Believing a Liar
Why Republicans should believe Trump sometimes means what he says.
Let’s think a little about Donald Trump supporters who don’t believe what he’s saying.
That’s the topic of an excellent reported piece by Shawn McCreesh about Trump supporters who attended his speech at the Detroit Economic Club last week. The business leaders don’t come off as yahoos; they basically appear to want normal Republican policies, and they’re inclined to believe that Trump successfully delivered those in his first term and would deliver the same if he wins this year. The rest of his promises — he is, after all, running as an authoritarian and a bigot — are to them just bluster that he uses to rile people up.
As McCreesh makes clear, there’s a huge amount of wishful thinking in this.
And yet! No one, including Trump opponents, believe all of his campaign promises. Does anyone at this point believe Trump will ever roll out a replacement for the Affordable Care Act (yes, he’s still promising one when asked)? Or that he’ll push for a program to fund fertility treatments – something he obviously “promised” to deflect real concerns that Trump’s party would try to ban them at the national level? As far as I can tell, most supporters of reproductive rights expect Trump to sign a national abortion ban, regardless of his protests now that he would not.
So it ain’t nuts to believe that at least some of Trump’s campaign promises are bogus.
And it’s not just the liberal promises; there are lots of Trumpy authoritarian promises he didn’t keep while president. He didn’t imprison Hillary Clinton, or even get her indicted. He didn’t build a wall, let alone have Mexico pay for it. He didn’t stop wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he certainly didn’t “take the oil” from Iraq.
It’s not hard to see how anyone, with surprisingly little effort, can convince themselves that he’ll keep the promises that sound good to them and ignore the ones that didn’t. It’s not hard to imagine, had things worked out a bit differently, Trump as an (authoritarian) liberal Democrat and rank-and-file Democrats making excuses for supporting him.1
And yet they would have been wrong to do so, just as big business Republicans are wrong to believe that he’s really nothing more than an annoying, obnoxious regular Republican.
Let’s take this three ways.
First: The stuff he did really happened, is clearly disqualifying, and totally sets him apart from normal politicians. You know: The things he was impeached for (twice) and indicted for (multiple times), as well as a host of other impeachable offenses for which Congress didn’t act (such as the multiple rounds of obstruction of justice that a special counsel documented in the Russia cover-up, or the repeated violations of the Emoluments clauses and a host of ways he used the presidency to enrich himself. Among many, many others). It wasn’t just talk.
Second: We have lots of evidence that he actively tried to fulfill additional anti-democratic, illegal, and unconstitutional promises, only to be stopped by people who might or might not stop him next time. That too wasn’t just talk.
Third: He’s actually changed over time, and very much for the worse. He’s run as a bigot from the start, and he’s always had anti-democratic tendencies, but he’s far more obviously running as an authoritarian this time. In 2016 he was happy to have others lead “Lock Her Up” chants while saying she shouldn’t be allowed to run for president; in 2024, he’s constantly threatening an ever-lengthening list of enemies with “retribution” once he wins. Among other things.
The time to resolve all this properly is during the nomination phase, and that was the real failure by normal, pro-democracy Republicans in 2016. And in 2020. And especially this time around. Once it gets to this point, there are only bad choices for the kinds of Republicans who attend Detroit Economic Club events.2
Still, the bad choice they are making is a lot riskier than they seem to believe. Yes, there’s a solid possibility that the second Trump term would be more or less similar to the first.3 But the downside risk is very real, and severe. Both on normal policy — Trump really might drop out of NATO, conduct a damaging trade war, and deport millions of people including citizens — and on rule-of-law and democracy issues. Historians and comparative political scientists could tell these businesspeople what can happen in nations that take those risks. It’s not pretty.
Sort of. It’s almost certainly true that part of why Trump was nominated was that the Republican Party has long had an anti-democratic strain that was increasingly more central beginning in the 1990s. And the post-civil rights Democratic Party isn’t a very available landing place for someone running as a bigot. So I don’t really think that Trump could have won a Democratic presidential nomination. But the part about making excuses for him had he done so? That’s simply the truth. We’re all apt to think the best of our party’s politicians. Especially around election time.
Assuming that they’re being sincere and not just telling a New York Times reporter what they think he wants to hear.
Which they’re misremembering as an era of peace and prosperity; in fact, the US was at war and taking casualties (albeit not all that many) throughout Trump’s presidency, and while relative prosperity continued through the first three years of his presidency, the pandemic actually happened, was handled badly, and produced economic hardship.