Biden's Vision Is Positive; Trump's Is Positively Dystopian
During the bitter 1796 election campaign— the third in our young nation’s history and the first to be contested and first with political parties (despite Washington’s warnings about them)— Federalist candidate John Adams and Democratic-Republican candidate Thomas Jefferson were at each other’s throats. Adams was accused of seeking British assistance, while Jefferson was accused of seeking French support (while the French Revolution was in its nadir).
Two centuries later, in 1968, Nixon went one step further, actually sabotaging the Vietnam peace talks but conspiring with our enemies to keep the war going! Unfortunately, he and Kissinger got away with it, which was the a green light in the 1980s for Reagan to get Iran to not release the American hostages before the election and to reward them with arms. That went well enough for someone with a criminal mind that Trump decided to seek help from his Russian buddies in 2016.
Trump didn’t get into any trouble over the assistance he got from the Kremlin— and he wound up in the White House. Basically, he gaslighted his way out of the bad p.r. “Gaslighting” has always been his middle name and one of his favorite battle tactics— along with projection, diversion and deflection, ad hominem attacks, hyperbole, exaggeration, embellishment and outright unsupportable lies, playing the victim/martyr, labelling and name-calling and good ole false equivalency.
Yesterday, a team of Washington Post reporters wrote about the dark vision Trump is painting for his followers, the hard core MAGAdonians who treat his rallies as cheap entertainment and show up for them to hear his delusional standup routine and to bond with the other MAGAdonians. The trio of reporters went to see him in Rock Hill, South Carolina and analyzed his 90 minute blab-fest, “laden with resentments, offering a dark vision for the nation that terrifies Democrats and animates his Republican base. It touched on recurring themes, including his election denialism, his promise of a sudden transformation in another Trump term and his claims of persecution and martyrdom… contain[ing] a slew of falsehoods and mistruths, ranging from hyperbole to outright lies, like his false claim that the 2020 election was stolen… [and pledges like] fulfilling his promises to root out the so-called ‘deep state’ of civil servants, harshly cracking down on illegal immigration and crime, and pulling back from the world stage. It also reveals many of his weaknesses as a candidate, such as sometimes slurring his words, confusing names of world leaders and attacking minorities in offensive ways.” Towards the end he was promising “to cast out the communists, Marxists and fascists” [and to] “throw off the sick political class that hates our country. We will rout the fake news media, we will drain the swamp and we will liberate our country from these tyrants and villains once and for all.”
Here’s the classic gaslighting, “almost a complete alternate reality of what the world looked like under his administration— and what it would look like under a second one, as well.”
“Under the Trump administration, you were better off, your family was better off, your neighbors were better off, your communities were better off and our country was far, far, far better off; that’s for sure,” Trump said, less than 10 minutes into his Rock Hill speech. “America was stronger and tougher and richer and safer and more confident.”
...“Look what happened to our country,” he continued. “You have wars that never would have taken place. Russia would have never attacked Ukraine. Israel would have never been attacked. You wouldn’t have had inflation.”
…Reiterating a key stump speech riff, Trump continued: “I’m being indicted for you. That’s what’s happened. Never forget our enemies want to take away my freedom because I will never let them take away your freedom. I will never let it happen.”
He concluded the bit by portraying himself as a martyr, as he does at almost every rally.
“They want to silence me because I will never let them silence you,” Trump told his supporters. “And in the end, they’re not after me. They’re after you. I just happened to be standing in their way.”
…Trump offers a dark and apocalyptic description of the state of the country under Biden. And he has cast anything other than a win for him in November as spelling doom for the nation, often saying that 2024 “is our final battle.”
In Rock Hill, Trump described an ominous vision of what would happen if he lost. He warned of “the largest stock market crash we’ve ever had.” At another point, he cautioned, “We’ll end up in World War III.”
He described Washington as a crime-ridden city, asking the crowd: “Have you seen what’s been happening? Have you seen people being murdered? They come from South Carolina to go for a nice visit and they end up being murdered, shot, mugged, beat up.” He routinely says the same about other cities and the nation as a whole.
