Mocking Trump might be easy, but it’s not a sound political strategy
In October 1917, Douglas Haig surveyed the wreckage that was the first battle of Passchendaele, which saw his British Expeditionary Force suffer 13,000 casualties for virtually no gain of land. It was yet another futile trench battle of the First World War, but Haig decided to keep going, that one more big push would break German morale. The second Passchendaele came to the same spluttering end in November.
Although that was 103 years ago, I thought of Haig when I read a column in the New York Times on how to utterly defeat Donald Trump. Although Trump has been consistently behind in national polls, the gap has at times narrowed, especially in key battleground states like Arizona, North Carolina and Pennsylvania. That Trump — with his unfolding catastrophes — is even clinging to Mr. Biden confounds the Democratic opponents of the president. But Times columnist Nicholas Kristof gives what he and his paper must think is a bold, new proposal.
Mock Trump. Make him a figure of fun. Undermine him with humour, every dictator’s kryptonite. No doubt Mr. Trump’s life is overflowing with things to laugh at, but reading the piece was irritating in light of the 2016 election. After that election, many in the news media realized they had underestimated Trump, and had not understood the Trump voter. Pollster Nate Silver’s research confirmed there had been a “liberal media bubble” in the United States. Reporters promised to do better, to get out of New York and Washington, to understand middle America. But the news media and the president’s political opponents are still floundering. The notion that mocking Trump will help ensure his defeat demonstrates how little has been learned since 2016.
The simplest rebuttal to that idea is as follows: how can you effectively satirize a person who has been a figure of public mockery — and often public humiliation — for most of his adult life? It’s not as if no one has been making fun of the man for the past 40 years.
Furthermore, humour works against dictators because virtually no one likes them. The population as a whole cowers in fear. The authoritarian state is always so fragile that it can’t tolerate anyone pulling back to curtain on its true nature. But Trump is genuinely popular with a large minority of the American population.
If Trump opponents think such ideas will finally bury his poll numbers, then they really are like Haig in 1917. They are facing a revolutionary force in Donald Trump, and they still don’t realize that trying the old tactics, but trying them harder, won’t work. Haig and his fellow generals of 1917 realized that machine guns and quick-firing artillery had revolutionized war, but thought that simply pressing harder, with more men and more massed artillery, would finally break through. It took a further revolution — the return of battlefield mobility via the full deployment of the tank in 1918 — to break the stalemate. To really ensure that Donald Trump will lose this election, his opponents need a tank, not sending more men over the top into another hail of gunfire.
At least the American media has learned one lesson from 2016: don’t give Donald Trump unmediated coverage. I was in the United States in March 2016, watching CNN in a hotel room. Trump had momentum but was far from a sure thing to be the Republican nominee. His rallies had become so infamous by that point that CNN was providing live coverage of an empty stage, simply waiting for Trump to start his speech. I turned to my wife and said that Trump would win the nomination and probably win the presidency.
I claim no special insight or prophetic powers, but it was clear at that moment that the American media was totally enthralled with Donald Trump’s bizarre candidacy. And when the presidency that couldn’t possibly happen then became all too real, it was apparent that Trump had been given a massive, free platform by all the cable news stations. With the exception of Fox News, it seems that this time around most major media outlets realized what a mistake it was to follow the Trump circus from coast to coast.
That is one lesson learned, but that is not nearly enough to really contend with the unprecedented nature of the Trump presidency. Although he’ll be gone eventually, he won’t be the last demagogic populist, so saner minds need to stop believing that trying the same old tactics will be effective in stopping Trump and those who follow after him.
How can you effectively satirize a person who has been a figure of public mockery — and often public humiliation — for most of his adult life?