Horror story

Politics demands a compelling narrative. Whether it's true is irrelevant.

The older I get, the more I’m convinced of the power of storytelling. Our lives revolve around narratives—from the vision we have of ourselves to the tales we weave about our families to the cars we drive and the brands we covet. We assign our beliefs the same way, applying our moral compass to particular societal wants and needs and, in turn, to political parties and candidates that match how we see ourselves.

Which gets me to Donald Trump.

Americans head to the polls a week from today for what is, all hyperbole aside, the most consequential and terrifying election in living memory. Both sides of the political aisle agree on this, but why they respectively view it as consequential and terrifying says everything about the narratives they’ve created (or not).

At his “carnival of grievances, misogyny, and racism” rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden two days ago, Trump’s message was crystal clear: the United States is a hellscape, overrun by illegal migrants who are stealing jobs and committing crimes, woke lefties forcibly giving kids sex-change operations, uppity women who have forgotten their sole purpose is to have babies, and a Democratic presidential candidate who’s a promiscuous moron benefitting from affirmative action. The solution presented was simple: “Trump will fix it.”

Not a word of that narrative is true. But from the perspective of a Trump supporter, the story fits. And if Trump has any form of genius, it’s certainly not as a businessman or husband or father or human being. It’s in his ability to identify weak spots and exploit them for personal gain—whether it’s stiffing contractors and challenging them to go bankrupt fighting him in court; lying about asset values to both minimize his tax bill and secure financing; or pinpointing legitimate problems facing low-income Americans, lying about their causes, then offering a simple but fake solution.¹

“Over the past 45 years, working people have been sledgehammered as the nation moved from an industrial economy to a postindustrial one,” Adam Seessel wrote in the New York Times last week. “Can you blame our compatriots if they respond to a dark and often irrational candidate who promises to restore not only their incomes but also their pride? I can’t, not really.”

In 2016, Trump ran on his “Make America Great Again” ticket at a time when the country was historically already in great shape. As former president Barack Obama keeps noting, “the reason some people think, 'I remember that economy when he first came in being pretty good’—yeah, it was pretty good because it was my economy! We had 75 straight months of job growth that I handed over to him. He didn’t do nothing! Except those big tax cuts.”

That last part isn’t strictly true. Trump did a lot: his tax cuts disproportionately favored the wealthy, blew out the deficit, and his bungled response to the global pandemic exacerbated America’s death toll and delayed its economic recovery. When Trump says people need to ask “are you better off than four years ago?” he’s asking them to forget that by October 2020, the US economy had contracted at an annualized rate of 31.4% in the June quarter of that year, there were 10.7 million fewer jobs than before the pandemic, and hundreds were dying every day of COVID-19 (a rate that would increase to thousands every day before he left office in January 2021).

And yet … his misleading narrative has been consistent because it works.² Almost half the country will next week vote for Trump’s return and for him to end the non-existent American carnage his dark inauguration speech touted in January 2017, which former president George W. Bush listened to then famously told Hillary Clinton: “That was some weird shit.”

For Democrats, the election is consequential and terrifying precisely because there’s a chance Trump will return to office.

That the United States faces thorny, seemingly intractable problems is without dispute. We’re boiling the planet faster than we can ever adapt. Inequality is widening, with wealth and power concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. Young people struggle to get a foothold on any kind of ladder. The elderly are forgotten, left to fight for scraps of dignity in a system that doesn’t support them. Young men are totally adrift. And social media is decimating our kids’ sense of self and self worth.

The problem? While the left has a compelling story to tell, it seems uniquely incompetent in its ability to do so. Kamala Harris’ policies hit on smart, fact-based approaches on almost every front, from increasing opportunity for younger people to strengthening the social safety net, protecting individual rights, investing in climate efforts, regulating increasingly monopolistic tech companies (and business in general), and increasing taxes on the wealthy and corporations.

It’s a simple tale of building a fairer America. Yet it’s not a story Democrats tell in any way effectively, especially when there’s an inclination to dismiss Trump supporters as stupid for perpetually voting against their own self-interest.³ They absolutely vote against their own self-interest, but they’re doing so driven by the Trump narrative offering a sugar high on whatever issue you choose. It’s utterly irrelevant that he’ll never actually stick it to the “elites” (a class he’s desperate to join) or that he’ll resurrect an economy that’s actually the envy of the planet. What he offers is an outlet for grievances and a promise to return to a world that never existed.

All of which gets back to why storytelling is so, so important. After Obama’s election, it felt as though the United States had course corrected—that the years of dopey Dubya had been leapfrogged by the elevation of a president who was smart, empathetic, and who happened to be, yes, Black.⁴ It felt as though the country’s collective arc had bent toward justice.

Yet it was an illusion. Obama was the president America didn’t deserve and the shift in the national narrative was embodied in him, not in a broader story Democrats repeated about the state of the nation and its aspirations. When Obama exited, so did the storyline—a void filled by a carnival barker with a unique (and uniquely dangerous) ability to tap into the country’s worst instincts.

On Tuesday, we’ll see just how many people still believe the lies. And I’ll cross fingers enough Americans—especially women, who are yet again called on to save the day—are able to look past the Democrats’ inept storytelling to the truth that underpins it. I’m hopeful, but definitely not holding my breath.

Note: The amazing image accompanying this post is by POLITICO’s Angelina Katsanis.

A note about whatever this is …

After writing a few thousand articles for newspapers and magazines, I spent a long time trying a bunch of other stuff. I guess I figured what came (relatively) easily must by definition be less valuable, so I wandered in the corporate wilderness, becoming increasingly frustrated and doing work that felt increasingly lousy.

Sometimes with age comes wisdom, and I’ve realized finding something (relatively) easy ain’t a bad thing. So, this is a space where I’m resurrecting writing for myself, on topics weird and wild and wonderful.

Posts will appear when the mood takes me, but I do try to be consistently inconsistent—sometimes it’ll be a couple of days between drinks; sometimes a week. But if you subscribe, you’ll get a email letting you know I’m ranting. Again.

1. It should come as no surprise there’s a strong correlation between religiosity and support for Trump. Despite zero evidence of the existence of a higher being, religion offers a simple explanation for complex, often uncomfortable, truths—and no amount of proof to the contrary alters a believer’s “faith” in what they think is true.

2. For a lesson in how, take a peek at Megyn Kelly’s execrable performance last week on Bill Maher’s Real Time. The righteous misleading is off the charts, as is the complete dismissal of how Trump and his sycophants have systematically dismantled the already flimsy guardrails that barely kept his impulses in check in his first term. I’m also not going to ask “what the heck happened to Megyn Kelly?” because, like Maria Bartiromo and dozens of others, implicit in that question is the assumption they were once serious journalists.

3. I’m not denying the role the media has in all of this. The double standard faced by Harris is gobsmacking, as are the kid gloves applied to Trump. The latest example? The self-censorship of the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times’ billionaire owners, who have vetoed endorsements of Harris to place personal kowtowing above the nation’s future. They’re also not alone in doing that, sadly.

4. Isn’t it astonishing that pretty much any non-Trump supporter would love to see someone like George W. Bush as the Republican candidate? The fact he seems competent by comparison tells you all you need to know.