Trump Can Still Win

Don't Kid Yourself

I’ve got a bad feeling. And it’s getting worse: Trump is gonna win. I don’t know for certain and this could just be a case of the heebie-jeebies, but I think I have a few actual reasons to worry.—

For one thing, the race remains extremely close. For all of Trump’s weaknesses and liabilities, Kamala Harris has not run away with it. It looked like after the convention and then the debate she might bury him, but nope, he’s still hanging around. And when he’s this close, the votes at the margins, the “undecideds,” the “low information” voters, become a factor. Are they turned off by the terrible, dark rhetoric about migrant invasions and Haitians eating pets or do they kinda like it? I think they might like it.

A few weeks ago, Tim Walz’s “weird” attack on the G.O.P. seemed right on the money: “Yeah, you know what, they are weird—Vance is a fucking freak, Trump is something of out a carnival! I’m not scared of those creeps!” It’s a circus. But people go to the circus. The problem is America is weird, too. A long time ago—way before Walz, I’m keen to note—I identified Trump’s approach to elections as the “any weird constituency strategy.” Basically, there are tons of people who feel left out of mainstream America, condescended to, put down. Trump doesn’t think much of them either, but he gives them the time of day. Republicans traditionally fended off the fringes to appeal to the center, like when McCain shot down suggestions that Obama was an “Arab.” Trump doesn’t do that. He says, “Sure, why not.” Then he gets a few thousands more voters here and there. After years of being cast aside they feel important and recognized. Antivaxxers, people who believe in chemtrails, crypto freaks, gold bugs, people who believe there are reptilians in charge of the government, people who want to homeschool their kids, etc., now they are on the bandwagon. In a piece from last year, entitled “Everyone in America is Totally Insane,” I wrote this:

[Trump] cobbled together a coalition of the wacky and weird. But being weird in America is kind of normal. It’s a very weird place. A lot of Americans belong to cults or odd religious sects, practice alternative medicine, participate in strange fandoms, wild fads, and peculiar enthusiasms. And with the decline of mass culture and the fragmentation of society, subcultures are now culture.

The problem with “weird” as an idea is that it relies on the belief in an old consensus, a shared reality that kind of doesn’t exist. Back in 1992 (sorry), H.W. Bush huffily announced that he didn’t want to “weird talk shows.” His son W. famously said of Trump’s inaugural speech that it was “some weird shit.” For better or worse, the old WASP world those figures represented is gone. The cacophony of the TV talk show era looks quaint and staid compared to the proliferation of bizarre voices today. There’s not much of a shared rationality anymore. People don’t read the same papers, or even watch the same shows, they are consuming homegrown content from other lunatics. Or feeding of A.I.-generated slop. And the structure of feeling of much that content is Gothic, lurid, and dark—it is confused and often sounds psychotic. They see the devil everywhere, just never exactly where he is. People will tell you that they’ve seen a video of Biden molesting children, which of course doesn’t exist, but Trump’s own perverse comments (and sexual assaults) do not faze them. Anything right out there isn’t real, only what is hidden is true.

Look at this situation with P. Diddy. the allegations and evidence are horrific, but they’ve been largely revealed. But the internet is awash with people looking for secret signs that he was actually a pedophile and homosexual. There’s the obvious misogyny here—it seems like crimes against women are never enough—but there’s also a strange urge to just never take anything at face value. There’s also something else going on. You could show people evidence of a crime and they will tell you immediately that that’s not the real crime. Trump flourishes in this environment where nothing and everything is true. He speaks the brain-dead language of low-trust. And that’s the language a lot of the country speaks.

We are accustomed still to thinking of the country as its post-War self, dominated by mass media, mass politics, the mass movement, the struggle for political and cultural hegemony, that is to say, the struggle over the definition of common sense and what is “normal.” Prime Time. Must See TV. The water cooler. That’s all gone now. We should think of the United States today as being more like the country Gilbert Seldes portrays in his classic on 1800s America, The Stammering Century, where he documents not a unified nation, but a patchwork of small movements lead by “fanatics, and radicals and mountebanks,” a country of “diet-faddists and the dealers in mail-order Personality; the play censors and the Fundamentalists; the free-lovers and eugenists; the cranks and possibly the saints…Sects, cults, manias, movements, fads, religious excitements…” Trump knows how to reach those people. Democrats today, much less so. Maybe they shouldn’t even try. I certainly think pandering to that tendency in American culture isn’t good. But maybe that’s not a tendency in American culture at all: it just is American culture.