Trump is using vitriolic speech to polarise and conquer
The president of the United States is now certifiably our “hater in chief.” Lashing out at people is what he seems to do best and enjoy most. Twitter, we now know, is his weapon of choice. He uses it to target people and institutions in the news. Just on Oct. 5, he used Twitter to criticise the Senate Intelligence Committee for investigating him instead of the media. Before that, he lashed out at the mayor of San Juan, Carmen Yulín Cruz, for her “weak leadership.” Days before, he was targeting football players and team owners. Before that, it was Stephen Colbert, and before that, Sen. John McCain, and before that, Sen. Mitch McConnell. The list goes on.
Bickering with people who are in the news has a political logic: It deepens the country’s polarisation — and this can work to the president’s advantage. Spewing hate toward celebrities is part of his game plan.
The main objective of hating is to incense your critics so that they hate you back even more. Insults tend to provoke more extreme postures. A result is that Trump successfully transforms the targets of his hate, and those who come to their defence, into an even more extreme image of what the president’s base already despises.
The use of hatred as a provocation tactic may not be that common among American presidents, but it is common elsewhere. Marxist presidents are especially famous for it. When they embrace class warfare, Marxist presidents are in essence adopting a policy of hate toward one sector of society, the private sector. If the private sector responds by fighting back, Marxist presidents win politically because they can now offer proof of what they have been arguing all along, that capitalists are mean.
Populist presidents also frequently employ hate as a political tactic. For populists, the target is always an authority figure. It doesn’t need to be a capitalist. It can be any elite: senior politicians, respected journalists, renowned professors, members of the clergy, policy gurus, celebrities, professional athletes and — why not? — mayors from small islands.
Some of the world’s most famous populists in the last decade have been masters at this game of hate. Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, Viktor Orban in Hungary and Hugo Chávez in Venezuela use or used hatred as a way to polarise and thus survive in office.
All three at some point were down in the polls, and they staged comebacks by radicalising. Radicalisation meant adopting the very same policies the opposition feared the most: anti-secularism in Turkey, anti-Europeanism in Hungary and anti-pluralism in Venezuela. But it also meant spewing epic insults against key figures in their countries, including respected public figures and celebrities. The rationale behind these attacks was to get the opposition to become extreme, too.
When the opposition adopts extreme positions, paradoxically, it can expand the president’s electoral base because it provokes a merger of die-hard supporters and ambivalent moderates. The hard-liners respond by saying: As bad as our president’s flaws might be, they are nothing compared with the excesses of the other side. Moderates, witnessing the excesses within the opposition, begin to agree with them.
Whereas a nonpolarising president might tell his most extreme supporters to chill, a polarising president needs them to freak. That’s how he can offer himself as protection for his base. It’s important, therefore, to always associate his targets with the enemy’s ideology. So when Trump attacked Mayor Cruz, he made sure to add that she was taking cues from Democrats.
Trump has discovered the benefits of making the opposition scream. And because he knows that his base, at its core, is an anti-elite coalition, he understands that he has a green light from his base to become America’s leading iconoclast. The more he disparages people and institutions of repute, the more his core will feel satisfied politically. That’s the diet you feed every anti-elite populist coalition.
Polarisation, of course, produces intense animosity from the other side, and this is risky for any president. Facing this risk, a president can either make a change in policy course or cultivate anti-dissentism. Trump is choosing the latter.
When the opposition adopts extreme positions, paradoxically, it can expand the president’s electoral base because it provokes a merger of die-hard supporters and ambivalent moderates
Anti-dissentism requires exaggerating how groundless dissent is. That is why the US President, in his hate tweets, likes to invoke the how-dareyou argument. With Mayor Cruz, Trump wondered how dare she criticise him with all that federal employees were doing for Puerto Rico. With NFL players, he made sure to remind them of their “privilege of making millions” in the NFL.
Given that Trump’s survival strategy is to polarise, his critics need to learn to play his war of words carefully. They must take a stand, while still avoid emulating the president’s escalation tactic, so as not to validate the image that the president wants to portray of them.
But self-restraint is, of course, hard to sustain, especially if the president is the chief polariser. At some point, some of his targets will also do something imprudent or even extreme. If that happens, the most likely winner will be Trump.