Hillary Clinton had a thousand reasons to be upset by the 2016 presidential election. Her book, What Happened, lists them all. In Chapter 16 (helpfully entitled Why), Clinton lays out her reasons in 120 well-crafted paragraphs. FBI director James Comey is her star performer, far outdistancing Vladimir Putin & Co. Clinton also acknowledges her own shortcomings as a candidate and recounts other popular explanations for the election’s outcome – angry blue-collar workers in the Midwest, a disorganized Democratic Party, fear of immigrants swarming the southern border, etc.1 What Happened is a conflicted book, as Clinton tries to explain “how sixty-two million people – many of whom agreed Trump was unfit for the job – could vote for a man so manifestly unqualified to be President.”2
Feeling conflicted is surely an appropriate emotion when one wins a popularity contest by 2.9 million votes but gets only 43 percent of the Electoral College’s delegates. But it is not the former secretary of state and U.S. senator we find seething in What Happened; it is the left-brained Wellesley College political science major. How, Mrs. Clinton asks, could she have lost to a man who bragged “about repeated sexual assault,” who attacked “immigrants, Muslims, Mexican Americans, prisoners of war, [and] people with disabilities,” who was “accused of scamming countless small businesses, contractors, students, and seniors,” and who took advantage of the media’s silly fascination with her emails?3 Armed though she is with a raft of statistical, demographic, and sociological facts about the election, Clinton concludes her book where she began – mystified by the sheer illogicality of the 2016 campaign.
Hillary Clinton has written an honest, if incomplete, account of one of the most tortured elections in American history. But two things are missing in her story: (1) what Donald Trump said during the campaign and (2) why people listened to him. When quoting Trump (a rare occurrence), Clinton features his misogyny and bombast and, when describing Trump voters, she showcases their irredeemable biases, but she mostly ignores the campaign’s rhetorical and emotional dynamics. In doing so, Mrs. Clinton reflects mainstream media coverage as well.
I take a different approach in this book although I share Clinton’s question: How could 62 million Americans – half the nation (or at least half of those who voted) – vote for Donald Trump? But rather than focus on what the media calls “Trump’s base,” I seek a broader, cultural understanding of the American polity and of those who support the Trump presidency.
To do so, I examine a large swath of materials – campaign speeches, press conferences, media interviews, letters to the editor, open-ended polls, political news coverage, person-on-the-street interviews, Trump’s tweets, and citizens’ reactions to social media. Throughout the book, I will offer alternative explanations for the Trump phenomenon. To do so, I will take political language seriously, placing special faith in word patterns that go unnoticed by the casual observer and even by seasoned White House reporters. Crass though he can be, Trump’s language shows a surprising cultural awareness. We need to learn what his gut tells him.
What Happened is a homunculus for the Clinton campaign itself. In both cases, voters’ feelings, especially their inchoate feelings, are rarely discussed. To be fair, Mrs. Clinton claims throughout her book that she enjoyed chance meetings with her fellow citizens, but the effects of those encounters seem to fade into the mist for her. As a result, What Happened is a brittle book, written by a consummately intelligent and well-intentioned person who does not relate easily to ordinary people. In that way and more she provides a sharp contrast to her husband, he of the legendary interpersonal skills. Hillary Clinton is all cognition – briefing papers, polling reports, policy options, and the sociology of the fifth Congressional district.
Although What Happened frequently mentions Mr. Trump’s bigoted fans, it fails to explain why a retired high school teacher married to a Methodist choir director in Omaha would vote for him. I shall attempt that feat here. In the chapters to follow, I explore four primary emotions that drove many voters into the Trump camp, emotions that continued to hold sway four years later. For example, Donald Trump knew that many Americans felt ignored so he acknowledged them with an accessible, populist style. He knew that some folks felt trapped and he uplifted them via emotion-filled storytelling. Others of his constituents felt besieged – by elites, especially by the media – so he offered them public therapy by becoming an alternative news source for them. Mr. Trump also sensed that many Americans were weary of the political establishment so he used his distinct personality and a barrage of tweets to energize them. The Trump presidency cannot be understood, I shall argue, without understanding this comingling of words and emotions.
