Trump's MADA: Make America Delusional Again

Since 2015, when Trump announced his candidacy for president, I've been on a journey towards increasing pessimism. 

I remember in the early days when I'd read what his supporters were writing/saying and my internal optimist would tell me that, when reality set in, they'd learn at least a bit about the error of their ways. It never happened. 

I also watched as Trump's sexism, racism, cruelty, and narcissism were put right out there in the open - constantly thinking that his latest outrage (ie, "grab 'em by the p*ssy) would finally lead to his demise. It never happened. 

We just watched Trump close out his 2024 campaign by promising to take revenge against the "enemies within," parrot Hitler by referring to immigrants as "vermin" who are "poisoning the blood" of our country, and promising to be a dictator on day one. As an added bonus, he talked about Arnold Palmer's penis and pretended to perform fellatio on a microphone. I assumed that he'd lose support. It didn't happen.

So now we're preparing for Trump's return to the White House with his determination to wreck the economy via mass deportation and tariffs. If, as everyone suggests, his re-election was all about "the price of eggs is too high," we're tempted to believe that soaring inflation and a recession (or depression) will surely turn his supporters against him. Right?

Not so fast. The first check on that is to remind ourselves that the Covid pandemic surged during Trump's presidency and we experienced the worst recession of our lifetimes. Not only did we all feel the economic pain, millions of people died because he totally bungled this country's response. What did his supporters do? They blamed China, Fauci, and science. Then they went on to blame Biden as he successfully cleaned up Trump's mess. 

To understand how that happens, it is helpful to remember what Julian Sanchez wrote about epistemic closure on the right. He noted that when he injected that phrase into our political discourse, a lot of people thought he was simply talking about an echo chamber or closed mindedness. But it's more complex than that.

So an “echo chamber” just means you never hear any contrary information. The idea of “epistemic closure” was that you WOULD hear new and contrary information, but you have mechanisms in your belief system that reject anything that might force you to update your beliefs…

I bring this up now, because the Trump ecosystem has developed a pretty sophisticated set of epistemic closure mechanisms that work to reject new information that might otherwise pose a problem.

The closure mechanisms Trump set up to inoculate his followers include his references to things like the deep state, fake news, and the swamp. When fact-checkers expose Trump’s lies, it is just fake news. When former administration officials decry the president, they are part of the deep state. 

Trump's narcissistic personality disorder has led him to develop a delusional system for dealing with the realitiy of his failures. As I noted shortly after he took office in 2017, it can be summarized as "lie, distract, and blame." We need look no further than his Big Lie after the 2020 election as an example. He lied about voter fraud, distracted with references to the great replacement theory, and blamed Democrats. 

The problem that we all face now is that a large portion of the electorate has bought into Trump's personality disorder. They have adopted his set of epistemic closer mechanisms to shut off the reality of his failures. To put an exclamation point on that, let's remember than one of Trump's most effective strategies during the 2024 campaign was to ask people whether they're better off today than they were 4 years ago when refrigerated trucks were being used as morgues and lines for food banks were miles long. Astoundingly, too many voters said "no." That is delusion created by epistemic closure. 

What we're going to have to grapple with is that, when Trump tanks the economy this time around, he will once again roll out his lie, distract, and blame strategy. Since I don't suffer from narcissistic personality disorder, it's hard for me to forecast what that will look like. But I have no doubt that it will happen. My concern is that his supporters will believe him and rather than holding him accountable, they'll unleash more hate on those the president choses to blame. 

With all my heart I hope I'm wrong. But for almost 10 years now I've been learning the hard way that the one time Trump told the truth was when he said he could shoot someone on 5th Avenue and his supporters wouldn't abandon him.

None of this is meant to suggest capitulation to the very real danger Trump poses. It's just that we have to start by understanding what we're dealing with.

Rep. Ocasio-Cortez is right about Tulsi Gabbard

Since Donald trump nominated Tulsi Gabbard to be head of our intelligence services, many people have spoken up about how she consistently parrots Putin's talking points - which poses the question about whether or not the next president is turning over our intelligence services to a Russian asset. It is hard to overstate what a danger that poses to this country and our allies.

But Gabbard has attempted to sell herself as anti-war - which is a lie. Representative Ocasio-Cortez recently pointed that out when she told Joy Reid that "A Tulsi Gabbard nomination is a pro-war nomination globally. Point blank, period." 

Let's unpack that a bit.

Folks have been reminding us that, in 2017, Gabbard travelled to Syria to meet privately with Bashar al-Assad, after he had gassed his own citizens as part of the civil war in that country. But we need to dig a little deeper.

