Trump: Misleading the People

Introduction (added 10/11/16)

I originally wrote this piece with a start and ending that assumed Trump had lost (yes, I know), and re-wrote it after he had won. I mention that because I think an unfortunate consequence of that is that many will read this as another 'why did he win' piece. It is not that, It is more a 'how did someone who was openly despised by most Republican politicians (included past Presidents), who broke all the normal rules, and generally acts like the dictator of some poor country unused to democracy, get a clear chance at being POTUS' type of question. Whether he won or not is irrelevant to that type of question.

Asking why he won is a whole different type of question, because you are looking at marginal shifts in the way people vote. His appeal to those in the rest belt who were adversely effected by globalisation is clearly relevant in that case.   


So the US has had its Brexit moment. Perhaps the lesson is that if people are promised impossible things and no one tells them they are impossible, you can motivate some potential voters to vote who would not otherwise have done so. But it would be wrong to get hung up on the polls: Nate Silver was clear that there was a good chance Trump could win.

The question to ask is how could the United States elect to its most powerful office not just a demagogue, but someone who lied openly all the time, incited hatred against other religions and ethnic groups, and promised to lock his opponent up if he won. We have to ask how this could happen.

You will hear a lot of talk about those left behind by globalisation, looking at charts like this

Share of income growth going to income groups from 1975 to 2007. Source OECD

They are remarkable, and they may explain some of the detail of how he swung votes at the margin. But, as Ezra Klein notes in an interesting article in Vox (written when he thought Trump would just lose), Trump support comes from people who are well off, do not live in areas hit by globalisation and are not in areas of recent immigration. They do not explain how a demagogue and liar gets to win so many votes. And they don’t explain how the chart above can lead to people electing a President who now almost certainly will cut taxes for the 1%.

His explanation instead comes from political scientist Julia Azari, who writes “The defining characteristic of our moment is that parties are weak while partisanship is strong.” It is certainly true that the Republican party hierarchy failed to stop Trump, and that a great many of them then went on to endorse him. It is also true that Sanders, an insurgent from the left, did very well in the Democrat primaries. But there the equivalence ends. Sanders is no demagogue who lies openly all the time, incited hatred against other religions and ethnic groups (unless perhaps you count bankers as an ethnic group), and promised to lock his opponent up if he won. He is hardly a threat to the democratic process.

This is one problem that I have with this argument. It implies a symmetry which is just not there. That is because it ignores a key feature of politics in the US over the last few decades, which is a steady march to the right. The threat to democracy comes only from the Republicans and their base. Let me put it another way. Republicans have become more partisan because the believe a centrist, experienced and relatively honest Hillary Clinton is beyond the pale, while Democrats have become more partisan because Republican policies are often mad. (Think climate change, guns, teaching evolution)

The other problem is that the analysis does not spell out why the Republican base has become so extreme, and why plenty of people who are not so extreme will have voted for Trump. You can certainly say that this extremism was encouraged by Republican politicians before the rise of the Tea Party: think of holding the government to ransom when Bill Clinton was President. But I think the biggest factor missing from Klein’s account - as it often is by those in the media - is the media itself.

This consists of two parts, much as it does in the UK. First there is Fox news: a highly partisan news provider with a clear right wing bias. Second there is an inability of the non-partisan media to provide any kind of counterweight when someone like Trump arrives, and in some cases provides help to his cause. I have talked about this second factor before, here and more briefly here, so let me concentrate on the first today.

The story is in fact told better than I ever could by Bruce Bartlett, who worked in the Reagan White House and for George HW Bush, so I’ll just summarise it here. The story starts under Reagan, who provided pressure to withdraw the Fairness Doctrine, which was similar to what keeps UK broadcasters from being partisan. Initially that allowed the rise of talk radio, and then Fox News. Gradually being partisan at Fox meant misinforming its viewers, such that Fox viewers are clearly less well informed than viewers of other news providers. One analysis suggested over half of the facts stated on Fox are untrue: UK readers may well remember them reporting that Birmingham was a no-go area for non-Muslims.

But why is this causal, rather than simply being a mirror on the rightward drift of the Republican base? The first point is that there is clear evidence that watching Fox news is more likely to make you vote Republican. The second is that, like the tabloids in the UK, this propaganda machine can turn on party leaders and keep them from moving left. The third is that it is also a machine for keeping the base angry and fired up and believing that nothing could be worse than voting for a Democrat. It is Fox News that stops Republican voters seeing that they are voting for a demagogue, conceals that he lies openly all the time, incites hatred against other religions and ethnic groups, and makes its viewers believe that Clinton deserves to be locked up. Just as UKIP (and perhaps now the Conservative party) is the political wing of the tabloids, so Trump is a creature of Fox news.

Trump’s election is a disaster for humanity. That may be true in ways we can only speculate about, but we know that he does not believe in climate change, thinks it is a Chinese hoax, will not follow the Paris agreement and will do all he can to support coal. With a Republican congress no one will stop him. When you think about that, remember also that Fox news (like sections of the UK press) encourages climate change denial, and the issue was not mentioned by the non-partisan nightly news election coverage (which obsessed about emails) or raised in any of the presidential debates. If you continue to mislead people in this way, they will continue to make terrible mistakes when they vote.