Before getting into such details, let us reflect on the questions posed by the 2016 presidential race. Was it the worst political contest in history or did it do what all good campaigns do – activate the citizenry? Was the emergence of Donald Trump a mere fluke or did it provide broad hints about where the nation was heading? What made Trump so different from other politicians and, pivotally, why does he continue to stir up such intense emotions among his fellow citizens? And what about his supporters? Where had such people been hiding in the past and why did they suddenly emerge – full-throated and unrelenting? The 2016 presidential campaign and its aftermath are indeed mysterious.
A Useful Campaign?
“Friends stopped talking to one another. Husbands and wives broke up. Parent groups at schools frayed as people looked anew at neighbors and said ‘I thought I knew you.’”4 According to many, the 2016 presidential campaign was horrific. Columnist Leonard Pitts, Jr., explains why: “Donald Trump is a lying, narcissistic, manifestly incompetent child man who is as dumb as a sack of mackerel.”5 “This is a fundamental rewriting of the map,” said CNN’s John King on election night,6 and the pollsters, it seems, were to blame: “It’s a debacle on the order of Dewey defeats Truman,” opined the University of Virginia’s Larry Sabato.7 “A lot of people feel more emboldened – because someone like Trump is in the White House – to speak their minds on topics that formerly had been taboo,” observed secessionist Michael Hill.8 “People feel it is not their country anymore,” noted the University of Georgia’s Cas Mudde and, “to a certain extent, it is not their country anymore.”9 “I don’t care what [Trump] says, you’re attacking Muslims here,” declared Iowan Steventjie Hasna, “and that’s not American at all. We stand for American values and that’s the exact opposite of what he stands for.”10
The post-campaign rhetoric ranged from the heartfelt to the histrionic. A sense of urgency filled the air and broad, cultural questions emerged: What did the campaign say about us? Who is an American, really? Will the center hold? The country’s very essence, its comprehensiveness, seemed at stake:
“In my opinion, unless the country gets back together, things just can’t work the way they should” (Queen Jones, retired teacher’s assistant, Mount Pleasant, North Carolina).11
“The most troubling outcome could be our willingness to retreat deeper into self-interested and self-idolizing divisions that pay little attention to our ‘other’ neighbors” (Thabiti Anyabwile, church planter, Washington, DC).12
“The results of the 2016 elections bring to mind the words of abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, who once condemned the slaveholder-dominated American government as ‘a covenant with death and an agreement with hell’” (Manisha Sinha, college professor, Storrs, Connecticut).13
Eight years earlier, things were different; the country had validated its birthright. One might have expected former secretary of state Colin Powell to be upbeat about that election (“The world wondered, can America really do this? Aren’t they too divided? Can they really pull something like this off? And we said to the world, yes, we can, and we did”), but a broader sense of coherence also existed.14 If the United States was on the brink of collapse in 2016, the nation had found its storied self eight years earlier. Everyone, it seemed, felt the change:
“[Barack Obama’s] campaign of hope and change really stuck with folks, and you see it in the designs that are being fed back. It’s as if folks are already nostalgic about this time” (Amy Maniatis, marketing executive, San Francisco, California).15
“The inauguration represents a tangible example of the American spirit, testimony to the indisputable fact that our nation is the greatest on earth” (Patrick Gendron, attorney, Bryan, Texas).16
‘‘I really didn’t think the country was ready for an African-American president, but they fooled me, for which I’m glad. We have really come a long way’’ (Merlin Bragg, administrative assistant, Linden, New Jersey).17
Two different elections, two different countries? To be sure, many Americans felt uneasy when Barack Obama became president in 2008 but the 2016 campaign seemed different, as if half the citizenry had suddenly emerged full-form and crazed, demanding that their nation be returned to them. These denizens of the dark – racists, sexists, homophobes, nationalists – seemed constituents of a nation reinvented.
