Trump-The-Devil versus polity/social/civilisational concerns

The candidate or the social dynamics?

My current prediction—based on the average of the Trump v Harris opinion polls at Real Clear Politics—is that President Trump will win both the popular vote and the Electoral College in the 2024 election. This prediction is not only based on President Trump now effectively tying with Vice-President Harris in the average of polls, but even more on that VP Harris has never polled as well as Secretary Clinton did at the relevant points in the 2016 campaign.

What reading this Substack Note brought out very clearly was how very different this US Presidential election seems to folk on the two sides of a deeply politically polarised polity.

On the VP Harris side, the salient view is some version of “how can you even consider voting for That Man!?” This is usually attached to a whole list of sins and other claims, of varying accuracy. This is the Trump-The-Devil view. The election is all about Trump and how appalling he is, both as a person and as a political figure. Sure there are other issues (e.g. climate change, abortion) but the lead and focus is how awful Trump is.

Source.

To deal with the reality that President Trump has already been President, there is regularly extra focus on his personal Devilness plus various claims about how a second Trump Presidency would be so much worse, for whatever reasons.

Back in the 2016 campaign, it was noted that Trump’s supporters treated what he said seriously but not literally, while his opponents treated his words literally but not seriously. That is, his opponents focused on Trump’s erratic connection to accuracy in his statements but did not take the political pressure points he mobilised anywhere near as seriously. Those were simply ignored and/or dropped into “the bigotry, so ignore” box. Conversely, his supporters were being mobilised by precisely those political pressure points.

The focus on President Trump’s willingness to say things for their rhetorical effect rather than their accuracy loses some of its moral high ground, given how willing President Trump’s opponents have been to make statements about him for rhetorical effect, rather than accuracy.

Sympathy for the Devil

When one looks at those who have ended up supporting President Trump, their focus is typically quite different from the centring on Trump himself you get from the “how could you!?” camp. There are usually aspects of Trump they like—often his humour, what issues he is willing to talk about. There are also often aspects of Trump they are not so keen on, or even dislike.

Their focus is, however, much less on Trump-the-person or Trump-the-candidate, but on a whole lot of other social issues and trends they hope that Trump will be a countervailing force against. One can certainly debate how rational those hopes are, but the underlying concerns are very real.

Perhaps the clearest way to understand support for Trump is to riff off journalist Chris Cuomo’s “hiring Trump to disrupt” comment.

The denizens of the epistemic industries (media, academe, schooling, entertainment, IT) are overwhelmingly progressive in their politics—they typically support the Democrat Party, they provide its activists and increasingly drive its language and agenda. They have also created public discourse dynamics that Trump exploits.

Those dynamics are easy to summarise:

If you object to the surgical and hormonal mutilation and sterilisation of minors — you are a bigot.

If you want to have effective border control — you are a bigot.

If you want effective policing — you are a bigot.

If you want to deport folk who illegally entered — you are an appalling bigot.

If you are concerned about migration interacting with restrictive land use regulation to drive up rents and housing costs and mention the migration aspect — you are are a bigot.

If you think different groups have different patterns of outcomes for any reason other than structural racism or similar — you are a bigot.

If you think migration can be done in a way that imposes more social costs than benefits, or even raise the possibility — you are a bigot.

If you want school students to be educated about the evils of Chinese communism — you are a bigot.

If you are concerned about the inbuilt politics of school curricula — you are a deluded bigot.

If you think the costs and benefits of migration are very unequally distributed across the population — you are a bigot.

If you think positively about the heritage and culture of your country — you are a bigot.

If you are in favour of free speech — you are a pro-harm bigot.

If you think cancel culture is a problem — you are a deluded bigot.

It is quite conspicuous, that as use of prejudice terms in scholarly abstracts soars, the public standing of higher education collapses. For the massive surge in use of prejudice terms—both in academe and the media—does not reflect anything in the real world, it reflects the multiplying use of moral abuse to suppress dissent and the expression of inconvenient concerns. Hence a majority of people in the US tell pollsters they have political views they are afraid to express.

Here is this candidate—Donald Trump—who is prepared to talk about various of these issues in ways that contradict the narrative of a sneering, contemptuous, self-righteously self-serving elite and, oh look, that elite call him a bigot and a horrible, deluded, uniquely dangerous person.

What a shock: folk vote for him to disrupt this elite that they despise and distrust, and that treats them with systematic contempt, while pushing policies profoundly against the interests of those same voters.

That to the “epistemic elite” he is Trump-The-Devil does not detract from Trump’s appeal to such voters. If anything, it increases it.

The “how could you?” trope is another manifestation of the fable of progressive innocence.

Trump-The-Devil is a very useful trope for those who do not want folk to notice, be concerned, or do anything inconvenient about the above issues. It is such a useful trope, that a certain scepticism about its frenetic use is warranted.

Polity fragility

Over 80 per cent of Americans support the use of Voter Photo ID in voting. Yet the Democratic Party is overwhelming against requiring Voter Photo ID in voting. It has even legislated against such in California.

The stated—incredibly patronising—reason for this opposition is that Voter Photo ID discriminates against minority citizens, who apparently have extra difficulty in coping with this requirement that is otherwise ubiquitous in modern society. That this claim is made by the very same people who recently demanded proof of vaccine status before one could go about the ordinary business of life means that what is going on is either a particularly egregious form of virtue-signalling or they want to do something that Voter Photo ID would get in the way of. (Most obviously, having illegal immigrants vote.)

The US has now had two Presidential elections in a row where the loser has attacked the legitimacy of the result. After Donald Trump’s Electoral College victory in 2016, Secretary Clinton and others went on and on about Russian bots, Russian interference and the nonsense of Russiagate. After Joe Biden’s election in 2020, President Trump and supporters went on and on about alleged electoral cheating “stealing” the election.

As Mr Whatifalthist Rudyard Lynch has pointed out, if the loser is going to attack the legitimacy of the results of the election anyway, this increases the temptation to cheat. The Trump-The-Devil rhetoric provides cover to justify cheating. For the more Trump is That Evil, the more actions are justified to stop him.

A clear result on the night would be the best result all round. What we absolutely do not want is another Presidential election where lots of States can count their result on the night, but somehow, key States cannot manage the same.¹ The count not only needs to be honest, it needs to lack reasons to doubt the honesty of the count.

1. In 2016, Donald Trump received 197,245 votes less than the House Republicans. Secretary Clinton received 4.1m votes more than the House Democrats, who had a net gain of 6 seats. The voter turnout for the Presidential election was 60.1%.

In 2020, President Trump received 1.8m more votes than the House Republicans, who had a net gain of 13 seats. Vice-President Biden received 4.2m votes more than the House Democrats, in a high turnout (66.6%) election—the highest turnout since 1900 (73.7%).

I am not claiming the 2020 election was seriously distorted, just that it did not look good when the ability to finish the count on the night was so unevenly distributed across States.