Mick Hartley

Daniel Finkelstein today in the Times:

At a campaign stop in Iowa in 2016, Trump remarked: “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose any voters, OK?” Correctly, he added: “It’s, like, incredible.” When he said it, it seemed ridiculous. Even making the remark seemed politically incompetent. It doesn’t seem ridiculous now.

It is almost certainly an overstatement to suggest that none of his wayward personal behaviour has ever lost him any votes. But remarkably, he has remained politically viable through a series of quite extraordinary scandals. He has been convicted of multiple felonies, has been found by a court to have raped a woman, has been disowned by his former vice-president and national security adviser, has been called a fascist by his former chief of staff and has been described by his former military chief as “the most dangerous person ever”. And this merely scratches the surface of the scandals he has been embroiled in and the staff members who have sounded the alarm about him.

And yet through crimes and gaffes and crassness, through incompetence and lies and vindictiveness, he has sailed on. He has won the Republican nomination three times and the attachment of roughly half of a great and prosperous country for almost a decade. And counting. How could this possibly have happened? How could he have got this far?

There are some conventional explanations, of course. Ruy Teixeira was correct in Monday’s Times to talk of the way that progressive ideology has damaged the political prospects of the left. Persisting with Joe Biden in the last couple of years didn’t help, either. And within the Republican Party, the economic libertarian approach of Ronald Reagan began to lose support of less well-off social conservatives and nationalists.

Yet this still can’t fully explain how, in an American political system that ate up and spat out candidates with fairly minor foibles, Trump was able to persist to arrive at today, let alone tomorrow.

Here are the three things I think this tells us, none of them very encouraging and all of them relevant to Britain. They are, as I say, things Trump has made us see that we cannot unsee.

First, people simply don’t care about political scandals anywhere near as much as journalists and other politicians do. Minor scandals are hardly noticed at all, with the protagonists completely unknown. Major scandals may entertain but they often don’t outrage because people (wrongly) think that all politicians are pretty much the same.

In 2016, Trump did not seem to many potential voters in any way a less suitable president than Hillary Clinton. And this was not because they thought him a saint. It was that they thought her at least as much a sinner. They also thought her a hypocrite because Trump, at least, didn’t pretend. Hypocrisy is why partygate mattered, while Boris Johnson’s sex life did not.

That seems right. Because Trump says so many outrageous things, people assume he's not a hypocrite. He "tells it like it is". Nonsense, of course – the man's a compulsive liar. But it is a key part of his appeal.

Second, Trump shows how we reason. We start with what we want to think — what it suits our interests to think — and we fit our explanation of events round it. So people who support Trump saw his criminal convictions as evidence that he and they were right and that the liberal establishment had rigged the system against them. Social media intensifies this tendency to motivated reasoning.

But it is the third lesson of Trump’s rise, and persistence, that is the most worrying. Far from his contempt for democracy — his active subversion of it in January 2021, his open flirtation with dictatorship before and since — being politically ruinous, it actually attracts many voters.

An alarming number of people don’t care at all about liberal democratic norms as long as things are all right for them. And they rather think “strongman” rule might be a better idea than rule by a load of squabbling politicians. They like that Trump is (as he is thought to be) a successful and ruthless businessman. They like that he belittles others. They think he is doing that on their behalf.

He isn't, of course.

A comment from a Times reader:

I have just watched a programme beamed from the Middle East (not from Israel, by the way). Many of those interviewed hoped that Trump would win, especially the women who were interviewed. One of the main reasons they gave was that "he doesn't lie". So, okay, he doesn't lie… deliberately. Instead he opens his mouth and blurts out the first and usually the most sensationally insulting thing that comes into his head. Whether it is true or not is immaterial, and usually it isn't true. So he does lie, but does so with such force that his listeners admire him for speaking in "plain" terms. The truth is unimportant. It is "his" truth, and that's what counts to them. He frightens me, and so do his supporters.