How US presidents create their own reality

Like Reagan, we should not underestimate Trump’s ability to create his own reality and then get his supporters to inhabit it

wo years ago, Donald Trump glided down an escalator in his New York office tower to announce his campaign for president of the United States. Ever since that day, Trump’s political opponents have been wondering when the magic is going to wear off. The president has become a uniquely polarising figure. Supporters are convinced that he channels the true America. Opponents view him as a danger to the republic.

What last Tuesday’s Republican victory in a special election in Georgia showed, however, is that mainstream Republicans are still willing to embrace Trump — not quite in the numbers they did last November, though. Democrats, on the other hand, need to come up with a better strategy than relying on anti-Trump anger if they want to start winning again. What Democrats particularly need to abandon is the idea that by pointing out the disconnect between Trump’s claims and his actual accomplishments they will rally disaffected Republicans to their side.

Trump appears to understand something about American politics that his opponents often fail to grasp: When it comes to maintaining political support, the presidency has become a show, and, like any show, what the audience sees — and sometimes what the audience merely wills itself to see — is far more important than whatever may or may not be happening behind the scenes.

Democrats and anti-Trump Republicans have been arguing for some time that in policy terms there isn’t much to the Trump presidency.

As many American journalists have noted, the much-heralded $110 billion (Dh404.58 billion) in arms sales to Saudi Arabia announced last month in Riyadh consists mainly of deals already approved under former US president Barack Obama or still in the early stages of negotiation (meaning they might or might not actually happen). Trump routinely holds huge formal signing ceremonies for things that a more conventional president would have done with a memo or a phone call. Several of the executive orders he has signed with great public fanfare turned out, on closer examination, to be directives to a particular Cabinet department to look into rule changes. One was merely a request that Congress consider new legislation.

Despite having passed no major legislation during his first five months in office, Trump recently opened a Cabinet meeting by congratulating himself on getting more done in a few months’ time than any president in history with, he said, the arguable exception of Franklin Roosevelt. Trump is not the first president to exaggerate his accomplishments, though it is fair to say that in this, as in other things, he has pushed the envelope farther than most of his predecessors. Can all this continue? Common sense may say ‘no’, but history says ‘yes.’

It is instructive here to consider the case of former president Ronald Reagan, who has come to loom over the modern Republican Party. Younger Americans, even liberals, will often tell you that he was universally popular and revered. People old enough to remember the 1980s will tell a different story. Reagan was certainly popular — no one who carries 49 states in his reelection campaign can reasonably be said to be unpopular. But he was also controversial. He scared a lot of America’s European allies, and, during his first term, had a lot of Democrats convinced that he actually sought war with the Soviet Union.

Missing the point

In the run-up to Reagan’s 1984 reelection campaign, Democrats were convinced his militarism, tax policies favouring the rich and attacks on public assistance would all doom Reagan at the polls. Instead, he carried 49 states. Reagan was better than any politician since the Second World War at selling voters the image he made for himself, and convincing them that opponents armed with statistics and long-winded rebuttals were both wrong and, at a more basic level, missing the point. It was Reagan who had established the Republican Party’s near-total opposition to tax increases, a policy that continues to this day. The extraordinary thing was that he did this even as he raised taxes repeatedly (more than 20 times, by some definitions). Even more extraordinary was the fact that he did so while claiming that he never raised taxes — and voters believed him!

My point is: Like Reagan, we should not underestimate Trump’s ability to create his own reality and then get his supporters to inhabit it. The people who would be particularly well-advised to remember this are the Democrats. Reagan’s opponents were always certain that the public would see through his lies and hold him accountable for his administration’s serial corruption scandals. It never happened.

It is a very different era, of course, and Trump is a very different president, but the lesson is simple: Trump’s supporters want to buy what he is selling. Most of them will continue to do so whether he actually delivers or not.

Gordon Robison, a long-time Middle East journalist and US political analyst, teaches political science at the University of Vermont.