Terry Prone: Stop mocking Trump’s supporters and start focusing on what he does

The decent upright liberal moral commentators clearly hoped against hope that the former US president would muster enough
residual decency to let on to be humbled when the camera shutter made its noise, enough residual decency to make him announce that he is a law-abiding man who takes this process seriously — witness him arriving on time and in the right place.

Now, Donald Trump, if asked about residual decency, would probably fail to understand the term. Nothing to do with him. His ways of reinforcing his already bullet-proof self-esteem do not relate to decency, residual or otherwise. Which baffles and infuriates mainstream commentators who assume it to be an eternal verity.

Those commentators don’t seem to get it — even after nearly a decade of full-on Trump — that one of the many factors making him appealing to his voters is that he has consistently indicated that mainstream commentators can stick their eternal verities on the highest rafter of the roof of their posterior.

But that’s the problem with mainstream media commentators of the liberal, decent, and upright persuasion: They have never sought to really understand the Trump phenomenon. It is such a painful ongoing challenge to them that they find three main ways of avoiding coming to terms with it.

The first — and arguably the most prevalent and shameful — of those ways is an eye-rolling confession of mystification. God, isn’t it just astonishing what he does? No, really, it’s like Churchill’s “riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma”. Makes no sense. But it’s happening. Sadly. This view of Trump tut-tuts about him arranging to time his perp walk so it suited TV news bulletins. Which, in turn, demonstrates what commentators are missing. They and the rest of media — at home in the US and abroad — can’t take their eyes off Trump. Timing was beside the point.

The second avoidance behaviour mainstream commentators use is high-level dismissive categorisation of Trump’s followers as ‘cult-like’. This is to misinterpret the term ‘cult’, which has always referred to a small bunch of people governed by a charismatic leader who requires that they buy in completely to a set of beliefs the rest of society shudders away from.

Except that Trump’s vast support base isn’t a small group. Waco, Jim Jones’s People’s Temple (whose believers ended up drinking poisoned Kool-Aid) and several 19th century religious groups led by a “prophet” who seemed to have a handle on the precise date whereon the world would end, were all cults.

Since Trump has millions of contradictions to that definition, the fact that it is so frequently deployed by people who would regard themselves as public intellectuals or at least as analytical thinkers, is amazing testament to the comfort derived from repetitively denigrating The Other. Calling those who follow Trump a cult isn’t racist or sexist or misogynistic. It’s just barking.

The third approach is to characterise those millions of Trump followers as unable to appreciate the big picture. The big picture being that the Democrat president has the economy lashing along beautifully. The reason Trump’s unintelligent fans don’t appreciate that is because those followers are not feeling the end results of a booming economy in their back pockets.

That statement is made as if it were provable, which it isn’t. Anyway, if hundreds of millions of voters are not experiencing a booming economy in their wallets and pocketbooks, that suggests the methods used to define the success or failure of an economy need to be looked at. But it misses a wider point that the three parties in the current Irish government are at serious risk of missing, and it’s this: Only ministers, economists, bankers, investors, and high-end commentators give a continental about the economy. Ever. 

That bunch talk to each other and talk down to the rest of us — here and in the US — as if we should appreciate living in a buoyant economy. However, the thing is that us plebs never think of ourselves as living in an economy. We think we live in a house, an apartment, a tent, a neighbourhood, a parish, a county, a country, or a nation.

Our self-defining moments are when one of our national athletes — like Rhasidat Adeleke — or one of our teams, or one of our actors does us proud. Few of us leap from the bed first thing seeking to be enthused by how the economy we’re not living in is doing.

Maybe it’s time to stop dropping nasty stuff from a great height on the dopes following Trump. Maybe it’s time to stop thinking of them as dopes. Maybe it’s time to stop mocking and deriding him and get serious about what it is that he does.

Commentators who thought they were maybe a bit on the liberal/left side — in so far as any US hack is leftward leaning — have failed to grasp that, just as Trump, single-handedly, has herded the GOP into a new self-definition (Crawling Followers of Trump) so he has shown US commentators and their publications the truth about themselves: They cannot cope with the Trump reality and few have tried. It’s easier to portray America itself as sick at heart, as deluded in its abandonment of normal politics, as gullible in buying what they see as Trump’s craziness.

The way those commentators approached the GOP debate exemplified this wilful counterproductivity.  In advance, they concentrated on his absence. Throughout, they concentrated on his absence. After it, they concentrated on his absence. 

A few did pause long enough to interrogate what the participants did (as in raising their hands to indicate they’d support Trump even if he was convicted of charges that run to the heart of loyalty to America) but only to do another eye roll at how lamentable they were.

"The debate had plenty of heat, flashes of genuine anger, and revealing policy disputes," @RonBrownstein writes: https://t.co/lI9capvsQU

— The Atlantic (@TheAtlantic) August 24, 2023

So, The Atlantic described the encounter as akin to Tom Stoppard’s play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, where two minor characters lifted from Hamlet never get close to the prince yet are still obsessed by him.

But hold it. Who asked the questions — the show-of-hands leading questions — that forced the participants in the big debate away from their own CVs, their own passions, their own policies, directing them instead to focus on Trump? Yep. The broadcasters.

If Trump was just a cult leader, they wouldn’t have paid him that attention or made that obeisance. Nor would they have tilted their show and all consequent coverage in his direction…