The reality, of course, is that Donald Trump won the presidency in a squeaker. A few more miners in western Pennsylvania, a few more industrial workers in Michigan, and the United States would have had its first female president. That, too, would have been heralded as apocalyptic by some, the full-flowering of the American planting by others. As Washington Post columnist Robert Pierre observed, “Whether Donald Trump is impeached or serves out a full term or two, what happens with our nation depends more on how we deal with one another in our divided nation. Barack Obama is who we are. Donald Trump is who we are.”18
Americans have always cast a furtive eye on one another. Fourth of July celebrations try to paper over that fact but the 9/11 tragedy, and the church bombings, and the Nazis marching remind us it is true. If, as Walt Whitman said, we as individuals contain multitudes, things are far more complicated at the level of the nation-state: Religious freedom as long as it is Christian. Public disclosure accepted, a prying press denounced. Patriotism yes, socialism no, unless the latter includes health coverage. Refuge for the world’s oppressed … as long as they stand in line.
Donald Trump stirred up all these contrarieties. He was an iconoclast who worshipped Wall Street, a renegade who lived in Trump Tower, an evangelist who never went to church. Trump was a Democrat at times, a Republican more often, but a fellow devoid of political discipline. He had the attention span of a gnat and no moral depth, but he appealed to seniors hooked on Fox News. Trump promised to drain the swamp but he dined with lobbyists. He wanted the unions to rebuild the roads even as he made the Supreme Court more ideological. Multitudes met their match in Donald Trump.
In many ways, though, the 2016 presidential campaign was fairly normal. Two establishment figures squared off, tempers were lost, outrageous statements made, and then it was over. All U.S. elections involve such soul-searching because identity is such a malleable thing in a nation housing roughly 330 million people, each with a short fuse. So Americans conduct a fresh introspection every four years: Truman populism, Nixon globalism, Carter moralizing, Reagan nationalism, Clinton progressivism, Bush belligerence, Trump protectionism. All these changes invited controversy.
But wasn’t the 2016 presidential election especially dispiriting? Judged by conventional standards, perhaps so. In their book Evaluating Campaign Quality, Sandy Maisel, Darrell West, and Brett Clinton lay out a number of sensible criteria for judging a campaign’s worth: Did it focus on fundamental issues? Did voters know what was going on? Was the discourse civil? Did the campaign inspire greater trust in government officials? Did the media referee the contest appropriately?19
Judged by these standards, the 2016 campaign did not measure up well. As ABC and the Washington Post reported in August of 2016, candidates Clinton and Trump were considered the most disliked candidates in the thirty years the poll had been conducted.20 Each day, it seemed, a new low was reported in the press.
But as will be stressed throughout this book, the 2016 campaign is far too complicated – and far too important – to be dismissed easily. In many ways, it was a fine contest, especially when assessed via these standards:
Did the campaign expand communication networks? Harry Truman’s train trek in 1948; televising of the national conventions in 1952; live presidential debates in 1960; fresh political ads in 1972; satellite uplinks in 1980; digital canvasing in 2008.
Did the campaign foster partisan rumination? The Goldwater revolution of 1964; the McCarthy and Perot challenges in 1968 and 1992; the emergence of “new Democrats” in 1992; “Reagan’s third term” in 1988.
Did the campaign inspire serious moral interrogation? Vietnam and civil rights in 1968; the Watergate purgation of 1976; women’s rights in 1984; the Willie Horton ads of 1988; sexual impropriety in 1996.
Did the campaign expand the leadership pool? An Army general in 1952; a movie actor in 1980; an African-American preacher in 1984; a businessman in 1992; a female governor in 2008; a Mormon in 2012.
Did the campaign enfranchise new voters? The Catholic voting bloc in 1960; McGovern’s youth brigade in 1972; evangelical Republicans in 1980; African-American turnout in 2008.
Did the campaign widen the policy agenda? The Soviet threat in 1956; the space race in 1960; the War on Poverty in 1964; Soviet decline in 1984; Middle East adventurism in 2000; national healthcare in 2008.
Did the campaign foster international rapprochement? The possibility of the United Nations in 1944; postwar reconstruction in 1952; China and Nixon in 1972; the potential for Middle East accords in 1976; the prospect of NAFTA in 1992.
Did the campaign increase economic stability? Strong post-election years: 1965, 1969, 1989, 1997, 2005; weak post-election years: 1949, 1957, 1981, 1993, 2001, 2009.