The civil war in Syria began when citizens of the country rebelled against the dictatorship of Assad as part of the Arab Spring in 2011. More than any other Arab country, Assad responded with horrific violence against the rebels. But by 2015, he was losing territory. That's when Putin intervened and started a bombing campaign in Syria.

Putin attempted to justify his actions by saying that he was fighting terrorists in Syria. But that was a lie. He was bombing civilians in an attempt to shore up the dictatorship of Assad. Long before Russia committed war crimes in Ukraine, they were bombing hospitals, schools, and markets in Syria. The atrocities were so severe that the UN took the unprecedented step of releasing a report charging Russia with war crimes.

What was Gabbard's response? As the bombing began, she suggested that the U.S. should be joining Russia in bombing Syrian civilians -  utilizing Putin's propaganda to suggest that the civil war in that country was all about terrorism.

Al-Qaeda attacked us on 9/11 and must be defeated. Obama won’t bomb them in Syria. Putin did. #neverforget911

— Tulsi Gabbard 🌺 (@TulsiGabbard) October 1, 2015

— Tulsi Gabbard 🌺 (@TulsiGabbard) October 1, 2015

Then in 2016, Gabbard was one of only three lawmakers — and the only Democrat — to vote against a non-binding resolution calling out the Assad regime for war crimes and stating that the United States should support the establishment of an international tribunal to bring war criminals to justice.

Gabbard's affection for brutal dictators doesn't stop with Syria's Assad.

In 2015, two years after he orchestrated the worst mass killing of protesters in modern history, a smiling Gabbard appeared next to a grinning Sisi on a visit to Cairo, after which she praised him for showing “great courage and leadership” in the fight against “extreme Islamist ideology.”

In summary, when oppressed people stand up to protest against tyranny, Gabbard supports violence and civil war as the tool for dictators to maintain their power.

It's worth noting that the first time Russia invaded Ukraine it was in 2014 after the Maiden revolution got rid of Putin's stooge, Viktor Yanukovych. When that didn't bring the country to heel, he launched a full-scale invasion in 2022. On the very same day, Gabbard sent out a tweet blaming the invasion on Biden and NATO. In other words, Putin's actions were justified. Is it any wonder then, why Russian state television calls her their "girlfriend?" 

Sorting through the noise to try and understand what just happened

After sitting in my discomfort for a few days, I'm ready to try to understand WTH happened in this election. There are an awful lot of bad takes out there attempting to find fault with VP Harris, President Biden, or Democrats in general. But they're all impossible to square with the fact that, no matter their shortcomings, a little more than half of voters supported a delusional, narcissistic bully who has been convicted of 34 felonies, found liable for sexual assault, and tried to overturn an election.

So here's the take that makes the most sense to me: 

About a month ago I wrote that, when it came to the presidential election, it was all about the lies and the way Trump/Vance used them to create an alternative reality. As it turns out, the lies worked. One of the best ways to document that came from a Reuters/Ipsos poll that was conducted just prior to the election.

What we see is that the more voters believed Trump's lies about crime, the economy, and immigration, the more likely they were to vote for him. Those who believed the truth swung heavily in Harris's direction. 

We're also getting a lot of bad takes on who those lies appealed to. Philip Bump did a good job of debunking all of that nonsense. The first thing to note is that Trump received about the same number of votes that he did in 2020 (it's just that Harris got fewer than Biden). So if we look at the demographics of Trump voters, "his voting base [in 2024] was older, wealthier and about equally White to what it was in 2020."

For example, we're hearing a lot of talk about how Trump won over Hispanics and African Americans in 2024. But here's what that actually looked like:

To all of those who are suggesting that this election was all about populism and support from working class folks, the truth is that Trump's big gains were actually among the wealthy.

What this kind of information tells us is that we not only need to combat the lies from right wing media, we're also being fed a lot of junk information from mainstream media and pundits. So chose your sources wisely.

Over the last few days I've been noting who I will pay attention to and who I'm going to ignore. On the former category, I've been significantly impressed with Rebecca Solnit. Here are a few gems from her latest column at The Guardian. 

I’m wary about anger – as George Orwell once observed, it’s easily redirected, like the flame of a blowlamp, and it has been in this election as people whose own lives were thwarted economically and otherwise got on board with the scapegoating of immigrants. So it’s something to be careful with. Even so, “rage is a form of prayer too,” as Reverend Dr. Renita J. Weems declared after this terrible US election.

