If Everyone Isn’t Pulling Their Hair Out, Trump Wins

Perfect, brutal description of the Trump effect from @RadioFreeTom. As the two of us have discussed many a time, it is very tough to continually fight exhaustion and Trump's attempts to turn us into "moral zombies." But we must. Gift link: https://t.co/RDRo3YcSqA pic.twitter.com/nwPlHBHLT1

— Jill Lawrence (@JillDLawrence) April 6, 2024

"Moral zombies”? I think there’s a class of Trump critics who have to keep amping up the rhetoric in order to get the attention. We did live through four years of Trump’s Administration. We are being reminded constantly now of what that was like.

I’m not a political expert. But is it a good or bad thing for the Trump campaign that there’s video evidence of Trump acting like a complete madman four years before every single day between now and Election Day? https://t.co/krbHEcyxZc

— Daniel Miller (@DanielMillerEsq) April 5, 2024

Interestingly, Tom Nichols is not a political expert, either.

There is no version of reality where everyone agrees with Chicken Little and Cassandra that we are all doomed if we don’t all start thinking exactly alike, no faint degree of difference allowed. “Moral zombies”?🧟‍♂️ Seriously? That’s what we are if we don’t recognize every word out of Trump’s mouth is another blot on the unsullied page of American history?

Do we really want to have that discussion?

How about we just get enough voters to agree Trump should not be President, and leave it at that?

"Watching a Trump speech in full better shows what it’s like inside his head: a smorgasbord of falsehoods, personal and professional vendettas, frequent comparisons to other famous people, a couple of handfuls of simple policy ideas, and a lot of non sequiturs that veer into barely intelligible stories," she suggested before adding, "... in a presidential race among two old men that’s often focused on the age of the one who’s slightly older, these campaign trail antics shed light on Trump’s mental acuity, even if people tend to characterize them differently than Joe Biden’s."

I’m sure the full immersive experience would be a good approach for some journalists still determined to make a narrative of Trump’s incoherent babble because they think that’s what journalism is, but this is a J-School argument, not a political one.

One thing politicians understand: you don’t need absolute unity and overwhelming acceptance to win: you just need a general consensus. Maybe that’s what scares people about Trump: but where is the consensus? It’s in the minds of the observers:

A large swath of America has apparently lost its collective mind about the Trump era.

My new column on the #Trumpamnesia factor in 2024: https://t.co/o1z7SLbV2j

— Susan Glasser (@sbg1) April 5, 2024

Obama didn’t have the approval rating of FDR during the war (did FDR have approval ratings? He got re-elected so many times they changed the constitution). But he defeated Romney handily. Bill Clinton probably could have won a third term if he’d been permitted. The awesome power of incumbency didn’t save Trump’s bacon.

What is the issue here, except that there aren’t enough people who agree wholeheartedly and single mindedly with Susan Glasser or Tom Nichols. Guess what? There never are! Politics isn’t the practice of making everyone think like you. Politics is the art of herding cats. It’s the effort of loading frogs into a wheelbarrow. Something about Trump especially makes some people want to be as tyrannical as Trump wants to be, but standing against him, not for him. They want the power over his army of zombies they think he has, but a countervailing force of zombies, equally mindlessly set on one task.

We really don’t need to win that way in order to keep Trump from the White House again. But they sure seem to need the clicks.