When examined via these criteria, the 2016 campaign looks rather good. For example, new ways of engaging the citizenry were found – cable channels got their share of the debates; stand-alone news sites (e.g., Politico, the Drudge Report, HuffPost) had some bite; vigorous social media outlets brought new consumers into the mix. In addition, partisan rumination starkly increased for both political parties, as Trump vanquished fifteen other Republicans and as Bernie Sanders gave Hillary Clinton a run for her money. Moral interrogation unquestionably took center stage for Republicans (Trump’s treatment of women, the biases of “fake news,” Russian interference in the election, the savaging of immigrants) and for Democrats (Benghazi, Hillary’s emails, “baskets of deplorables,” and the reemergence of Bill Clinton’s liaisons).
The talent pool obviously expanded in 2016, as the first woman ever nominated by a major political party took on a corporate-titan-turned-TV-star. New voters were found in the Rust Belt by Republicans and in Texas and Georgia by Democrats, and new battleground states emerged (Virginia, Nevada, Colorado, West Virginia, and North Carolina). The campaign also brought old-but-new debates out into the open – healthcare, immigration, global trade, tax reform – but the campaign failed miserably when it came to furthering international rapprochement (largely because of Mr. Trump, a trend he continued once in office). In the economic short term, at least, GDP growth, unemployment levels, and the Dow all sent positive signals during 2017 and 2018.
In many ways, then, the 2016 campaign served the needs of democracy and did so surprisingly well. The women who marched wearing pink hats on January 21, 2017, the day after Donald Trump’s inauguration, would have been otherwise occupied if Hillary Clinton had become president. Similarly, blue-collar workers who had been downsized and ostracized would not have turned out to vote unless Donald Trump had given them hope. As former White House advisor Eric Liu reports, the 2016 campaign triggered a “systemic immune response in the body politic, producing a surge in engagement among” Trump opponents.21 Indeed, says Shaun Harper, then of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Race and Equity in Education, one might even express a “painful gratitude” for Donald Trump’s ability to galvanize a Democratic counter-force in 2018 and 2020 headed by young people, African-Americans, Hispanics, and other marginalized groups; the “gift of Trump,” says Harper, has the capacity to change American politics for years to come.22 Agreeing, columnist E. J. Dionne observes, “it’s hard to imagine a president more likely to inspire Obama Nostalgia than Donald Trump.”23
In short, the 2016 presidential election had considerable vitality. It inspired populist Republicans to rally against their establishment overseers and insurgent Democrats to question (via Bernie Sanders) their party’s ideological homogeneity.24 Presidential campaigns almost always energize the electorate, and the 2016 race was no exception. As this book was being written, most Americans were angry at something – at the President’s detractors, at the aimlessness of the Democratic Party, at one of the cable news channels. These kinds of anger are the very stuff out of which democratic engagement has long been fashioned.
A Native Son?
Try as she might, Hillary Clinton rarely made it “above the fold” in the morning newspapers in 2016. That spot was almost always reserved for Donald Trump. This book asks why. What was it about Trump that so commanded the press’s attention? Why did Candidate Clinton spend so much time attacking him personally rather than following her own game plan? Why were the elite media unable to resist his provocations and what does that say about current-day journalism? Trump’s irresistibility, his insouciance, shed light on what ails the American people but also what exalts them. Although Donald Trump seems the least mysterious political candidate in human history, he tells a story far richer than himself.
Rhetorically speaking, there have been at least four types of American presidential candidate: (1) Charismatics, optimists who wandered onto the political scene largely unbidden (e.g., Eisenhower, Kennedy, Reagan, Bill Clinton, and Obama); Designees, establishment figures who worked their way through the system until it was their turn (Dewey, Stevenson, Nixon, Dole, Bush 43, McCain, etc.); Legatees, those who carried the torch of a popular predecessor (Truman, Johnson, Ford, Gore, Bush 41, etc.); and Contrarians, people who swam against the tide simply because they chose to do so (Goldwater, Wallace, McGovern, Carter, and Trump). Contrarians are the most interesting of the species because of their internal tensions: They want to control things by deconstructing things. They pose solutions to unclear problems but are fully in touch with their inner selves. Contrarians also want to command people’s votes rather than solicit them and that, too, makes them interesting.
