The intelligence of Donald Trump
In the days that have passed since the outcome of the 2024 US presidential election became clear, thousands of pundits, journalists and, well, bloggers have given their version of events as to what happened on November 5th 2024. Not everybody thought Kamala Harris could win — I for one was hopeful but unsure — but very few predicted that Donald Trump would so in such a decisive manner, the first Republican president to win the popular vote in two decades.
So, what happened? I, too, have an idea. Or, rather, two.
1. Fearmongering
The first step to Donald Trump’s winning formula is quite evident in the way he has been expressing himself since he started his reelection campaign, arguably since he started his first election campaign. The bedrock of Trump/MAGA land is a barrage of fearmongering ploys the extent of which is unparalleled amongst major party operations in modern democracies. Sure, you will find some extremist groups doing just that, or populist leaders in autocratic regimes doing worse… but Trump is arguably not that far off a Vladimir Putin in that regard. And I don’t take the comparison lightly: I spent nearly 5 years of my life in Putin’s Moscow.
This is truly the first innovation, if you will, in Trump’s approach to politics: in a country that is the planet’s biggest superpower, where the economic outlook is good and improving, where social progress is by and large going in the right direction (save for setbacks like abortion rights orchestrated by the very candidate), which managed to get out of a global pandemic relatively unscathed, Trump and his cohort masterfully managed to instil enough fear and doubt for millions of Americans to believe that the situation was truly dire. Ironically, the only true cause for lasting concern would the environment, a topic Trump recurringly derides. By emphasizing instead the supposed risk that immigrants pose, by pointing out an inflation cycle that was directly caused by the aforementioned pandemic and has significantly decreased since, by literally creating fake enemies “from within” that come with the great advantage of being nondescript, and telling those lies over and over and over again during dozens of campaign rallies all over the country, the former reality TV star effectively succeeded in affecting the country’s morale in a notable way.
If you try and look at this in a clinical way, that feat is in and of itself remarkable: no leader in a democratic country has ever been able to falsify reality with such efficiency and at such a scale. That is something that should be closely analized by historians and sociologists, if only to ensure that such an phenomenon cannot be easily replicated.
2. Storytelling
With that fearmongering base laid out, Donald Trump then proceeded to deliver the final blow to Kamala Harris’ campaign, leveraging another powerful if widely known technique — storytelling. Very few would dispute that the United States are storytelling country: from the soft power that Hollywood has displayed the world over since World War II to Taylor Swift’s influence on contemporary music all the way to the science of marketing that was effectively invented stateside, telling a story is in many ways what defines the “American dream”.
And Donald Trump is arguably one of the best political storytellers of all time. Across all those speeches, through the innumerable ad campaigns, via his small army of surrogates, the man succeeded in painting a picture whose simplicity was a major part of the appeal. We will have the best tarifs to kill off Chinese imports and make sure your local factories reopen; we will get rid of all those immigrants who take your jobs so that you can get a decent wage no matter what; we will ensure that wokism does not force you to learn what someone’s pronouns are. There is an overarching story being told here: a reactionary tale of going back to a time America was this carefree wonderland where anyone could prosper, where you had the freedom to say whatever you felt like, where everything was up for grabs.
Of course, that wonderland never existed: previous decades came with reduced rights for women and minorities, life was actually harder for most communities with limited access to modern commodities and/or healther, inequalities were demonstrably higher… But no matter: this is a game of make belief. And Donald Trump gets it better than anyone save for a few Hollywood screenwriters. Herein lies the genius of the man, if you will: develop an aspirational story borne out of the lies he fostered. Therefore creating a parallel reality that is largely self-referential — historians call that an ideology.
This is not end. Not of history, not of democracy, not of hope. If anything, this may very well be the nail in the coffin for trumpism, and by extension democratic populism. For the lies have their limits and those limits will ultimately start showing. For there will come a time when new moderate leaders emerge and tackle those lies head-on. Crafting new stories that voters can truly aspire to without first feeding off their fears.