THREE TAKES ON TRUMP
And his connection to The Simpsons, white identity and heirloom tomatoes,
Political science may eventually find an explanation for what happened in the United States this week. But right now, pop culture is doing a much better job. After all, as many other commentators have noticed, it was The Simpsons, not the pollsters, who foresaw the prospect of a Donald Trump presidency — nearly 20 years ago.
It was a 2000 episode called “Bart to the Future,” in which new U.S. president Lisa Simpson is trying to clean up the fiscal mess left by the outgoing administration.
“As you know, we’ve inherited quite a budget crunch from President Trump,” she tells aides assembled around her desk in the Oval Office. In subsequent interviews, the Simpsons’ creators have insisted they weren’t trying to forecast the future.
In fact, in the interests of comedy, they say they were trying to come up with the most ridiculous possible scenario.
Here’s Matt Groening, quoted in an excellent U.K. Mirror article about this whole phenomenon: “Back in 2000, Trump was, of course, the most absurd placeholder joke name that we could think of at the time, and that’s still true. It’s beyond satire.”
Who’s laughing now? As a political-science graduate, I of course regret that my own field of study is currently inadequate to the task of explaining how the United States ended up with a cartoon character in the White House.
But Trump didn’t build his victory on the rules or conventions of political science — he broke more rules of political communication than he followed. By comparison, Hillary Clinton was the ultimate, play-by-the-rules candidate — to her peril, as it turned out. Like many other successful presidential candidates before him, Trump seems to have understood that American voters are influenced more by marketing and entertainment than political theory.
Now, Clinton’s team wasn’t totally out of touch with this reality either — the Democratic machine was using a lot of the same people and tools as the old Barack Obama organization, and let’s not forget, it did manage to win the popular vote.
Both sides waged their campaigns with social media, slick advertising and celebrities, but the differences in the ways the Republicans and Democrats used these tools may tell us a lot about the more powerful forces in U.S. pop culture right now. Back in July, for instance, New York Times columnist Jim Rutenberg put forward an intriguing analysis of the two big-party conventions.
“Clinton’s convention was made for TV; Trump’s was made for Twitter,” was the headline on the column, which suggested that this was an unexpected development, given Trump’s long experience with TV celebrity culture. Now, in retrospect, we may look at this distinction as one candidate sticking with old media and the other tacking to the prevailing media winds.
Yet it’s not particularly their choice of medium, but rather what they represented. TV is still influential, especially for mass marketing, but Twitter better captures the polarized, angry, fractured state of the U.S. electorate.
The same differences can be found in the candidates’ use of celebrities. Clinton was pulling out all the big names — from Beyoncé and Jay Z to James Taylor — for massive concerts in the final week of the campaign. Trump had to make do with the likes of Ted Nugent and Scott Baio.
What can we make of this? Perhaps that celebrity endorsements, like the newspaper ones, are far less influential in an age where celebrity/authority is conferred widely, whimsically and fleetingly.
As for the influence of marketing, it’s impossible to avoid the conclusion that many Americans, once again, voted as consumers this week, believing that someone from the corporate world was preferable to a candidate steeped in the political world. Having written a book on how marketing made its way into Canadian politics, I went looking around this week for explanations on how that worked for Trump.
The best one I found came from the Harvard Business School and a post by John A. Quelch, organized into six lessons for marketers from the Trump victory.
He sums them up as: Give consumers a job; show the past as prologue; pursue forgotten consumers; sizzle beats steak; build enthusiasm and close the sale. “Brand Trump is today’s bright new thing,” Quelch writes, with a warning: “But new is easy. Good is hard.”
Americans have four years to see whether President Trump can master the art of the good as well as he’s mastered the art of the political deal. Given the whole improbable state of things in U.S. politics right now, it’s probably wise not to make any bets or predictions.
The Simpsons, on the other hand, are a safer wager. The 27-year-old show was renewed for two more seasons last week, set to break a record as the longest-running TV series. sdelacourt@bell.net