How & why Trump is so persuasive
America’s leading essayist, Chris Caldwell, has a couple of pieces out this start of the year which I recommend—long reading on the future we’re making for ourselves, with good & bad.
First, in the Claremont Review of Books, he wrote an account of the Trump 2024 campaign & how American politics has changed at the level of political communications. I’ll lead you into it:
Trump’s oratory won him the election. But it has not won him a reputation as any kind of Great Communicator. That’s because his communications style is new, & still evolving. It’s different than it was in 2016 & even 2020. True, Trump can excel at those powerful, parallelism-filled exhortations familiar from every presidential campaign since the founding. “We will not be invaded, we will not be occupied, we will not be overrun, we will not be conquered!” he told the crowd in Salem. “We will be a free & proud nation once again. Everyone will prosper. Every family will thrive.” Plenty of presidential candidates—from Harry Truman to Ted Kennedy to Elizabeth Warren—have campaigned in that register.
But the heart of Trump’s communications style has always lain elsewhere. At 78, he still gives marathon speeches, averaging almost 90 minutes apiece. By the end of the campaign he was giving three a day, often in cities hours apart by plane—a feat of stamina that might drive a politician half his age into a delirium. Although not quite unprecedented, they are unlike anything politicians have ventured since the 19th c., when Charles Sumner would hold the Senate floor for two days or Daniel O’Connell would gather much of Ireland at one of his monster meetings.
But Trump’s speeches are different. They’re more like happenings. His crowds aren’t coming to be steered in the right direction or forged into a common will. They have mixed motives. Some come to laugh, some come to rage, & some come to participate in a bacchanal. Trump creates an environment of freedom. You might call it a safe space. What his technocratic opponents deplore as crudity & braggadocio, his defenders consider a display of openness & authenticity, a radical kind of honesty, even an intimacy. Of course, both views are correct. Trump is about to change American life because he reflects American life. This became clear in the closing stage of the campaign.
Then, another piece on the situation rather than its protagonist, “The Dawn of The Anti-woke Era” for The New Statesman, explaining Trump’s continued, indeed increased appeal as an alternative—the alternative—to elite institutions & their figureheads, as well as the transformation of America: The 2024 elections were much less polarized by race than previous ones.
The country no longer wants the establishment’s advice on its choice of president. Democrats can blame their own spite. Not content to defeat Trump at the ballot box, as they had in 2020, they set out to defeat him in the courts, lending their support to a number of court cases as election season heated up. They wound up doing grievous harm to their party & country.
The result was revolutionary, & not in the way Democrats intended: anyone with a sense of fair play would be tempted to vote for a fellow who had been, as the playwright David Mamet put it, “raided, indicted, convicted, sued, slandered, & shot”. But at this point, to do so would be to declare the judicial system corrupt. In the end, half the country did just that: suburbanites wore T-shirts with Trump’s mug shot on them. Grannies danced giddily on TikTok: “Here’s how it feels to vote for a convicted felon!”
The country is floating free of its laws. That is what gives the present its feeling of open-ended promise & peril. If Trump decides to investigate the Biden administration’s connection to these cases, will it be sauce for the gander, or a sign of authoritarian tendencies? Hard to say. Every elected official poses some risk of turning authoritarian. Mostly, we assume it’s one in 100, or one in 1,000. But the more discontented an electorate is, the higher a risk it may run.
People were more discontented than we were led to believe.
American elites want a level of control over American life that Americans reasonably enough find intolerable. But the moment this conflict becomes political, as has happened since 2016, then indeed laws, habits, the restraints of ordinary life & the worry about changing the grand arrangement by which everyone comfortably enjoys his familiar part of American life—all that is up for renegotiation, or destruction. So it’s no longer possible to speak confidently about what laws & institutions amount to. Promise & danger have replaced our tranquility. The most we could guess at now is, how long will it take to restore that civil tranquility. After about a decade of trouble, perhaps another decade is needed. In that period, we would most of us come around to agreeing that the only unifying figure in America is Trump.