There are many things that have changed since we first watched Donald Trump come down that escalator on June 16, 2015, but if there is one thing that stands out it is that we no longer have any confidence in our ability to know what matters and what doesn’t matter when it comes to a presidential candidate’s competitive viability.
I remember thinking that Trump had destroyed himself and his political future, in July of 2015, when he said about John McCain: “He’s not a war hero. He was a war hero because he was captured. I like people who weren’t captured.” In Rick Perlstein’s 2014 book The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan, he makes the point that President Nixon executed a pretty clever mind trick by convincing many Americans that the return of the country’s Vietnam POWs was, in a strange sense, the victory America sought. Never mind that the war was a disaster, the pictures of reunited families on tarmacs, of children and wives running to their fathers and husbands was, Nixon hoped, a story happy enough to make people forgot what had been lost.
The extent to which Nixon succeeded is debatable, but the place of those returned POWs in American folklore, particularly among conservatives, has never been in doubt. For Trump to criticize John McCain, famously known for refusing early release from captivity, surely made many of us think Trump had done himself irreparable damage. On top of that, of course, is that the remarks came from someone who had ducked the draft through college deferments and medical exemptions, another “black mark” that has raised eyebrows in past presidential campaigns.
We could talk about the Access Hollywood tape where Trump bragged about the sexual assault he is able to get away with because he is a celebrity. There is the E. Jean Carroll lawsuit, the Stormy Daniels case, January 6th, and on and on with scandal after scandal. January 6th is interesting because so many high profile, experienced Republicans thought Trump’s political career would be over because of his support for the rioters, though they mostly backed off when it became clear his base (and their base) didn’t care. Again, old rules did not apply.
Then there is Tuesday’s debate when any number of truly laughable statements were made by Trump, statements about immigrants eating pets, Kamala Harris’s ethnicity, and January 6th rioters. It’s all so new we don’t need to go into detail, but the point is that it really hasn’t seemed to matter.
Why is that?
There are three things that come to mind. The first is in a clever term that someone came up with called “sane-washing,” which has been defined as “an act of packaging radical and outrageous statements in a way that make them seem normal.” The argument goes that reporters, charged with making the world make sense for us go the extra mile to make otherwise incoherent statements meaningful.
Another factor is in what some of Trump’s supporters tell us we should do, which is to take Trump “seriously but not literally.” Trump strategist Corey Lewandowski once said that “the problem with the media is that [they take] everything Trump says so literally. The American people don’t.” I guess this means we are supposed to be satisfied that Trump doesn’t literally mean that immigrants are eating cats and dogs, but that they are here and doing bad stuff in general. Perhaps his question about whether Kamala Harris is really black isn’t that he cares about such things, but that she changes positions for political gain. You get it.
And finally, the existence of Fox News has created an immensely powerful safety net for Trump, an entire network dedicated to his protection. Someone once said that if Fox News had been around in the early ’70s, Richard Nixon would not have had to resign because a sufficiently robust counter-narrative would have been available to protect him and to make Nixon’s voter base sufficiently organized to threaten any Republican who got out of line.
I’m sure there are other reasons Trump gets away with so much, and the few ideas proposed here don’t, I’m sure, explain everything nor do they operate in silos. More than one mechanism can be at work at once, and different mechanisms are likely at play with different kinds of statements and actions.
To end where I began, since Trump, we no longer have any confidence in our ability to know what matters, and it is frustrating as hell, though I doubt I am alone in thinking about it, a lot.
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