Over at Slate, Jamelle Bouie elaborates on a point that I touched on briefly in Scenes From a Panicking White House, where I speculated that perceptions of Trump’s power may be overstated by his opposition. Bouie suggests that a journalistic over-emphasis on Donald Trump’s hard core of supporters has created a blindness to the larger fact of his historical unpopularity. He notes how absymal the president’s approval numbers are compared to previous presidents, and the concrete ways in which this is affecting his ability to get things done:
It matters that Trump is historically unpopular. It robs him of potential allies in the Democratic Party. Even “red state” Democrats like Sen. Heidi Heitkamp in North Dakota or Sen. Joe Manchin in West Virginia must think hard about working with the president. Likewise, it puts him on uneven ground with “blue state” Republicans like Sen. Susan Collins of Maine. It weakens his overall agenda. Public skepticism about Trump has transferred to his tax plans, putting Republicans in a hole as they move to transform the tax code.
Bouie contends that his declining poll numbers show that Trump’s scandals and mistakes have in fact hurt his political standing — that he’s not untouchable, as some pundits would have us believe. And it’s not just that Trump is hindered, Bouie goes on to say; his weakness puts him on the verge of being a failed president.
As much as I agree with Bouie’s spot-on criticism of the media’s coverage of Donald Trump — there has surely been an underemphasis of the fact that only just over a third of the nation supports him, and this in turn has led to overstatements of his political clout — and as much as I like how this backs up my speculation that there is great possible harm in overestimating Donald Trump’s political power, Bouie’s conclusion that Trump is close to a failed presidency is a point I find myself both wholeheartedly agreeing and disagreeing with. How can this be?!
My schizoid stance brings us back to one of the fundamental questions that has kept popping up since Donald Trump’s election: do the regular rules of electoral politics still apply, or are we in altogether new territory? Let’s stay with Donald Trump’s exceedingly low approval ratings for the moment. I take Bouie as making the case that the old rules apply, for example, insofar as he sees the president’s position in past discussions over the GOP tax plan to be weakened by his basic unpopularity. I would agree that on something like the tax bill, this is the case.
But another fundamental question to ask is not whether Donald Trump is succeeding or failing under our normal measures of success in a democracy, but to what degree he is engaging in behavior that undermines our democracy — behavior that indicates he may be playing by a different set of rules entirely. Because alongside traditional measures like approval polls and whether the president is actually able to get legislation he supports passed by Congress, there is a whole other dimension of the GOP’s near-lockstep march in running interference around Trump’s scandals, from the Russia investigation to his incompetence in handling the Puerto Rico disaster. Our entire politics is haunted by an alternate storyline, unfolding on a daily basis, in which an authoritarian White House resorts to increasingly desperate and anti-democratic measures to assert its power. We could even make the somewhat obvious observation that his incentive to take such measures increases as Donald Trump’s poll numbers decrease and as his scandals mount. The greater his political weakness as measured in traditional terms, the greater the incentive to fight cultural wars, demonizing NFL players and immigrants; to call for the FBI to investigate Hillary Clinton; to call on his supporters to simply, ominously “DO SOMETHING,” as he tweeted last month. In this way, you can see how the authoritarian possibilities of the Trump White House exist in a parasitic relationship to more democratic measures of success.
There is also the unpleasant fact that because of gerrymandering and more polarized party identification on the right, the GOP majority in Congress is dangerously insulated from broader public disapproval of Donald Trump. With so many districts more or less impervious to a Democratic challenger, GOP congresspeople most fear attacks from their right flank, not from the left; and what better way to shore up that right flank than to support Donald Trump through thick and thin?
Apart from Trump’s own authoritarian tendencies and the GOP’s built-in incentives to support Trump to the hilt, the other great challenge to our traditional understanding of politics right now is the degree to which Trump supporters are living in a different informational reality than the rest of Americans. This piece by David Roberts at Vox is an excellent take on how the powerful right-wing media echo chamber has brought us to a point at which Americans are living in two different worlds of facts and explanations for what transpires in our shared world. Roberts uses the real-world example of the Mueller investigation and Mueller’s possible finding of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia to make his case.
The phenomenon of the influential right-wing media has been explored thoroughly and often over the last two decades as it evolved into the foul-headed hydra that poisons our discourse today, but Roberts makes the case that we’ve reached a turning point of deep “epistemic breach.” This is a philosophy term concerning fundamental disagreement over “who we trust, how we come to know things, and what we believe we know — what we believe exists, is true, has happened and is happening.” Roberts’ assertion that the conservative movement is the primary cause of this breach as a general issue in our society is debatable, but it’s hard to argue that right-wingers and their media aren’t the primary cause of this in the political sphere.
“Epistemic breach” is some high-faluting terminology, but an alternate conservative universe of lies has been developing for a long time; with Donald Trump, a man who lies effortlessly and endlessly, this universe now feels like it’s enormous, self-sustaining, and in danger of suffocating us all, or at least breaking the country into irreconcilable systems of facts and understanding. Roberts’ example involving Republicans rejecting Mueller’s possible future finding of collusion between Trump and Russia feels creepily accurate, as it’s only been borne out in the time since he wrote the article, with the right-wing embarking on a concerted effort to discredit Mueller even before the conclusion of his investigation.
Roberts’ peroration is dismal:
The only way to settle any argument is for both sides to be committed, at least to some degree, to shared standards of evidence and accuracy, and to place a measure of shared trust in institutions meant to vouchsafe evidence and accuracy. Without that basic agreement, without common arbiters, there can be no end to dispute.
If one side rejects the epistemic authority of society’s core institutions and practices, there’s just nothing left to be done. Truth cannot speak for itself, like the voice of God from above. It can only speak through human institutions and practices.
[If] the very preconditions of science and journalism as commonly understood have been eroded, then all that’s left is a raw contest of power.
Millions of us are aware of the evil of this fake news/alternative facts, right-wing discourse; if we’re going to return our country to a sounder course, we’re going to have to figure out a collective antidote to this corrosive assault on fact-based truth.
