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Why Trump’s narrative resonates with so many Americans despite the facts and dangerous rhetoric

4 Nov 2024

Tight races are not new in US elections, but this one feels peculiarly tight because even though facts and decency suggest that it should have been a mismatch, America is being seduced by its worst self.

Dear former first lady Michelle Obama,

You asked the question that millions outside the US have been asking for weeks, if not months: Why can’t America see former president Donald Trump for who he is – a congenital liar, a narcissist, a fascist, and a demagogue?

At a campaign rally in Michigan on 26 October 2024, you criticised those holding Democratic candidate Kamala Harris to a higher standard than they have held Donald Trump despite his four chaotic years as president and his even more crooked lifestyle, long before that.

“I’ve got to ask myself,” you said, “why on Earth is the race even close?” There are a few possible answers.

Crucify immigrants

Trump and his campaign have been telling conservative Americans precisely what they want to hear: that their problems have been caused mainly by immigrants stealing their jobs.

And that under Joe Biden’s presidency, during which his deputy, Harris, has been the “border tsar”, illegal immigration has worsened to the point where a floating sea of immigrants from Puerto Rico now threatens to submerge their country. They must take their country back.

He has been telling them that their country, once the beacon of exceptionalism, has been captured by the Deep State pursuing the vindictive and narrow agenda of a few. Trump has been telling Americans that fundamental values, such as freedom of expression and public trust, are under threat. Big media, he says, has been hijacked and can no longer be trusted as arbiters of the public good.

Socialism redux and victimhood

That’s not all. Trump is telling Americans that they’re currently in danger of something worse than the nanny state. Socialism and Marxism are in resurgence, and a country known for hard work, individualism, and limited state intervention is at risk of being overrun by the modern-day cousins of the Red Army.

In case they don’t believe him, Trump is telling Americans to look at his own life, his travails, as a living example of deep-state victimhood. He has been framed, lied about, prosecuted, persecuted and shot at for nothing other than mortal fear that he might indeed be the one to make America great again.

And if they don’t believe him, they can look at their own lives. In his classic Trumpian way, he has reminded them that they were better off under him, with less inflation and more money in their pockets for groceries. He even said on Tuesday that the stock market was rallying on the expectation of his victory.

It’s a woke country

Trump is telling Americans — at least the conservatives — that a wave of wokeism and postmodernism on sexual orientation and preferences has seized America, driving it down a depraved slope where gender pronouns mean nothing any more. This is the kind of thing that many evangelicals can’t say publicly but are pleased to hear amplified by Trump and his campaign.

Trump has also been discussing America’s place in the world. He has been saying the world was far more peaceful before Biden, that the war between Russia and Ukraine and the war in the Middle East, which has become a meat grinder, were enabled by weak US leadership, as epitomised by the disorderly and humiliating US withdrawal from Afghanistan.

You might argue, dear former first lady, that Americans should know better and that the facts, for voters who care, contradict Trump on almost every count.

Killing facts

For example, there’s hardly any evidence for the anti-immigrant rhetoric of job stealing. According to a Brookings Senior Fellow Vanda Felbab-Brown, “the impact of immigrant labour on the wages of native-born workers is low… undocumented workers often work the unpleasant, back-breaking jobs that native-born workers are not willing to do”.

Though Biden said three years ago that Harris was the most qualified to lead the administration’s efforts to manage the border with Mexico, she was never a “border tsar”, as Trump has successfully branded her. It was another Trump lie. But all is fair in politics as in war.

Is the Deep State after Trump, making his life a misery for leading the Salvation Army? This claim of a deep-state offensive is at least four years old. It started with claims in 2020 that the “Deep State” was slow-walking vaccine treatment for Covid-19 so that he could lose re-election.

Scapegoating as art

Then, when he lost, he blamed the Deep State for rigging him out and has doubled down on his anti-Deep State rhetoric since, blaming everyone from civil servants in Washington to the FBI and the State Department for all his self-inflicted legal problems.

Dear former first lady, the race is tight because voters won’t have facts for dinner. The facts show that inflation, worsened by post-Covid-19 supply chain problems, is cooling, but voters feel poorer than before. They are clinging to the false nostalgia that Trump would bring back the old times, despite the forecast by 16 Nobel Prize winners in economics that the US economy would be worse off in a Trump second term.

Also, an inconvenient point, dear former first lady, is that Kamala Harris is partly paying for a backlash from Barack Obama’s era that your husband didn’t do enough for people of colour, especially black people. This is a race of margins, and despite his charm and eloquence, your husband and former president has struggled to convince black male voters that Harris will serve them well.

Just as misery loves company, nothing makes greater company for voters than a scapegoat. Trump has scapegoated immigrants, the Deep State, China, the UK’s Labour Party, and virtually everyone in sight. And the biggest scapegoat of them all is Joe Biden.

Unfortunately for him even the best presidents fall out of favour with voters by the end of their first term. Their achievements are often dwarfed by their flaws, and the demagogues whose mess they came to clean up begin to look like saints. Like Trump. That’s why the race is tight.

Double-edged sword

The false start by the Democratic Party after the catastrophic presidential debate didn’t help matters. Whatever advantage it may have conferred on Trump initially, the party also lost time healing the wounds created by Biden’s peremptory removal.

Tight races are not new in US elections, but this one feels peculiarly tight because even though facts and decency suggest that it should have been a mismatch, America is being seduced by its worst self.

It’s a measure of the state of US politics today that even after the results have been announced and the winner declared, except if that winner is Harris, the former first lady may find herself asking, why has US politics fallen so low? DM

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