Trump

 You are reading this, most of you, knowing at least something of the result of the presidential election. I am writing before the votes have been counted. This allows me to avoid the error of the campaign books. My reflections are not biased by any knowledge, however incomplete, of the outcome.

Hearts are Trumps
John Everett Millais (1829-1896)
Photo Credit: Tate [CC BY-NC-ND] 

So I am able to write about Donald Trump without knowing whether the swing states are falling his way. And without that knowledge, it is already obvious that he has changed our understanding of politics profoundly. That his political career has been, however grim it may be to acknowledge it, a stunning success. And that, as a result, we have seen things about democracy we can never unsee. This will be the case whether he is heading for the White House or not.

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...

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. How could this have possibly happened?..

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

Trump
Louis Francois Roubiliac (1695/1702-1762)
Photo Credit: Hogarth's House [CC BY-NC] 

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...

(Daniel Finkelstein, The Times, 2024)

How about that people just care more about the price of petrol than they do about the morality of their leader? How about that the cost of living matters more than the good or bad behaviour of an individual? Or perhaps, morality does matter to individuals but not quite enough unless that person becomes the headteacher of the school their children go to?