- Jamelle Bouie asks if Trump Voters know what he has planned for them;
- Heather Cox Richardson observes how on social media Trump voters are alarmed by the implications of Trump’s polices, which somehow they hadn’t noticed before;
- Two more lists of reasons why Trump won and Harris lost, from Slate and Salon;
- How I see the big issue as about how humans react to short-term circumstances and cannot process long-term thinking.
Answer: No.
NY Times, Jamelle Bouie, 9 Nov 2024: What Do Trump Voters Know About the Future He Has Planned for Them?
On Tuesday, Donald Trump became the first Republican in 20 years to win the national popular vote and the Electoral College.
The people — or at least, a bare majority of the voting people — spoke, and they said to “make America great again.”
What they bought, however, isn’t necessarily what they’ll get.
The voters who put Trump in the White House a second time expect lower prices — cheaper gas, cheaper groceries and cheaper homes.
But nothing in the former president’s policy portfolio would deliver any of the above. His tariffs would probably raise prices of consumer goods, and his deportation plans would almost certainly raise the costs of food and housing construction. Taken together, the two policies could cause a recession, putting millions of Americans — millions of his voters — out of work.
I’m guessing that the billionaire class who support Trump know, and don’t care, because these things won’t affect them. And some of the far-right MAGA folk know, but don’t care, because they’re all for deporting immigrants and banning abortion, and they’re willing to suffer some economic pain to get that done. But not the majority of casual voters who have some vague impression Trump will make the economy great again, because of, well ya know whatever, the price of eggs was lower when Trump was president before. A puddle-thin understanding of big issues.
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Similarly,
Heather Cox Richardson, November 8, 2024
Social media has been flooded today with stories of Trump voters who are shocked to learn that tariffs will raise consumer prices as reporters are covering that information. Daniel Laguna of LevelUp warned that Trump’s proposed 60% tariff on Chinese imports could raise the costs of gaming consoles by 40%, so that a PS5 Pro gaming system would cost up to $1,000. One of the old justifications for tariffs was that they would bring factories home, but when the $3 billion shoe company Steve Madden announced yesterday it would reduce its imports from China by half to avoid Trump-promised tariffs, it said it will shift production not to the U.S., but to Cambodia, Vietnam, Mexico, and Brazil.
As well as voters alarmed to realized that their undocumented relatives could be deported. And so on. And how voters prefer Harris’s policies…
[Salon‘s Amanda] Marcotte recalled that Catherine Rampell and Youyou Zhou of the Washington Post showed before the election that voters overwhelmingly preferred Harris’s policies to Trump’s if they didn’t know which candidate proposed them. An Ipsos/Reuters poll from October showed that voters who were misinformed about immigration, crime, and the economy tended to vote Republican, while those who knew the facts preferred Democrats. Many Americans turn for information to social media or to friends and family who traffic in conspiracy theories. As Angelo Carusone of Media Matters put it: “We have a country that is pickled in right-wing misinformation and rage.”
And on and on.
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Another list of the reasons.
Slate, Jim Newell: The Surge, subtitled “Slate’s guide to the most important figures in politics this week”
Welcome to this week’s edition of the Surge, which welcomes Mr. Trump to his rightful place on the throne! Ha ha ha, very good, sir! (Disclaimer: Surge Enterprises LLC has large contracts—spaceships and so forth—before the federal government.)
A longish paragraph about each of seven issues: Inflation; Joe Biden; The border; Transgender issues; Right-wing media; Butler, Pennsylvania [the site of the first assassination attempt on Trump]; This too shall pass.
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And another list!
Salon, Paul Rosenberg, 9 Nov 2024: Six big lies that won the election: How Donald Trump gaslit America, subtitled “It isn’t just that Trump told lies. He wove a set of interlocking false narratives — and the media helped”
Nine days before Election Day, Donald Trump delivered his closing argument at a Madison Square Garden rally that drew comparisons to a 1939 pro-Nazi rally in the same arena and characterized by similar anti-democratic themes: demonization of immigrants and political enemies, invocation of strongman leadership, threats of violent retribution, denunciations of the press.
