It's Not You, It's Them

There's a new basket of deplorables, but only Trump and Vance are in it.

There have been many responses to the Democrats’ discovery that calling leading Republicans “weird” seems to be unusually potent, but I’d like to focus on one topic this turn of events raises: The relationship between leaders and followers, the individual and the collective he or she is supposed to represent. I was particularly struck by New York Times columnist Tom Friedman’s trip to the fainting couch, in a piece headlined “Democrats Could Regret Calling Trump and His Supporters ‘Weird.’”  

It is now a truism that if Democrats have any hope of carrying key swing states and overcoming Trump’s advantages in the Electoral College, they have to break through to white, working-class, non-college-educated men and women, who, if they have one thing in common, feel denigrated and humiliated by Democratic, liberal, college-educated elites. They hate the people who hate Trump more than they care about any Trump policies. Therefore, the dumbest message Democrats could seize on right now is to further humiliate them as “weird.”

How many thousands of times have we heard this before? Democrats need to show respect to the kind of people who vote for Donald Trump! The only thing missing was the ritual invocation of Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” remark from 2016, which supposedly convinced half of America that Clinton was a condescending elitist shrew who hated them and everything they stand for. 

But no Democrat I’ve heard — not Kamala Harris, not Tim Walz (who is getting credit for initiating the meme-ification of “weird”), and not anybody else — has said that all Trump supporters, let alone all white people who don’t have college degrees, are weird. The attack is being aimed squarely at Trump and JD Vance, with perhaps a few other prominent Republican weirdos thrown in. 

As giddy as liberals may be about the way the “weird” meme is spreading, it’s actually an appeal to the normies in the middle, to say that these specific guys are not like you and have ideas that are disturbing in their implications. Which they do. It also serves to limit Trump’s ability to succeed in one of his key goals, to present himself as a representative of a larger population of people to whom you, Mr. or Ms. Independent Voter, might belong. 

Trump constantly casts his own narcissism and self-inflicted wounds as not his own but something that belongs to the larger universe of people who follow him. “They’re not coming after me. They’re coming after you,” he says whenever talking about his many indictments and lawsuits, despite how personal they are. But who is “you” in that formulation? It’s clearly not all Americans or even all conservatives, but Trump superfans in particular. They seem to have convinced themselves that at any moment, Merrick Garland is going to send jackbooted thugs to break down their door because of that saucy thing they posted on Truth Social. It’s an insane fantasy of martyrdom.

But the effort to create a personal identification and sense of community around a candidate is hardly unique to Trump; for instance, here’s what you’ll see if you go to berniesanders.com:

That was the slogan of both of Sanders’ presidential campaigns, and candidates of all kinds tell voters that they’re one of us, that they’re not just an individual but a representative of a larger inclusive community that you may already be a part of, or if not, that you can join to get that feeling of solidarity.

The difference in what Trump says is not just in the way he’s such a singular individual — he’s not like anyone and is not a product of any community, and never has been — but also in how the identification he seeks to forge is based so much on fear, anger, and the idea of a war he urges people to fight. “We” are united because “they” are coming for us, looking to throw us in jail or ban our religion or destroy the country we love, by turning it into the kind of hellhole “they” live in. 

Reconsidering the “basket of deplorables”

Clinton’s 2016 turn of phrase has become the ur-example of a politician attacking a large portion of the country, a statement supposedly both morally reprehensible and strategically foolhardy. From the way people talk about it, you’d think it was a central theme of Clinton’s campaign that she put in TV ads and pasted on billboards, rather than a single offhand remark at a fundraiser. The condemnation from the news media was swift and vicious, and largely ignored her point, which was that while Trump had won the affection of the worst people in America — irrefutably true, whether or not they made up “half” of his supporters — he was also getting lots of votes from people who had legitimate complaints about the state of the country but might be persuaded to come over and vote for her instead. 

The coverage not only elided that point, but ignored the fact that “Those snooty liberals hate you and everything you stand for” has been a theme of every GOP presidential election for decades, an idea based on stereotyping liberals and encouraging resentment and hatred toward them. The point has always been that voters should hate the Democratic candidate as an individual, but also because they represent a portion of the public you already hate, whether defined by worldview, race, or even geography (yesterday John Kerry was a “Massachusetts liberal,” today Kamala Harris is a “San Francisco liberal”). That appeal is usually cast by reporters as shrewd and justified, not divisive and contemptible. 

Yet despite the protestations of Trump supporters, Democrats aren’t insulting them as a group or saying they’re outside the national community. The “weird” attack is about Trump and Vance as individuals. Maybe that’s why it’s working.

Other things I wrote and said this week

• At Heatmap, I wrote about fights over “preemption,” which usually means red states getting pissed off that their blue cities are passing ordinances on things like protecting workers from heat exposure, so the states pass laws forbidding cities and counties from making their own rules. It’s going to be a key locus of conflict in the coming years on a lot of issues, not just climate.

• At MSNBC, I wrote about the way J.D. Vance’s views on parenting actually reflect a pinched view of citizenship in which we’re all just maximizing our narrow self-interest.

• There’s a new episode of Boundary Issues, the podcast I co-host with my sister Ayelet. We discuss the rebirth of the Democratic campaign and JD Vance’s issues with cat ladies. Have you not subscribed yet? Well what’s wrong with you?