In the last few days, I’ve read several articles that serve up amusing, schaden-freudy takes on the way Donald Trump has spawned imitators who are now using his own media-savvy tactics against him; check them out here, here, and here. The proximate cause for these pieces is the heartburn/brewing crisis in the West Wing caused by former Apprentice star and presidential staffer Omarosa Manigault Newman publishing her memo and dropping secret recordings of White House interactions in quick succession over the last week. But these observers note that not only Manigault Newman, but Michael Cohen and Michael Avenatti as well, represent this trend of "mini-Trumps." Of course, with Manigault Newman, you may have the most distinct instance of the phenomenon: a person who not only has learned to emulate Trump’s tactics, but at a deeper level seems to share many of his darker character traits.
I’ll admit it: on a gut level, the idea that Trump has both created (in the cases of Manigault Newman and Cohen) and inspired (in the case of Avenatti) opponents who are able to throw him off his game and potentially do him real damage is deeply satisfying. In his article on the phenomenon, Josh Marshall refers to them as Trump’s “nemeses,” which I think playfully captures some of the surreal justice of these figures rising up to smite the president. But it’s in the strong sense that we are watching a Godzilla versus Mothra battle of nuclear fallout-spawned titans that we begin to understand that no matter who wins these battles, the American people are certain to lose.
If it hadn’t been clear when our attention was focused solely on Trump, it’s come into focus now: those who embrace and evolve strategies of media manipulation and information warfare can really only use these tools to destroy, never to build up. They might or might not be able to beat each other, but their scorched earth tactics and personal aggrandizement are antithetical to the consensus-building and mass participation necessary for healthy democratic politics.
And yet, in the spectacle of their demonic clash, it’s difficult to look away from the fireworks, the raw animus, the pure drama. The pieces I've read all draw clear parallels to the mechanisms of reality TV. Ultimately, these are tactics meant to draw viewers and build ratings; while there’s no denying their magnetic power, they get us nowhere good as a country. Confusing matters in the case of all three of the “mini-Trumps” I’ve noted are extremely serious matters of public concern in which they're embroiled, whether it’s Cohen’s knowledge of illegal activities by the president, Trump’s use of campaign funds to pay off Avenatti’s client Stormy Daniels, or the fact that Trump is all too comfortable using the “N” word, as alleged by Manigault Newman. These hard stones of substance end up conferring legitimacy on the debased tactics of these three, providing cover for their primary goal of self-promotion and, for Manigault Newman and Cohen, self-exoneration.
Avenatti raises the most worrisome concerns by far. He’s suggested interest in seeking the Democratic nomination for president in 2020, which is both deeply insane and also uncomfortably plausible given his success to date as an anti-Trump trickster-lawyer media savant. It’s hard to see Avenatti actually winning — too many Democrats would rebel at his opportunism — but it’s believable that he’d gain some sizable following as someone who can fight on Trump’s level, the substance of his ideas be damned. As likely, he would perform the same feat as Trump did in the 2015-16 primaries, sucking away oxygen from other candidates due to a combination of freak show appeal and publicity smarts. This would potentially be catastrophic for the Democrats in a few ways: it would divert attention from hashing out the real policy and strategy questions that the party faces, increase the chances that the Democratic Party adopts a stance that prioritizes attacking Trump over putting forward a constructive agenda for America, and undercut the eventual nominee.
But it’s with that last point — the damage someone like Avenatti would inflict on the actual Democratic candidate for president, whether through direct attacks or simply suctioning off news coverage — that reality really begins to warp and weave in a nauseatingly familiar way. Whether or not Avenatti runs, the Democratic nominee will still have to face Trump’s analogous ability to swim the currents of the media like a fish in water. The big question, then, is whether Democratic politicians can figure out a way to counter Trump’s mastery of the contemporary media environment without adopting his nihilistic, manipulative, and essentially anti-democratic tactics, in which politics is alternately primal, apocalyptic, a joke, a lie, and a Darwinian survival of the Twitter fittest.
In a recent interview of media and technology guru Zeynep Tufekci, Ezra Klein discussed with her the idea that technology shapes how we perceive reality, including politics. Television has arguably led us to see everything in terms of entertainment, with our reality show president a logical outgrowth of this tendency. But Tufekci and Klein also talked about the fact that we’re in, or at least moving into, a world in which social media is now serving as the central paradigm for how we conceive of the world. The nature of this new structure is both in flux and subject to debate, but ideas such as information or attention overload and a prioritization of personal and mass anger and resentment come forward as prime characteristics. Regardless of its specific nature, it seems incontrovertible that our communications networks, and by extension our sense of how we view reality, have changed.
The basic question that I keep coming back to is this: in such an environment, is it even possible to counter the new Trumpian media approach to politics without simply becoming uncomfortably like Trump himself? No good has come of the way we have collectively viewed politics as entertainment (a propensity that still continues, and is interacting with social media technology), and it’s hard to be optimistic that this latest mutation will bring anything good (particularly with Donald Trump as the avatar of this new dispensation). It seems impossible for any successful Democratic presidential candidate to avoid grappling with what really are existential issues for American politics. My nightmare is a repeat of 2016, with an “analogue” Democratic candidate never being able to break through the media frenzy surrounding a widely-despised opponent.
But I suppose It’s possible I’m worrying too much. After all, despite her many flaws and media disadvantage vis-a-vis Donald Trump, Hilary Clinton still beat him by a good margin in the popular vote — a point we should not lose track of. Similarly, it was Trump’s revanchist and populist message that gained him so many votes, without which his mastery of the media would have meant far less. But then I start to think that an environment that favors lies, disinformation, and rage will always favor the candidate who seeks to break us down into a mythical past, not the candidate who runs on facts and conscious, collective change. . .