President Donald Trump famously said he could shoot someone
on Fifth Avenue and his supporters would continue to support him. And he has a
point. Since the start of his scandal-struck presidency, Trump’s approval
ratings have lingered at around 40%. By no means good, but with a
record-breaking turnover rate of top staff at the White House, numerous charges
brought against a plethora of campaign staff and countless other scandals it’s
remarkable that Trump has maintained the support he has. It's avid too. One
look at a packed campaign rally with an audience shouting “lock her up” shows a
president with an immensely die-hard base.
The Pew Research Centre says: “Political
polarization – the vast and growing gap between liberals and conservatives,
Republicans and Democrats – is a defining feature of American politics today”. A
2017 Pew poll showed that 43% of Republicans and 38% of Democrats have a negative view of the opposing party. These stats can be
exemplified in real life by how each side views the other’s preferred news
networks. MSNBC? Fake lefty propaganda. Fox News viewer? Fascist Trump
appeasers. In April, a Hollywood Reporter poll showed just about half of
Americans believed MSNBC and Fox News were credible and a 2018 Gallup poll revealed
a third of Conservatives have lost faith in the media, with almost half siting
“fake news” as a reason. This sort of division plays a key role in Trump’s
popularity. He’s accosted reporters to their faces, labelled them “fake news”. This
lends his supporters an enabled cognitive dissonance, to ignore the facts
presented by the media they chose to distrust. A damning report into Trump’s
past financial dealings from CNN would have weight, if it weren’t for the fact
that only 12% (Hollywood Reporter poll) see them as neutral, a statistic
potentially aided by Trump’s fervent attack on the outlet.
In 2016, there were two main rival camps battling
it out for the Democratic presidential nomination. Hillary Clinton was centrist,
neo-Liberal and seen as the establishment while Bernie Sanders was proudly left-wing,
economically populist, and anti-establishment. We see it happening again, with
newcomers such as the social democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez beating the
number two Democrat, Joe Crowley, in his own district, and consistent polling
showing Bernie Sanders to be the most popular US politician. The more
established centrists still control the head of the party however and disagree
fervently on policy and strategy. This conflict has resulted in a divided
attack strategy towards Trump. Left-leaning Democrats have attacked Trump on
such things as his flip-flop of universal health, while traditional centrist
Democrats have attacked Trump for things such as his populist rhetoric on trade.
This disunity prevents the Democrats from having the desired effect on Trump of
turning his supporters against him. Much of the news coverage is taken up by Democratic
Party infighting and just like Labour in the UK disunity within a party does
not inspire confidence in the electorate. To quote Thomas B. Edsall in the New
York Times: “Bernie Sanders scares quite a lot of people, and quite a few of
them are Democrats.”
In March, a Pew poll revealed 69% of evangelical
white Americans support president Trump, a twice-divorced billionaire who brags
about grabbing women by their intimate areas, allegedly cheated on his wife
with a porn star and who used to support abortion. On the surface, Trump and
evangelicals are not ideal bedfellows. A closer look and it makes sense. Since
running for President, Trump has become fervently anti-abortion. The once Hilary
Clinton donor gains support from this religious group because they know he will
– and already has – picked an anti-abortion judge for the supreme court which,
as Republicans maintain a majority in the court, could result in the recession
of Roe v Wade and spell the end of legal abortions in America. For
evangelicals, abortion is killing one of God’s children, so if you take that
into account it becomes a lot easier to forgive some adultery here and some
sexual harassment there.
Trump has endured a perfect cocktail of division,
bedfellows, voter disillusionment and distrust in the media that has taken him
from Comedy Central Roast to ruler of the free world in just 5 years. The
ironic thing about Trump is that so much of his victory is thanks to those who
hate him most. The media, the Democratic and all which make up the nebulous
establishment have conjured up such antipathy from the general public that a
voice like Trump’s, however self-aggrandising or blatantly factually incorrect,
is fresh air from what many voters see as the same old lies told by the same
old people. This, mixed with Trump’s support of a few deeply conservative
policies, populist rhetoric and a little race baiting wasn’t enough for him to
win the popular vote, but was for the electoral college and to hold onto a
deeply loyal base that is unwavering in its support – for now at least.
