact that, whatever ills may beset the American economy, they pale in comparison with the economic travails of our global allies and competitors alike — whether the UK, Germany, China, or most other developed and developing countries.
And in spite of the fact that, as president, Biden has managed a post-pandemic recovery that has avoided the expected plunge into recession, while battling, throughout 2023, a far-right-controlled House bent on economic and political sabotage.
It can certainly be argued that Trump is not solely responsible for the dark national mood of which he is the beneficiary. Inflation — as experienced by ordinary Americans at the store, the pump (where the Trump-backing Saudis are making their play to swing the election by cutting supply), the doctor’s office, and when paying the monthly bills — is concrete in the way that gauzy unemployment statistics are not. So too are the spiked interest and mortgage rates that can make home and vehicular ownership problematic, if not impossible.
These and other cyclical factors, most of which we’ve navigated before, are genuine sources of insecurity and anxiety. Indeed one can go further and — as Astra Taylor, recently interviewed by Molly Fischer for The New Yorker, contends — indict capitalism itself as “an insecurity-producing machine.”
And, as many have noted, social media plays a major role in ratcheting up stress and insecurity, especially among the young.
But one can also imagine a very different passage for our country through these “interesting times” — a Trumpless passage far less doused in fear and rage, one more graceful, hopeful, and even appreciative.
What Trump has done is to collect the stray rays of dark energy, stoke them, amplify them many fold, and converge them into a political beam of enormous destructive force. It takes great energy to make a laser, a death ray, strong enough to blow apart even well-fortified and reinforced structures: the Constitution, an enduring democratic tradition, the rule of law, common decency, coexistence.
Trump has been gathering that dark energy since his birther days, since Obama made the fatal mistake of poking fun at him at the annual White House Correspondents Dinner in 2011. It started, as all cancers do, small.
There is a dynamic that seems to govern both aggressive cancers and those who would be demigods. Abhorring equilibrium, they can only accelerate or intensify, inexorably, toward their dark apotheosis. Lies beget yet bigger lies, repressions and the resistance they provoke call forth yet more dire and brutal repressions.
We witnessed it with Adolf Hitler and we’re witnessing it now with Donald Trump. His trajectory is set; he cannot stop. Whether he will be stopped — before reaching full critical mass, before destroying everything he must destroy to save himself and his tortured psyche — is very much up in the air.
There is much we cannot yet know, and that undercurrent of existential uncertainty, which seems to permeate the very air we breathe, looks as if it will only grow over the next year-plus.
What we do know is that, as long as Trump holds enough Americans in a hypnotic trance to have a realistic, if not excellent, chance of returning to the White House, the entire MAGA/GOP army will be his to command. It will, at every turn, condone, cheer on, and amplify his lies, his taunts, his threats, his calls for violence.
Which, of course, will only further advance the proposition that democracy is broken and only a strongman — Trump — can fix it. In this way, the breaking of America and the death of its democracy may be a self-fulfilling prophecy.
There’s no sugarcoating the ugliness and the danger of this moment. But there remains so much that we can do — before we reach for our volume of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross — to alter this deadly trajectory, to intercede with history. I’ll quote myself here, because it bears repeating:
“Talk, write, tweet, fund, volunteer, organize, vote.”
Jonathan D. Simon is a senior editor at WhoWhatWhy and author of CODE RED: Computerized Elections and the War on American Democracy.
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