Some contrarians have a good sense of what ordinary people feel, and nobody was better at that than Donald Trump. Trump hates complexity and is filled with opinions, always in a hurry, and constantly ready for a fight – quintessentially American characteristics. Trump dislikes subtle distinctions, layered questions, or anything that circumscribes his personal freedom. Most Americans hate these things as well. Trump resents the landed gentry so he loves Twitter; Trump cannot abide fecklessness so he loves Twitter; Trump prizes spontaneity so he loves Twitter. The result: There is an obscene familiarity to Donald Trump, an inveigling invitation to better know ourselves by knowing him.
Despite his wealth, Trump is more plebeian than patrician. One has little trouble imagining him at tractor pulls or hot-dog-eating contests. During the campaign, Trump’s wantonness attracted voters as did his braggadocio: “I’m speaking with myself, number one, because I have a very good brain and I’ve said a lot of things.”25 “If you do not get even,” he once opined, “you are just a shmuck.”26 Trump is famously transactional – what can I get? what will it cost me? – and, like so many of his fellow citizens, is clumsily transactional. Trump likes neither poetry nor art (unless it is expensive), neither fine food nor fine music. He is more comfortable with opinions (especially his own) than with facts (especially those of others). He finds it hard to “rise above things” because doing so elevates him to an airy, undependable space. In these ways and more, Donald Trump is an American.
Many commentators disagree. Throughout the media and across the body politic, Trump is constantly exoticized. It has become popular to deem him a foreigner, dramatizing how he violates the conventions of logic, science, grammar, propriety, honesty, sociability, law, and morality, the same conventions most Americans violate each day. According to some observers, Trump exemplifies every human flaw, every personality tic:
Trump is an example of how one man can ruin a country.27
Trump is an example of someone who believes “the world began when I showed up.”28
Trump is an example of the wrong kind of assimilation.29
Trump is an example of a traumatized child who refuses help.30
Trump is an example of the stupid psychopath problem.31
Trump is an example of an extreme narcissist.32
Trump is an example of democratic extremism.33
Trump is an example of an underlying caldron of hate making its way to the surface like a festering boil.34
Mixed metaphors aside, distancing oneself from Donald Trump has become a popular game as has infantilizing him (e.g., the “Angry Baby” balloon that stalked him throughout his visit to London in the summer of 2018). The more accurate charge, though, is that he is more an adolescent than a baby. Trump’s moodiness, for example, often makes him an object of scorn. Like many adolescents, he has fears he cannot admit (his differential popularity, for example) and his opinions are often undermined by the surrounding facts. Like so many adolescents, Trump needs love but cannot admit it, feels tortured by bullies (e.g., the press), and resents established authorities (e.g., Congress, European leaders, etc.). Trump’s emotions are raw, like those of any adolescent, and he lashes out in febrile ways. His speech is disconnected, filled with self-interruptions, and his thoughts disappear as soon as they appear. It is hard to be an adolescent and it is hard to be Donald Trump.
My argument in this book is that Donald Trump is one of us and ought not be dismissed as a cultural alien. Trump emanated from the land of reality television, for example, and that would be sinful if it were not for the fact that 52 percent of the American people watch such shows.35 Trump has no sense of history, no aesthetic taste, and no moral complexity, sins committed from time to time by everyone we know. If Donald Trump was summoned from the gates of hell, then, he was summoned by us, I argue. And if Trump left the scene tomorrow, we would still have to sort out the us within him. To really understand the United States of America, we must make Donald Trump a question.
On February 27, 2017, Kellyanne Conway found herself kneeling on a couch in the Oval Office with her shoes pressed against the upholstery, distractedly scrolling through her smartphone as President Trump stood chatting with some thirty dignitaries from the nation’s historically Black colleges. A photo of the scene went viral, a sure sign that something cultural was afoot. How dare Ms. Conway show such disrespect in the White House’s sanctum sanctorum, taking a load off her feet, getting lost in social media, and acting as if she were just a person? Surely Ms. Conway – and her boss – had descended from some distant planet.
