Comfort and Sustenance - Why Trump’s Base Loves His Lies: Guest MINDSETTER™ Renehan
Saturday, December 12, 2020
All politicians lie. This is one of the fundamental laws of nature. Birds fly and politicians lie. We expect it.
What we object to most about Donald Trump is not that he lies, but that he is a particularly ham-handed and utterly self-serving liar. Indeed, this almost seems a part of the package he is selling. His lies are not only tailored to his own personal advantage, but they are custom made to attract not so much those who are gullible (though these are Legion, and no small part of his fan base) as those who simply need to believe Trump in a manner that is quite urgent and visceral.
Trump’s particular talent, it seems clear, is the leading of angry mobs. He has claimed to be the victim of witch hunts. But it is he himself who leads witch hunts. These have involved – variously – Obama’s birth certificate, Hillary’s emails, and the tens of thousands of corpses who supposedly voted in the most recent presidential election: the walking dead. The lies associated with such fabrications are so severe, and so blatantly out of balance with reality, that one has to wonder what seduces people ranging from Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin to “Joe the Plumber” into belief.
GET THE LATEST BREAKING NEWS HERE -- SIGN UP FOR GOLOCAL FREE DAILY EBLASTThere is nuance here. Trump does not in fact lead just one great army of malcontents, but two: an Army of the Ignorant allied with an Army of the Entitled. Both constituencies need him and his lies quite desperately, but for different reasons and because of different agendas. The fuel for the Army of the Ignorant is fear. The fuel for the Army of the Entitled is greed.
There is an art to molding and inspiring the disenfranchised and ignorant. In this art Donald Trump is a maestro. The dispossessed souls in MAGA hats whom we see as backdrops at Trump’s super-spreader arena speeches represent the last few remnants of that once vast white majority which inspired H.L. Mencken in the 1920s to suggest that no one ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American people.
These folks were once secure in their knowledge that of all the working people in the world, they were the best off. American manufacturing dominated the world marketplace. The great, wide breadbasket of the Plains states represented a vast patchwork quilt of prosperous farms. The white American worker – whether industrial or agricultural – could safely look down on his counterparts elsewhere on the planet.
He could also, of course, look down on blacks, not to mention the occasional gang of Mexican migrants. Now, however, manufacturing has fled to China, the small American farmer is on the ropes, blacks have stridently fought for and largely succeeded in gaining their just rights, and together with Latinos and Orientals they promise to make the whites the only true minority in the United States by the year 2040.
Joe the Plumber feels embattled - cornered. He requires a man of apparent success and power to tell him that he has been victimized.
In return for Trump telling Joe the Plumber he’s been robbed of his birthright as an American, Joe the Plumber is happy to believe that Trump himself has been robbed of his reelection. Duplicitous, dark, “un-American” forces are killing the true, God-fearing, white United States of Billy Graham, Elvis, Anita Bryant, and Petticoat Junction. It is this irredeemable mirage of an idealized America which Trump promises to redeem. And it is to this key lie that Joe the Plumber clings. He has no choice. His ship is sinking, and this one frail piece of floating driftwood is his only option, given the utter absence of lifeboats.
Trump’s other constituency, that of the Entitled, has no worries about self-preservation. Their yachts remain watertight. Their preoccupations focus not on survival, but on two of the seven deadly sins: gluttony and greed, with perhaps a dab of lust (for power) thrown in just to spice things up. Of Trump’s tax cuts, which some have called “Socialism for the rich,” one needs to say no more. Then we have the so-called Cares Act, supposedly meant to aid small businesses and households through the economic fallout of the COVID crisis, but which in fact gave $174 billion in tax breaks mostly to large corporations and rich individuals.
The minions of Trump’s two distinct and disparate groups of supporters rarely meet, save for when the dispossessed show up to detail the Jaguars of those more fortunate. While one Trump supporter waits tables at a diner in Altoona, another – Louise Linton, the wannabe actress wife of Secretary Mnuchin – uses her personal fortune to underwrite her own starring role in a feature film meant to finally elevate her out of the realm of cheesy bit parts on CSI: NY and Cold Case.
These two ladies have absolutely nothing in common except for Trump and his lies, by which the waitress is duped, and in which the “actress” is complicit. But each in her own way requires and loves the lies, from which each derives comfort and sustenance, albeit completely different varieties of comfort and sustenance.
Edward Renehan lives in Wickford. His most recent book is The Life of Charles Stewart Mott: Industrialist, Philanthropist, Mr. Flint (University of Michigan Press).
Renehan can be found on the web here.
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