Trump's Two-Track Appeal
Fascism for the base, while the false idea of his "moderation" persists
Author’s note: I’m trying something new with this post: an audio version. You can read it, or listen to me reading it. Let me know in the comments if you find this valuable.
Unless he literally drops dead in the next few months, Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee for president in 2024. No opponent’s clever gambit or ill-considered gaffe will stop him. Even if he slipped into a coma from which his doctors insisted he could not possibly emerge (à la Ariel Sharon), I’m fairly sure he would still garner at least a plurality of the delegates.
Given that fact, you might have thought Trump would be working to expand his appeal, so that he can hold moderate Republicans and win over independents and a few Democrats. It’s not as though his devoted fans are going to abandon him; at this point there is nothing he could say or do that would diminish their devotion.
But instead, Trump has embarked on a kind of fascism road test, previewing new authoritarian policy ideas and violent rhetoric every few days. The condemnation from liberals and a good portion of the news media has not slowed him a bit; if anything, it seems to have encouraged him.
Yet for all you might be alarmed by what he’s been saying, there is still a two-track strategy at work, in which Trump wants to repeat the success he had in the past in convincing a great many people that he’s a “moderate” while assuring the far right that not only does he represent them but he’ll go further than they can hope for. Let’s begin with some of his recent atrocities.
“They’re poisoning the blood of our country,” he said on Saturday, repeating something he has said before, an idea that comes right from Mein Kampf. The immigrants poison our blood, and the domestic enemies are “vermin.” And what do you do with vermin? You exterminate them. That’s why nearly every genocide in human history was preceded by rhetoric characterizing the eventual victims as vermin or insects.
To this Trump is adding a vision of government agents sweeping through every corner of the nation to root out, arrest, and expel undocumented immigrants:
“I will shift massive portions of federal law enforcement to immigration enforcement including parts of the DEA, ATF, FBI and DHS,” he said to cheers on Sunday. “And I will make clear that we must use any and all resources needed to stop the invasion of our country, including moving thousands of troops currently stationed overseas in countries that don’t like us.”
Trump’s advisers are talking about deploying as many as 300,000 American troops — or almost a quarter of all uniformed personnel in the entire US military — to the border. He also said he would “indemnify all police officers” against “being destroyed by the radical left for taking strong actions against crime.” Which sounds like a real proposal because it uses the fancy word “indemnify,” but isn’t; when police are sued or prosecuted for “strong actions” — i.e., abusing or killing people — it’s tried in state courts, and the president can’t “indemnify” anyone against what happens there.
But of course that’s not the point. The point is the fantasy of Trump unleashing soldiers, agents from every law enforcement agency, and local cops to be more violent and even homicidal when dealing with “the radical left” and the racial, ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities it advocates for.
Compared to that, "So much winning you’ll get tired of winning" was small-time stuff. Trump promises so much more this time around: an epic renewal, a new nation birthed in blood and rage. Just imagine the boots kicking down doors, the families cowering in fear as they speak their alien tongues to each other, the roundups, the deportations, the sniveling liberals crying their impotent protests.
But as he feeds this vision of jackbooted thuggery to the base, there’s a counter-narrative about Trump, that when it comes to policy he’s actually always been a moderate, and therefore will be again. Consider this New York Times op-ed titled “The Secret of Trump’s Appeal Isn’t Authoritarianism,” which says that what really brings in the votes is his middle-of-the-road policy agenda. There’s a kernel of truth there, in that Trump did in fact resist some of the least popular parts of the conservative agenda, especially Paul Ryan’s long-held dream of cutting Social Security and Medicare. But that was about as far as the moderation went. The op-ed takes that fact and then turns it into a series of unsupported and even laughable conclusions, like this:
Start with his stance on health care, which defies Democratic and Republican positions alike. When asked in 2015 whether he supported universal health care, he said, “Everybody’s got to be covered” and “The government’s going to pay for it.” In office, he proposed an alternative to Obamacare that conservative congressmen denounced as a “Republican welfare entitlement.” Last month, when he again attacked Obamacare, he emphasized that he didn’t want to “terminate” the program but rather “replace it with much better health care.”
In other words, when Trump off-handedly tossed off utterances like “Everybody’s got to be covered” that he had zero intention of following up on, that was serious and meaningful, but when he actually attempted to repeal the Affordable Care Act — which would have kicked 20 million Americans off their health insurance and thrown the entire health care system into chaos — and came literally one vote shy of succeeding in the Senate (you may remember John McCain’s dramatic thumbs-down), that’s not even worth mentioning when discussing the subject.
Not every argument for Trump’s moderation is that insipid, but the basic claim is one we hear regularly. “Perhaps the most moderate candidate in the GOP field as of this moment is former President Donald Trump,” wrote the National Review’s Rich Lowry earlier this year. But look closely: Beyond the opposition to cutting Social Security and Medicare, the case for Trump’s alleged moderation usually consists of “He said this thing about abortion one time that pro-lifers didn’t like, even though he gave them the entire judiciary” or “He insulted Wall Street bankers while cutting their taxes.”
In other words, it amounts to almost nothing. With Trump, you have to watch both what he says and what he does. And trying to discern in him a coherent ideology — a collection of policy beliefs that grow from a consistent set of principles — is pointless.
That’s one of the problems reporters still have in understanding Trump. People who are immersed in politics have a grasp on what conservatism and liberalism consist of, and are used to placing politicians along a one-dimensional ideological spectrum running from far left to far right. So when faced with a politician like Trump, who is not interested in cutting Social Security but calls his opponents “vermin” and wants to turn the Justice Department into a weapon to use against those who criticize him, at least some of them say, “If you think about it, he’s kinda moderate.” Then they congratulate themselves for their savvy and cleverness in arriving at this bravely counter-intuitive conclusion.
Whether Trump is strategic enough to be planning for this eventuality, it may be that the news media will eventually tire of pointing out that he is offering fascism in all but name, then move on to reporting the general election as nothing but a horse race, with extra points given to Trump for the deftness of his populist appeal. But don’t be fooled. In no way that matters is Trump a moderate, and believing he might be will only serve to downplay the radical threat he poses.
You give the reporters far too much credit.
There are probably very few jobs where the hiring decisions are as corrupt and oppressive as in prestige journalism. Those without both-sides brain worms need not apply.
Following mainstream news sources should at best be treated like an exhausting side hustle/act of good citizenship. The management generally consists of shameless monsters who would do the world a great service if they became ditchdiggers instead. It may be a bit They Live to say this... good.
Don't let the bread and circuses of a morally vacant and flagrantly hypocritical media environment inform your view of reality. As the previous commenter was alluding to, things are as bad as Nixon's "compassionate conservatism" while running as the anti-war candidate. Same as it ever was.
Paul, as good as it is to hear your voice, I much prefer to read than to listen. I retain more information and usually, I can read faster to myself than someone can read aloud. With that out of the way, you make great points here.
I think Trump being called a moderate by a couple of pundits and editorials stems from this perverse need some pundits and editorial writers have for a Republican party to be the party of sober adulthood. Never mind that it's never been true, at least not in the last 50 or 60 years. It's sort of the way the GOP's given the automatic benefit of the doubt when it comes to fiscal policy -- they're automatically assumed to be better with economic matters, even though there's no evidence to support that. Republican talking points and lingo get adopted (think "entitlements" or "pro-life") nearly the same way. It's almost as if to acknowledge the depraved dysfunction of the GOP would be to admit that the US is a floundering empire in decline, and that's a bridge too far. The United States doesn't work very well as a country anymore, anyone with any sense knows that, but to say that is like saying Voldemort's name.