Donald Trump, with his oversized personality and legion insensitivities, makes it easy to dismiss him as an extraterrestrial. To do so, however, is to miss an opportunity to know how 62 million Americans helped him get where he got. Few would argue that Donald Trump is the best of the United States, but his grandiosity and shamelessness find him firmly rooted in the pugilistic, impatient culture that raised him. We need to know more about such matters.
A Responsible Electorate?
Most of the commentary about Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign featured the candidate himself rather than his supporters. This book reverses that polarity. Instead of focusing on Trump-the-man, I feature Trump-the-empath, the fellow who turned emotional needs into votes. But a book entitled Trump and Us immediately prompts the question: Which us are you talking about? It inspires other questions as well: How could so many people vote for a serial adulterer-cum-New York hustler? Post-election, why did half of us find it so hard to be civil to the other half of us? Why did the campaign open up new wounds between men and women, Blacks and whites, churched and unchurched, documented and undocumented, young and old? Why did they put Trump in office? How could they have done that to us?
Using the first-person plural in the United States has always been problematic since few Americans identify with all Americans. “He’s not my president,” went the refrain in December of 2016, as if there were an alternative to that proposition. Donald Trump no doubt exacerbated the nation’s tensions but he did not invent them. That deed was accomplished long ago by the American people themselves.
Pigeonholing Trump supporters has become a popular pastime in the United States. The characterizations have ranged from the benign (Trumpers are naïve, childlike) to the calamitous (Trumpers are xenophobic, unable to cope with their rapidly changing neighborhoods). Trumpers are said to be resentful of the “New Class” that emerged in the postwar United States, a class with more education, more wealth, and greater comfort with new technologies than their working-class brethren.36 For yet others, Trumpers are outright totalitarians, protective of their station in life above all else. Trumpers are anti-Muslim, anti-media, anti-change, antediluvian. Voting for Donald Trump costs one one’s humanity.
“People were scared to say they were voting for him” said Scottsdale hairstylist Audrey Katz. “They think ‘Oh, so you must be a racist,’ and that isn’t true or fair.”37 “Virtually all of my friends or colleagues actively hate Mr. Trump,” said Professor Philip Maymin, an academic with a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago. “We learn to stay quiet,” he added.38 “The greatest con of 2016 was not persuading a white laborer to vote for a nasty billionaire with soft hands,” says author Sarah Smarsh. “It was persuading a watchdog press to cast every working-class American in the same mold.”39 Lifelong Republican Esther Valdés describes the “backhanded commentary” she received, “with the suggestion that I’m somehow disloyal to my race or to my profession.” “It’s never hurtful,” she adds, somewhat unconvincingly, “because it’s completely untruthful.”40
There is a certain efficiency in presuming that all Trump admirers are either delusional or evil, but that seems preposterous given the breadth and depth of his support. As we will see throughout this book, Trump was successful because he listened to people who felt unheard. He also knew four things about them:
1. Trump supporters like candor. “Every time Trump opens his mouth it helps him,” said veteran Anthony Holston. “I like that he’s got balls and he’s willing to take a chance. Not taking a chance hasn’t worked too well.”41 “He’s a mouthy New Yorker,” says Lenny Massumino of West Virginia, “and if you know anybody from New York, they all got a line of bullshit. That’s the way they are.”42 “He grew up in the construction business and went to military school,” said Billy Shreve of Frederick, Maryland; describing underdeveloped nations as shithole countries is “just common language. The snowflakes aren’t used to it.”43 “In true Trump style,” said former Boeing engineer Brad Pontious, “he spoke what he felt about Charlottesville. It might not be the political thing to say, but he was correct.”44 These commentators know that being frank has its downsides but that the truth sometimes demands it. A parent with an unruly child or a boss with an unresponsive subordinate accepts the costs of delivering unwanted news. But real candor is hard to find in politics so, as a result, it can become a craving for some. Donald Trump understood that.