I suspect she means that behind that rage is care, and this is something I have found secular activists often forget – you are angry the children are being bombed or the forest is being cleared because you care about them, so it’s not the feelings about the forces of destruction that is primary. It’s the love, and not losing sight of that is crucial...

Not being them and not being like them is the first job, not just as negatives but as an embrace of the ideals of love, kindness, open-mindedness, the ability to engage with uncertainty and ambiguity, inclusiveness...

There are other kinds of resistance that mean making your own life and your own mind an independent republic in which the pursuit of truth, human rights, kindness and empathy, the preservation of history and memory...This does not overthrow the regime, but it does mean being someone who has not been conquered by it, and it invites others who have not been or who can throw off the shackles to join you...

We do not know what will happen. But we can know who we can commit to be in the face of what happens. That is a strong beginning. The fact that we cannot save everything does not mean we cannot save anything, and everything we can save is worth saving. Let Julian Aguon have the last word: “No offering is too small. No stone unneeded … All of us, without exception, are qualified to participate in the rescue of the world.”

Solnit's words remind me of a song Garth Brooks wrote after the Oklahoma bombing titled "The Change." It's going to be my anthem for a while.

I've also been extremely impressed with the analysis provided by historian Heather Cox Richardson. She was interviewed by Jon Stewart a couple of days ago on his podcast. It is a little over an hour long and I know most people won't take the time to listen to the whole thing. But she's absolutely brilliant (Stewart...not so much). So I definitely recommend paying attention to her - no one does a better job of describing what just happened. 

Doug Muder has always demonstrated a deep understanding of this political era and recently wrote a post titled, "My Way-Too-Soon Election Response" over at his blog The Weekly Sift.

Going forward, I'll be paying a lot of attention to Timothy Snyder, who literally wrote the book on fascism. His most recent column at the New Yorker is titled, "What Does it Mean that Donald Trump Is a Fascist."

To maintain my sanity in the midst of the chaos that is about to come, those are just a few of the people I'll be listening to. 

On a final (somewhat related) note, I'd just like to share this little nugget to help explain why Christian nationalists are so amenable to the alternate reality created by Trump's lies. 

The discomfort I'm sitting in today

I'm still reeling emotionally and doubt that it's a good time to write any analysis about what happened on Tuesday. There are an awful lot of bad takes pointing fingers - which is understandable, but ultimately not productive. Here's a twitter thread from Brad Bauman that I found helpful:

A lot of times we confuse fast with smart. Quick and simple answers at a moment when everyone is trying to make meaning of what’s happening and looking for something to do. We end up doing things that aren’t productive or counter productive when we move that quick.

Sometimes, the right answer is to sit in our pain; sit in our discomfort and feel it, rather than rush to answers or movement.

There will be a resistance, and all of us will be a part of it, individually and collectively.

Let’s take a moment and allow ourselves to process, to feel, to think about what truths arise and then let’s act.

As I "sit in my discomfort and feel it," Rebecca Solnit captured my reaction perfectly.

Our mistake was to think we lived in a better country than we do. Our mistake was to see the joy, the extraordinary balance between idealism and pragmatism, the energy, the generosity, the coalition-building of the Kamala Harris campaign and think that it must triumph over the politics of lies and resentment. Our mistake was to think that racism and misogyny were not as bad as they are, whether it applied to who was willing to vote for a supremely qualified Black woman or who was willing to vote for an adjudicated rapist and convicted criminal who admires Hitler. 

I literally cried as I read that. Here's how John Harwood put it:

If you’re accustomed, as I am, to believing that a critical mass of Americans embraces the values of freedom, pluralism, and common sense, the choice voters made defies comprehension. The arc of history in 2024 bent not toward justice, as Martin Luther King Jr. liked to say, but away from it.

Regular readers will know that I've always maintained that President Obama's speech at the 50th anniversary of the Selma march was the most important he's ever given. In it, he defined his view of America and the ideals we've embraced/fought for. VP Harris echoed that vision during her speech in Washington D.C. last week.

I’ve seen [the promise of America] in Americans, different in many respects, but united in our pursuit of freedom, our belief in fairness and decency and our faith in a better future...

Nearly 250 years ago, America was born when we wrested freedom from a petty tyrant. Across the generations, Americans have preserved that freedom, expanded it, and in so doing proved to the world that a government of, by, and for the people is strong and can endure. And those who came before us, the Patriots at Normandy and Selma, Seneca Falls, and Stonewall, on farmlands, and factory floors, they did not struggle, sacrifice and lay down their lives only to see us seed our fundamental freedoms.