…He described the United States as a “third-world nation that has weaponized its law enforcement,” “a nation that is no longer admired, respected or listened to on the world stage” and a “drug-infested nation, crime-ridden nation” with an economy that is “collapsing into a cesspool of ruin.”
Doyle McManus noted how you wouldn’t know Biden and Trump are describing the same country. Trump says America “is ‘a failing nation’ that’s ‘descending into a cesspool of ruin. In many ways, we’re living in hell right now.’” Biden says “America is coming back… Our future is brighter. The American people are writing the greatest comeback story never told.”
Rarely have two major candidates presented narratives so wildly at odds. They seem to be describing wholly different realities.
Biden’s narrative rests on three arguments. He says the economy is recovering from the COVID-19 pandemic and the accompanying recession— the “comeback story” he trumpets. He says he will guide the country to a more prosperous and equitable future, financed by tax increases on corporations and the wealthy. And he charges that Trump would “pull America back to the past” by restricting abortion rights and other freedoms.
...“Our economy is literally the envy of the world,” Biden said. “Wages keep going up. Inflation keeps coming down… It takes time, but the American people are beginning to feel it.”
The main threat to continued progress, he said, is Trump, whose refusal to accept the results of the 2020 election reflects his desire to rule as an autocrat.
“When he says he wants to be a dictator, I believe him,” Biden said of Trump on Saturday, a day after the former president met with Hungary’s dictatorial leader, Viktor Orban.
Has Biden’s narrative hit home? Reviews were mixed.
Some Democratic strategists worried that the president’s upbeat economic message was out of sync with the views of most voters, who tell pollsters they think the economy is in bad shape.
“I would have framed it a little differently,” [Democratic consultant Doug] Sosnik said of the State of the Union address. “I would have said we inherited an economic crisis and we’re moving in the right direction, but we still have more work to do. You have to meet people halfway.”
But Sosnik said Biden’s calls to increase taxes on the wealthy, lower the prices of prescription drugs and help first-time home buyers probably landed better.
“That’s the narrative he’s running on— a populist narrative,” the strategist said.
Trump’s America sounds like a very different place.
“We are a nation whose economy is collapsing into a cesspool of ruin, whose supply chain is broken, whose stores are not stocked,” the all-but-certain Republican nominee claimed last week. “We are a nation where free speech is no longer allowed, where crime is rampant and out of control like never before.” It was an echo of his 2017 inaugural address, when he described the state of the nation as “American carnage.”
As is often the case with Trump, a fact-check is in order: The economy, far from collapsing, is growing at a healthy pace of about 2.5% a year; the supply chain disruptions of the pandemic are almost entirely over; and violent crime has dropped significantly since 2022.
Trump blames two causes for the nation’s problems: “radical left Democrats” and asylum-seeking migrants who have come across the nation’s southern border.
In a second Biden term, he told conservatives, so many migrants will enter the U.S. that “Medicare, Social Security, healthcare and public education will buckle and collapse.”
“Ruthless gangs will explode even more into the suburbs,” he warned, “... while weaponized law enforcement hunts for conservatives and people of faith.”
“Our country is being destroyed, and the only thing standing between you and its obliteration is me,” Trump claimed.
Biden and others have pointed out that Trump ordered Republicans to block a bipartisan compromise that would have tightened border security, apparently because the former president wants to keep the crisis going as a campaign issue. “We can fight about fixing the border or we can fix it,” Biden said in his State of the Union address. “I’m ready to fix it.”
Trump’s pitch, Sosnik said, “sounds as if it’s intended to turn his base out, not appeal to swing voters.”
Those are the narratives on which the next eight months of campaigning will be based.
If Biden’s sounds over-optimistic, Trump’s sounds cartoonishly dystopian, out of sync with the reality that the economy is genuinely improving.
Trump appears to be relying on voters to stay unhappy about high prices and to blame Biden for the border crisis— but not hold the GOP accountable for blocking a potential solution.
Biden is hoping he can remind swing voters of the reasons they disliked Trump in 2020, and— above all— bank on the economy to continue improving.
Which narrative will connect best with voters’ real-life concerns?
That’s what the next eight months of campaigning are about.