2. Trump supporters distinguish words from actions. “Trump is arrogant and crass, I’ll give you that,” says former coal miner John Beatty, and “women don’t like him much, other than the ones that sleep with him. I won’t call him a bigot, but he’s not too far from it. But I believe the way he thinks can do what has to be done.”45 “I have disrespect for Hillary for not doing more for herself, not standing up for herself with him,” opines Palma Frable of Moscow, Pennsylvania, “that’s more damaging than goofball words Trump came up with.”46 Such a sharp distinction between language and action drives elite reporters crazy but Trump’s supporters hold firm: “The fact that Donald Trump is very blunt about it,” says online contributor Carlos Rodriguez, “is not a surprise, this is just Trump being Trump.”47 Echoing poet Maya Angelou, Eric Johnson of Woodstock, Georgia, waxes philosophical: “People will always forget about what you say, forget what you do, but never forget how you make them feel.” Johnson then goes all-out in defense of the President: “We said we needed a bulldog, someone who’s going to fight for us, and he’s our hired hand. It’s kind of messy. He might make a mistake and hit the wrong person but I know he doesn’t intend harm.”48
3. Trump supporters are as self-reflexive as anyone else. “I’m guilty,” says John Lusz of Milwaukee, “I employ illegals. Pay them cash. It’s tough when it’s there. I feel very guilty about it.” But then Mr. Lusz makes a Trumpian Turn: “It’s just wrong. They don’t pay in, but they want the stuff. Collecting social services with a cash-hustle on the side. They should learn English.”49 “I don’t care if you’re gay or any of that stuff,” remarks Kris Wyrick of California. “I don’t care if you’re black, brown, yellow. I don’t give a fuck. Just make your own money.”50 When first hearing about Mr. Trump’s comments on Haiti, Danny Eapen of Oklahoma said he was “a bit skeptical” but then acknowledged “if it’s true, then it’s true. But at the same time, I would like to give him the benefit of the doubt.”51 “I still support my president,” said Los Angeles’ Angie Galvez, but he “should have more filters because he represents the United States.” “We want him to look more professional,” she concluded.52 For Trump’s opponents, this kind of double-thinking is maddening, especially when human dignity is at stake, but Trump’s supporters have a ready retort: “The politically correct movement has no sense of humor. They cannot understand that the average person can see humor even in horrible things.”53 A Shakespearean thought, that.
4. Trump supporters understand political dynamics. A popular trope during the 2016 election was that Trump’s supporters were either uninformed or incapable of reason. The established media were fans of that trope and often its progenitors: “If the media got together and wrote a script for Trump to read,” said one Trumpian, “they would complain later that he was sending a different message because of his body language.”54 Said another online contributor: “President Trump could disavow all groups that promote racism [and] the media would still clutch their pearls and complain that wasn’t good enough.”55 “Any Christian that watches CNN and the rest of the ilk,” says a third observer, “are committing the sin of lust. They can’t get enough of the Trump bashing.”56 These people see the landscape whole and many of them are rational actors, carefully weighing what they get with Donald Trump: “I’m hoping that he’s as conservative as he says he is. He used to be liberal on a lot of things. That’s life. Over the years, I’ve changed my mind about a lot of things. If I held the same viewpoints I did when I was younger, I’d be living in Colorado right now, rolling one fat one after another.”57
We need to make questions out of Trump’s supporters: Who are they? Why do they respond as they do? What explains their loyalty to the President? Trump voters may be imperfect but they hold fast to certain presuppositions: Truth is more important than propriety, the media are blind, people pick the facts they like, politicians can’t be trusted, things aren’t as simple as they seem, one must keep the Big Picture in mind. There is a bit of shamanism here but a bit of lay science as well.
Many Americans cannot understand how anyone could have voted for a dishonorable fellow like Donald Trump. But as Richard Dimery of Leander, Texas, observed, “In the Bible, prophets were generally despised but God had a purpose for them.”58 Trump did not assume, says Londa Chandler, that “because we’re not all college professors we’re worthless.” Knowing she was swimming against the tide, Chandler nonetheless continued: Everybody but Trump “seemed to have this attitude that if you weren’t part of the elite you didn’t matter, and that whether you have a degree, a good job, raised wonderful families, you were worthless.”59 Sharon Ross adds another note: “You know exactly what [Trump’s] thinking. You don’t have to wonder what’s going on.”60 Mr. Dimery, Ms. Chandler, and Ms. Ross somehow felt special because of Donald Trump. We need to know why they felt that way.
