Donald Trump and Jimmy Carter revisited, Part V: Trump's personality cult

 After a brief intermission, we pick up where Part IV left the series.  Donald Trump has been an utter failure in terms of negotiating with Congress.  He has been worse than Carter.  Carter was an outsider, elected by the McGovern-Fraser rules, and so he lacked any connection to or understanding of the processes of Washington D.C.  The same has been true of Donald Trump, who knows nothing of political processes, but in addition to that, knows nothing about public policy, making him even more legislatively ineffectual than Carter.

Yet, Trump has taken a different path, as discussed in Part IV.  He has expanded executive power by relying on executive actions to an extreme beyond any peacetime president, and going beyond any constitutional boundaries.  Puzzlingly, the Republicans in Congress who had refused to pass Trump's legislative agenda also refused to do anything about his unconstitutional executive actions.  Why?  There has been one consistent thread in their response to Trump and his deviations from conservative orthodoxy:  passivity.  Why?  Fear.  Fear of Trump's electoral base.  Unlike Carter, and indeed, unlike any modern president, Donald Trump has a personality cult surrounding him that scares congressional Republicans into that passivity.  They have not been pressured to act on his agenda, but they have not been willing to confront him.

So let's take a moment to pick on poor Samuel Kernell.  Kernell wrote a famous and picked-on book called Going Public.  The idea of Going Public is that a president can trade on public opinion in order to threaten to campaign against legislators who don't pass his legislative agenda.  It is a risky strategy, for a variety of reasons, but that's the gist.  It isn't merely about public appeals, and speeches, and... rallies.  It is about posing an electoral threat to legislators who oppose him.  Fail to do my bidding, and I'll make sure you lose your next election.

Lots of us, political scientists, have been skeptical of Kernell for a long time.  Mainly, it relies on the idea that the president can move public opinion, and we have scholars like George Edwards, who have shown that presidents have a great deal of difficulty with this task.  Yet, if Trump has such a loyal base of support within the GOP, shouldn't he have been able to pressure them into passing his bills when they had unified support?  Hmmm... We'll come back to this.

Anyway, Donald Trump is a strange creature, in many ways.  One of Niccolo Machiavelli's famous pieces of analysis in The Prince was that the prince was supposed to make efforts to appear pious.  The prince did not have to be pious.  After all, the goal of the princely state was stability, and maintaining the stability of the state would often require doing things that conventional, religious morality would condemn.  Yet, maintaining the support of the nobles, who had their own resources, and preventing too much discontent among the peasantry would require making an effort to appear pious.

Donald J. Trump spits in the face of Niccolo Machiavelli.  He is, quite literally, a wrestling heel.  He actually did participate in professional wrestling, as a heel.  The job of the heel is to be as villainous as possible, as ostentatiously as possible, in order to rile up the audience.  This comes naturally to Donald J. Trump, since he is a true sociopath, who never learned to hide his sociopathic nature.  Born rich and surrounded by sycophants, at no point in his life did he ever have to feign empathy, compassion, honesty, or basic human decency.  It is a skill he does not have because it is a skill that he never needed.  Some sociopaths learn to hide, and some don't.  Trump never learned to hide that he is a sociopath.

In fact, then, it isn't strategy that he acts as the heel.  He simply is the heel.  He is the lying-est liar who ever lied a lie, and his lies are so transparent that you have to be the kind of idiot who falls for the Nigerian Prince email scam to be taken in by him.  He brags about getting away with sexual assault, and so on.  There's no point continuing.  That's just Trump.

The question, then, is how such a creature becomes the object of a personality cult.  The other day, I posted Living Colour's song, "Cult of Personality," and the song references figures from Gandhi to Stalin.  Stalin actually has the all-time title for mass murder.  He beats out Hitler and Mao, despite the fact that we associate Hitler's name with the totality of evil.  Yet each of these figures developed cults of personality.  And what we can say about them is... at least they weren't morons.

You can watch a recording of Hitler's oratory and be terrified that so much evil can be combined with the force of his oratory, and think that people were manipulated by a perversely gifted villain.  And we contrast that with a Trump rally, in which we can reduce every Trump statement to:  "As you know, we'll see what happens.  It'll be the likes of which you've never seen.  But what we have now is a total disgrace, and it should never be allowed to happen again."

This?!  This is what people worship?  The guy who brags about sexual assault and can't pass a Turing Test?  Seriously.  Put this guy's words into a salad spinner, spit 'em out at random, and would you really know the difference?  He's not just a sociopath, and not just a bully.  He's a nincompoop.

This is the difficulty that those of us who read for a living have with respect to Donald Trump.  We.  Just.  Can't.  Get.  It.

So how does Trump's personality cult work?

