On the morning of the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing with James Comey, the former director of the FBI, a number of bars here opened early to allow political groupies to celebrate or drown their sorrows while watching the proceedings live.
I’m afraid that I let this experience pass me by. I had to work, and besides, I didn’t think the hearing would do anything to change President Trump’s behaviour or his base’s indulgence of it.
It’s true that President Trump’s ratings are the lowest of any modern president at this point in a first term, which has hamstrung his ability to pass any major legislation. But he has triumphantly succeeded in turning politics into a spectacle, transforming the complicated process of government into something more like made-for-TV drama. A lot of his supporters care more about the fight than the results, and the sense that the whole production is faked only adds to their enjoyment.
As a political historian who writes mainly about the Republican Party, I’ve often puzzled over why far-right groups during the 1950s and ’60s had such an appetite for obvious falsehoods. Robert Welch Jr, a founder of the John Birch Society, famously maintained that President Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, was “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.” Other extremist groups charged that a committee of University of Chicago eggheads was rewriting the Constitution to deprive Americans of their rights to vote and hold property, and that the United Nations was training barefoot African cannibals in Georgia for an armed takeover of the United States. Did the people who read those made-up stories actually believe them?
In the 1960s, Republican Party officials and conservative leaders like William F Buckley Jr were able to marginalise the John Birch Society and related groups. Today, it’s the conservative establishment that has been marginalised by right-wing media and President Trump’s populist movement. Birch-style fake news stories once circulated only among small audiences. Today, thanks to the internet, they reach millions of Americans who make up a big chunk of the Republican Party’s base.
Populist conservatives also appreciate fake news for conveying what they see as underlying symbolic truths. Barack Obama is not actually a Muslim, but those who called him one were pointing toward what they saw as his cosmopolitanism, racial otherness and seeming discomfort with “real” America. Democratic officials do not actually run sex rings, but for fake-news readers they are part of the corrupt and all-powerful government that exploits helpless citizens for fun and profit. Climate change science is not actually a hoax concocted by China and the scientific community, but many see it as serving the interests of globalists from both parties who allowed the devastation of American manufacturing and the working class.
One of the lessons future historians may draw from the Trump presidency is that populism and partisanship shouldn’t mix. President Trump won the election in large part because he was one of the few candidates from either party to address terrible problems in the left-behind parts of the country, including the drug epidemic, declining labor force participation rates and the rising cost of health care.
But when he arrived in the White House, he merely added his own brand of insult to the usual Washington partisanship. He didn’t begin to do the work that would have been required to assemble a bipartisan coalition around a genuine populist agenda. Instead, he agreed to make Paul Ryan’s draconian repeal of Obamacare his top priority. That provoked Democrats in Congress to be just as obstructionist and hostile as Republicans were under President Obama.
Toxic polarisation means that Congress is unlikely to pass any significant legislation on infrastructure and tax reform that once might have attracted cross-aisle support. Trump also lacks the popularity that allowed presidents like Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton to rally the public behind their proposals and compel Congress to go along with them, and he doesn’t seem to understand that their skillful use of the reputable media was an integral part of their success.
Trump cast himself during the election as the sole candidate able to break through Washington gridlock and get things done. Will his failure as a problem solver cause his supporters to abandon him?
I doubt it. Scratch a Trump supporter, and you’re likely to find someone deeply pessimistic about America and its future. Few believe that he will be able to bring back the good times (however they define them) because they’re convinced that the system is rigged: The “deep state” is too entrenched, the demographic tide too advanced and the global elite too powerful to allow real change. Still, they appreciate President Trump for fighting the fight, especially when it involves going against the wishes of his own party and the customary norms of presidential behaviour.
The Comey hearing, then, is unlikely to change their minds. Anything short of blatant evidence of illegality will simply play into their narrative of the president’s battles against his diabolical enemies. They will continue to see President Trump as the ultimate political independent, taking on the whole world. Even if it’s an empty performance, it’s bound to win applause.