Sidebar 1 – Trump’s biggest scandals
The Stormy Daniels affair
In 2018 The Wall Street Journal revealed that
just before the 2016 US Presidential Election Donald Trump’s lawyer – and
so-called “fixer” – Michael Cohen, had paid porn actress Stormy Daniels
$130,000 to sign a non-disclosure agreement about an affair she had with Trump
in 2006, who was married at the time. Trump, at the time, denied the money and
affair. But in 2018 Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison and ordered to
pay a $50,000 fine for tax, bank and campaign finance crimes. In 2018, Cohen
said that he willingly violated campaign finance laws at the direction of Trump
“for the principal purpose of influencing" the
2016 presidential election.
The Obama birther movement
Interestingly, Trump’s first foray into politics
was as a so-called “birther”, questioning whether Obama was really born in
America. Trump claimed when Obama grew up “nobody knew him” and that “there was
something on his birth certificate that Obama doesn’t like”. After Obama
released his birth certificate, Trump offered to donate £5 million to a charity
of Obama’s choice if he released college and passport applications. Birtherism
was largely dubbed a racist movement, as the first black President of the
United States was accused of not being a real American.
Trump University
Trump University was a for-profit education
company that ran from 2005 to 2010. It offered courses in real estate, assessed
management and wealth creation. In 2016, After becoming president, Trump
settled three lawsuits against the company, claiming it defrauded students and
used misleading marketing techniques, for $25 million. The scandal was used by
Trump’s opponents to claim he was and still is a conman.
Hollywood access tapes
Most likely one of Trump’s biggest scandals, many
pundits were amazed at how this scandal did not sink Trump’s presidential
aspirations. In 2016, during the presidential race, The Washington Post
published a video in which Trump described seducing a married woman. Trump
said: “I don’t even wait. And when you’re a star they let you do it. You can do
anything. Grab them by the pussy”. Trump was married to his current spouse
Melania Trump at the time and many commentators accused Trump of being a sexual
predator. Trump and his allies dismissed the tape as “locker-room talk”.
Howard Dean and the dire scream
In 2004, Howard Dean was the front runner for the
Democratic Party nomination. But on January 19, 2004, at an Iowa caucus started
rallying up his crowd after a disappointing 3rd place defeat. During
which he screamed “ahhh” as he waved his mic from right to left. The gaffe
turned out to be the downfall of his campaign as he plummeted in polls and his opponents
attacked him as unhinged and crazed.
Like Trump, at the time Dean was considered a
long-shot maverick at first then and managed to become the frontrunner (until
his unfortunate vocal faux-pas at least). Dean does like Trump though, in 2018,
labelling him “mentally ill”.
David Eisenbach, a presidential historian, said
in 2016: “The difference between an incidental gaffe and one that can really
bring down a campaign is if that gaffe somehow speaks to something that the
public and media are suspicious of that character. For example, Howard Dean,
he’s kind of a high-strung guy and his opponents in the race were whispering
‘this guy cannot be trusted, he’s not going to be a cool commander and chief.
This guy is going to have his finger on the atomic bomb button. So, when he has
that explosion of the Dean scream it played into the narrative that was already
waiting to be exposed by the media.”
This is in stark contrast from today’s political
landscape where flagrant lies – such as when Trump accused his main Republican
presidential opponent, Ted Cruz’s father of being the man who murdered JFK –
are not enough to nudge the polls even a few points.
Media scholar Robert Thompson said in 2016: “If
Howard Dean were running for the 2016 election and he did the exact speech I
don’t think anybody would have been paying any attention to it whatsoever.
Howard Dean has got to be sitting at home and watching every night some of the
things these candidates are saying, and he must be wondering at the unfairness
of the universe that he was born just a little too early.”
Comments
Post a Comment