After the Fact
Fighting for Facts in the Age of Trump
In September—or even when I published my last column, early Nov. 8—I thought I’d be writing a Trump retrospective. What could we learn about our country and ourselves through Trump’s rise and fall? How could we prevent the rise of a future “clean Trump,” the extremist without such obvious personal flaws—without the Twitter insults, the business scams, the infidelities, the shameless disregard for the importance of the office—who could actually win?
America Unravels
Walsh was referring to how, “For 9 days, over 20 million people early voted thinking the FBI had something big on Hillary.” It was a surprising break from reflexive partisanship, especially puzzling given Walsh’s other recent tweet about armed rebellion against a President-Elect Clinton.
How Donald Trump Changed Our Minds
The Donald Trump brand is a powerful thing: Even if it’s not worth $3.3 billion, it clearly carries staggering political capital among his supporters. Months before Triumph’s focus group met, Trump had introduced an idea so far from the mainstream that no pollster had ever asked about it—a ban on all Muslims entering the United States. Within the week, Rasmussen released a poll showing that a stunning 66 percent of Republicans supported the proposal. But Trump hasn’t just moved Republicans to the right. Trump has persuaded millions of conservatives who assailed Obamacare, for example, as a government distortion of the free market that international trade has robbed us of our jobs and dignity. He convinced a Republican convention with its harshest anti-LGBT language in decades to nominate someone whose views on gender-neutral bathrooms align more with Hillary Clinton’s than their own. (By the time Peter Thiel gave his speech on the convention’s final night, the convention cheered when he said their new wedge issue was a “distraction from from our real problems; who cares?”) When he suggested we might not defend our NATO allies in Eastern Europe, Trump defenders like Newt Gingrich hailed his foreign policy as a practical, cost-cutting approach, a few short years after skewering President Obama for his inaction in (non-NATO) Ukraine.
Trust the Polls
That, of course, is hyperbole. His die-hard supporters are just as much in denial. In fact, they, not his ever-shrinking inner circle of former pollster Kellyanne Conway and erstwhile Breitbart editor Steve Bannon, are the ones enabling this delusion, roaring their approval as he dismisses the tales of his campaign’s demise as exaggerations by a scurrilous media. How could he possibly be losing Pennsylvania, where 5.7 million people voted in 2012, when he’s packing 8,000-seat venues in Wilkes-Barre with people who can recite his iconic phrases—now dismayingly including “locker room talk”—verbatim? (I’ll be the first to predict a Bob Dylan landslide in 2020, should he choose to accept it!)
When ‘Wrong!’s Make a Right
One of these characters, of course, was Donald Trump, in part because his campaign had cultivated such low expectations. Despite having never debated fewer than three opponents at a time—allowing him to go into “a kind of hibernation” whenever the discussion turned toward basic substance—Trump apparently scorned traditional debate preparation, preferring sessions of “spitballing ideas with his team.” MSNBC, in its pre-debate analysis, identified three tasks for each candidate. Hillary Clinton, as the first female candidate ever on such a stage, had to sell her vision for her presidency to an audience of 80 million while maintaining an intimate presentation (no shouting!) and getting “those jokes off” (smile more, sweetheart!). Trump, meanwhile, had to “stop lying,” “show humility,” and “fill in the gaps in his policy proposals.” The gendered implications of such wildly different standards, as noted in the tweet linked above, were hard to miss.