Responding to criticism of this self-evident hate-fest, Trump characterized it as “a lovefest.” He wasn’t just lying. That’s too simple an explanation of how Trump behaves in general, and what he’s doing here. Lying is deceiving people about the state of the world, and Trump routinely does that too. But simply tallying up the lies gives no insight into their purpose. Bulls***ting is deceiving people about one’s motives — using true or false claims indiscriminately — and is a more accurate description of his routine behavior. But calling that rally calls a “lovefest,” is doing something more: That’s gaslighting, an effort to undermine people’s entire sense of reality and impose an invented reality in its place
Trump was saying, in effect: The hate you saw was really love, and if you can’t see that, you’re the hateful one. It’s the kind of upside-down logic commonly found in abusive relationships, whenever the abuser is challenged. They may lie all the time, but when the chips are down, they gaslight.
Then:
In this election, Trump relied on five key themes of gaslighting in various different ways, all of them adding up to an overarching sixth theme: Democrats are the real threat to American democracy, and Donald Trump is its savior.
(I have to say, editorially, that if an article’s title promises five or six or ten points about something or another, a reader should be able to skim the article and see all five or six or ten. Why make reading your article hard on the reader? This article fails in that way; the sixth is hidden in that comment quoted above.)
So, reading through the article, these are the other five :
- The climate crisis.
Climate is arguably the main reason that Central Americans have replaced Mexicans as the largest population seeking entry to the U.S. since Trump first took office, so gaslighting on climate change was essential to making his “immigrant crime” narrative work. Hurricane Helene presented the perfect opportunity for bringing the climate crisis into the campaign. The damage done was almost 1% of U.S. national GDP, far exceeding annual government spending to combat climate change. It was the moment for a supremely important public policy discussion, but Trump’s gaslighting helped keep it entirely off the agenda.
- The great replacement. Citing fantasies of white supremacy, and Tucker Carlson.
Of course reality is radically different: Immigrants have much lower crime rates than native-born Americans, and are a net boon to the economy. It’s pure paranoid fantasy that blocks out the complex reality of a world in which the climate crisis will inevitably increase migration pressures. But it’s a simple story for a conman to tell, and the media’s willingness to normalize it radically shifted political discourse in Trump’s favor.
- The voter fraud myth. Around since the 1960s.
Decades of election data shows that individual voter fraud is extremely rare and organized voter fraud, beyond a single Republican example in North Carolina, is simply nonexistent. But through endless repetition, Carlson and others have made it a right-wing article of faith that Democrats are encouraging undocumented immigration and registering the undocumented to vote in significant numbers.
- Roe v. Wade and abortion.
His claim that “everyone” wanted this all along is, by itself, spectacular gaslighting, as is his claim that women have nothing to worry about. “I will be your protector,” he says, one of the creepiest gaslighting lines that women in abusive relationships often hear. “You will not be thinking about abortion” may have even more sinister undertones. This example of gaslighting was particularly effective, in that state initiatives to protect abortion rights passed almost everywhere, with large numbers of Trump voters voting for them.
- The great Trump economy.
This outrageous fiction builds on decades of GOP puffery and media complicity. Republicans have long been trusted more on the economy, despite generations of evidence that the economy does better under Democrats. Job growth offers a particularly striking example: Nearly all of it since 1989 has occurred with Democrats in office. But Trump takes this gaslighting to new levels, and the media’s abysmal treatment of Joe Biden’s remarkable record offered him a big assist.
Concluding,
There are certainly many other factors to consider in unpacking what happened in the 2024 election, including that it was just one element in a global trend of incumbent losses. But gaslighting is a central factor in the operation of fascism, and the failure of media in liberal democracies even to recognize its existence, much less to fight it, puts the very survival of liberal democracy at risk.
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More tomorrow. This is a big issue, that goes to the core not just of Americans and America’s status in the world, but to how human do or do not understand reality, and how they evaluate short-term issues and ignore long-term threats. And how cultures, or the species, may or may not survive.