They didn’t do that only to see us submit to the will of another petty tyrant.

These United States of America, we are not a vessel for the schemes of wannabe dictators. The United States of America is the greatest idea humanity ever devised, a nation big enough to encompass all our dreams, strong enough to withstand any fracture or fissure between us, and fearless enough to imagine a future of possibilities.

So America, let us reach for that future. Let us fight for this beautiful country we love.

And in 7 days, we have the power, each of you has the power to turn the page and start writing the next chapter in the most extraordinary story ever told.

What's been shattered is my belief in that America. More than anything else, I'm grieving that loss today.

Why I'm getting optimistic about this election

It's hard to over-state how much the Des Moines Register's Selzer poll shook things up by showing Harris/Walz leading in Iowa. None of us know if their numbers are on point. But here's what we DO know:

That's one of the ways to look at the Selzer poll. In early Sept, they had Trump up +4. By the end of Oct, they have Harris up +3. Since their methods didn't change, they captured something important. (2/2)

— Nancy LeTourneau 🇺🇦 (@Smartypants60) November 3, 2024

Whether or not Harris wins Iowa isn't as important as the fact that the same pollster found a 7 point swing in her favor in state that has been deeply red. WOW!

But let's forget about the polls for a minute. While Selzer gave us all a moment of hope, a consensus has been building over the last week or so that pollsters and aggregators really don't have a clue about what's going on. Here are the data points that make me optimistic.

Enthusiasm

According to Gallup, Democrats are seeing a surge in enthusiasm.

Democrats and Democratic-leaning independents are largely driving the surge in enthusiasm nationally. In March, 55% of Democrats and Democratic leaners said they were more enthusiastic than usual about voting; now, 78% are. Republicans and Republican leaners, who held a slight edge in enthusiasm in March, now trail Democrats by a significant margin, with their current 64% enthusiasm score up slightly from 59% in the spring.

That difference is palpable when you compare what is happening at Harris/Walz rallies to Trump's. 

Meanwhile here was Kamala’s rally, held at the exact coliseum. Both levels plus the floor full of eager supporters! https://t.co/ZJmaeIaIvg pic.twitter.com/w55RKfka1A

— V 🤎 (@veexoh_) November 3, 2024

Fundraising 

It's true that Trump has a lock on money from the oligarchs. The problem is that they only get one vote - like the rest of us. When it comes to small donors, they've abandoned his ship.

Donald Trump’s contributions from small-dollar donors have plummeted since his last bid for the White House...Fewer than a third of the Republican’s campaign contributions have come from donors who gave less than $200 — down from nearly half of all donations in his 2020 race...The total collected from small donors has also declined, according to the analysis. Trump raised $98 million from such contributors through June, a 40% drop compared to the $165 million they contributed during a corresponding period in his previous presidential race.

Here's how that compares to Harris/Walz:

Ground game

When it comes to GOTV, Trumpers are nowhere to be found.

Some battleground state Republicans say they’re worried they see little evidence of Donald Trump’s ground game — and fear it could cost him the election in an exceedingly close race.

In interviews, more than a dozen Republican strategists and operatives in presidential battlegrounds voiced serious concerns about what they described as a paltry get-out-the-vote effort by the Trump campaign, an untested strategy of leaning on outside groups to help do field work and a top-of-the-ticket strategy that’s disjointed from the one Republicans down the ballot are running.

In comparison, here's at taste of what the Democratic ground game looks like:

The Harris ground game strategy is at once obvious and sophisticated. Harris has more than 2,500 staff and 358 field offices across the battleground states, including more than 475 paid staffers in Pennsylvania. Since July, more than 110,000 people have volunteered with the Harris campaign in Pennsylvania, and those volunteers have knocked on nearly 2 million doors in October alone. One third of the Pennsylvania field offices are in rural counties that Trump carried by double digits in 2020, and where Harris’ goal is to hold down Trump’s margins. At the same time, the campaign is attempting to lock down the base in urban areas through long-term relational organizing targeted to hard-to-reach voters. The campaign realizes that Democrats have long taken Black and Latino votes for granted. Now, the campaign is treating them as persuasion targets as much as mobilization targets. And it believes the path to victory goes through the suburbs, where they hope college-educated voters and women could propel the VP to victory.

Harris/Walz voters are "fired up and ready to go!" Their enthusiasm is demonstrated by their willingness to donate both money and time to the campaign. So while I'm certainly not ready to celebrate yet, I'm at least starting to unclench my fists and breath a bit.