The quick and unsatisfying answer is the Republican media ecosystem.  Fox News, and the rest of the conservative echo chamber will spend all day every day fluffing Dear Leader.  The difference between Fox News and North Korean state media is that the employees at Fox News have actual paychecks and consumer goods on which to spend them.

Yet, Fox didn't start the 2016 primary cycle as a Trump campaign organ.  Trump started building a deeply loyal following long before Fox became his personal propaganda machine.  Once Trump became the Republican nominee, Fox's niche in the media ecosystem forced it to become the Trump News Network, but people started flocking to Trump before the conservative media coalesced around him.  That observation of time order is important.

That doesn't mean the media ecosystem isn't important.  Carter certainly didn't have it.  For all Republicans whine about "liberal media bias," the line is little more than a combination of underlying paranoia combined with a strategy designed to manipulate journalists into easing up any criticism on Republicans while ramping up criticism on Democrats.  Prior to the fragmentation of the media into their current arrangement, their only consistent bias was an oppositional bias.  It is merely that Republicans whined about it more.

And Carter certainly didn't have the press working for him.  He didn't even have MSNBC, for whatever that'd be worth.

On the other hand, anyone who exists within the Republican media ecosystem receives a steady diet of pro-Trump propaganda, and nary a hint of actual fact.  That will tend to reinforce loyalty to Trump, but again, for a significant portion of the Republican electorate, that was there before the Republican media ecosystem decided that its raison d'etre was saving Trump the cost of a little, blue pill or the need to stare at a picture of Ivanka.

So... why?  If the loyalty preceded, at least in an inchoate way, the media coalescence, then why?  What is it about Trump, the current state of the Republican electorate, and the interaction between the two?

We can never ignore the observation that Trump rose to the presidential stage through his embrace of birtherism-- the platonic ideal of the Venn diagram overlap between racism and idiotic, conspiratorial lies.  That was his point of entry, and his rallying cry.  This speaks as much to Donald J. Trump the man as it does to the current state of a large portion of the Republican electorate.  Those who have embraced Trump, and joined his cult as loyal followers.  There is no way around this.  No escape.  We cannot separate Donald J. Trump from birtherism, and we cannot separate birtherism from racism, paranoia, stupidity and lying.

At the core of Trump's personality cult has always been that.  Narratives have been constructed to try to explain away Trump's support.  Groups that feel left behind, anti-elite sentiment, or some such.  Why do people work so hard to construct these narratives?  They are actively trying to forget birtherism.

Why is a reality tv show huckster, who failed at business after business, involved in politics at all?  There is one and only one answer.

Birtherism.

Am I saying that Donald Trump's core followers are stupid and racist?  Pretty much.

One question for them:  Where was Barack Obama born?  Every Trump supporter should still be asked this question, and judged by their answers.

So we have a president.  A president with a loyal cult.  And we return to Samuel Kernell.  According to Going Public, a president with a high approval rating should be able to pressure Congress to pass his agenda by threatening to campaign against intransigent legislators, and moving public opinion.  If Trump is so popular among his base, he could threaten to campaign against intransigent Republicans in a primary, right?  Doesn't he kind of make that threat on a regular basis anyway?  So... why haven't they passed his heterodox bills?

While subsequently being unwilling to confront him when he oversteps his constitutional authority through executive action?

A smart cult leader might actually have been able to pull off a Kernell maneuver!  In principle, maybe.  Edwards would argue that such an effort would be futile, but if we accept the premise of Kernell's argument, Trump could have said to intransigent Republicans, give me my wall, or I'll campaign against you in primaries!  He... didn't.  Why not?

He's an idiot.  And lazy.

On the other hand, the lazy thing to do was just to declare a phony national emergency, and steal the money from another project.

But...

Had congressional Republicans intervened then... ooh.  Then, Trump might have done something.  And then, those congressional Republicans would have been scared.  So we come back to the observation of passivity.  Republicans have remained passive throughout all of Trump's presidency in the face of Trump's ideological apostasy.  Why?  It has just been the easiest and safest way to deal with someone they don't respect, but of whose base they are afraid.

Carter didn't have that base.  He couldn't have done what Trump did with the phony emergency declaration.  Congressional Democrats would have passed a new bill, with Republican support and a veto-proof majority blocking Carter's attempt.  However, Trump had enough Republicans who either supported the wall for real, or were scared enough that even though they saw what was happening, they didn't want to face a backlash from the kinds of idiots who... well, thought Mexico was paying.

This is about fear.  The use of fear, and the bizarre politics of fear, when it comes to a group of people motivated centrally by loyalty to someone who exists in the political realm because of a stupid, racist, easily debunked lie.

Sorry, Niccolo.  You don't need to feign piety.  I think we can throw out that text now.

That said, things are looking kind of sketchy for Trump next week.  Why?  Live by the sword, die by the sword.  Coming next, in Part VI.