Conclusion
In a recent study of online commentary, Nicholas Subtirelu reports an interesting thing about Trump supporters: They are willing to work through Trump’s words to find his true intentions.61 That is a powerful gratuity. If Trump’s remarks are off-kilter, or even deeply offensive, it can be seen as a verbal accident, not a sign of malevolence. Instead of calling Trump’s supporters blind, then, we might call them doubly visioned – they look into his soul and then beyond to the future, excusing the linguistic middle. “It’s like if someone tells a joke,” says Florida’s Wayne Lebnitsky, “one person might take it one way while someone else might take it another way. A lot of the things that are reported about him, whether bad or terrible, are probably taken out of context.”62 Here, intertextuality becomes an excuse but human psychology is available as well: “We need to keep our butts at home,” says Ed Wiley of Coal Creek, West Virginia, and “stay out of these wars. That’s the sort of thing you’d have to watch out with him – if he can keep himself calm, [maintain] control of his bipolar.”63
It is tiring to be a Trump supporter. All of popular culture, much of media culture as well, repudiates everything the President says. That sends many of his supporters into their shells or into moments of Fox News-watching or into conspiratorial conversations with like-minded friends. Emotions felt, emotions expressed, emotions denied.
Things are no easier for Trump haters. A simple question such as “What did He say today?” sends his detractors to their liquor cabinets. While anti-Trumpers can depend on late-night television to buoy up their spirits, doing so depends on two things: a taste for unbridled cynicism (which can itself be depressing) and a willingness to stay up past one’s bedtime. For all Americans, then, the 2016 presidential campaign was, and continues to be, a nightmare.
Although this book focuses heavily on Donald Trump, he is not the only card in the nation’s deck. Structural racism, institutional sexism, and a carnivorous right-wing media preceded him and continue to have their own, independent influence. Too, study after study shows declining political trust in the United States (trust in leaders, trust in fellow voters), trends from which Mr. Trump profited during the campaign.64 He also aligned himself with a political party containing an increasing number of hard-bitten crusaders, many of whom rejected the bouquet of freedoms fashioned in the 1960s and 1970s and then institutionalized in the 1980s and 1990s. Donald Trump is very much the product of the country’s recent political history.
For reasons such as these, it is tempting (a temptation to which many authors have succumbed) to treat Donald Trump as an outcropping of larger sociological and political tendencies – growing nationalism throughout the Western world, a renewed, testosteronal populism in the United States. Superb historical work has been done in this area, work showing a broad (and broadening) disenchantment of the white working class with all aspects of traditional democratic politics.65 The mass media have played up such trends, trends often buoyed up only by randomly distributed and aggressively collected anecdotes. Perhaps there is more to Trump than Trump but it is too early to tell if that is true. As a result, I shall stick to what we can know for sure, focusing on the rhetorical facts available to us and leaving it to others to find the grand design to which Donald Trump is subordinate.
Instead of focusing on ideological matters, then, I will treat Trump as an emotional revolutionary, a person (1) who is proud of the feelings coursing within him, (2) who is unafraid to display them in public, (3) who treats his supporters’ feelings with special reverence, and (4) who regards an unemotional politics as no politics at all. Trump is especially comfortable with real emotionality, including its herky-jerky repetitiveness, its bodily eccentricities, its aimlessness but also its earnestness. Trump feels what his supporters feel but, unlike them, he can attach words to those feelings. He says what some people say only in private and, for other Americans, he speaks their unspoken voice.
By focusing on Trump’s emotions, I treat him not as an alien but as an American original. Trump may not be the best of us but he is one of us and we need to know what that means. We also need to know more about his supporters because they are emotionally complex and because they too are Americans. Toggling back and forth between what Trump says and how he is received gets us beyond the story of one election. It tells us who we are as a people and why US politics has become so clamorous. Within such self-understanding, I argue, virtue lies.
