Back in July I wrote a column about how Donald Trump was challenging the conventional wisdom that winning an American presidential election “requires hundreds of millions of dollars in advertising and an army of staff and volunteers making phone calls and knocking on doors.”
I acknowledged that this theory was presumed to be true mainly because no one in either party had ever really tried to run a campaign any other way. I also expressed scepticism about Trump’s ability to upend a century or more of political tradition. We all know how that turned out.
Among liberals still trying to come to terms with the 2016 election one argument comes up over and over again: Trump can’t succeed. He has promised so many impossible and contradictory things to so many different, often competing, groups of people that his supporters will inevitably shake off their delusions and turn on him.
It might take six months. It might take a year. Sooner or later, however, all those angry, working class white people in Michigan and Pennsylvania will realise that Trump is not going to reopen their local auto plant or coal mine. The trade war he’ll start with China will make all the cheap stuff they buy at Wal-Mart cost a lot more. He isn’t going to build a wall on the southern border and whatever he does build will not be paid for by Mexico. He won’t deport 11 million illegal immigrants and even if he did it would not bring back millions of blue-collar industrial jobs.
Meanwhile Trump’s cabinet of plutocrats, warmongers and right-wing cranks will work hand in hand with a Congress controlled by conservative ideologues. The result will be lower taxes for the rich and less health insurance for the poor. Government-funded health care for the elderly will be effectively ended. Energy companies will be allowed to despoil the environment at will while banks and Wall Street fleece the poor and the middle class. America will wind up at war with some combination of Russia, Iran, Syria, China and North Korea.
These outrages and more will be undertaken by the most incompetent, corrupt and ideologically blinkered administration since Warren Harding’s disastrous presidency in the early 1920s.
When all this happens Trump’s voters will turn on him and the Democrats will return triumphantly from the political wilderness.
To which I say: Well, maybe.
The problem with the scenario I have just outlined is that it presumes the media are aggressively covering Trump and holding him to account. More importantly, it also assumes that people will be listening, watching and reading. That they will accept accurate reporting when it is presented to them, and will react to that reporting in a logical, rational and engaged manner. Based on the record of the last 18 months I don’t think I’m out of line expressing doubts about all of these assumptions.
The theory Trump now seems set to test is that as president there need be no actual link between his words and the actions of his administration. His personal popularity is all that matters, and this can be sustained through tweets, public statements and rallies that, in effect, create their own reality.
This is neither as implausible nor, frankly, as difficult as it might seem. Because the American media are deeply respectful of the presidency as an institution, presidential statements — even those that are obviously at odds with reality — are accorded extraordinary deference. Add to that the natural tendency of human beings to tune out unpleasant news and the internet’s ability to show you only the news you want to read and it is easy to imagine a world in which many millions of Americans simply accept Trump’s description of himself as a champion of everyday Americans who strides mightily from one triumph to the next.
In other words, one need not actually succeed at anything so long as one successfully projects a winning image. Whatever you may think of Trump he does seem to be good at convincing people that he is a ‘winner’.
The clearest evidence of this is the millions of Americans who still believe he is a monumentally successful businessman despite a year and a half of media coverage explaining that his ‘empire’ is mainly artifice. These are the same people who fervently believe he is a champion of the working class when, again, 18 months of excellent journalism has demonstrated that, really, he is not.
So, yes, Trump may wind up crashing and burning over the next year or so. The history of American politics pretty much guarantees it. Yet if Democrats and the few remaining anti-Trump Republicans have learnt anything from the last 18 months surely it ought to be that putting all one’s faith in political conventional wisdom is both dangerous and short-sighted.
Gordon Robison, a longtime Middle East journalist and US political analyst, teaches political science at the University of Vermont.
