Observers have said Trump (and many in this year’s Presidential field) are exploiting voter fear to establish their campaign brands. But I think that’s not exactly right.
Fear is what you feel when you’re hiking in the woods and a bear appears in your path. Fear is that animal-level, fight or flight response.
What this year’s candidates are exploiting is not fear, but dread . . . Dread is the feeling you get when you’re hiking in the woods and you realize you’ve lost the trail and have absolutely no idea how to get back home. All animals can feel fear, but only a human being can feel dread.
The answer to fear is practical and immediate: to fight or flee. The relevant pieces of information are answers to questions like, “Am I stronger than this bear?” or “Am I faster?” or “Can the bear climb a tree better than I can?” The relevant information is about what you can do to solve the problem you’re suddenly in.
The answer to dread, on the other hand, is often magical thinking . . . It’s putting yourself into the hands of a power outside your own control. The relevant pieces of information are answers to questions like, “Is there a secret word I can say that will transport me back to my campsite?” or “Will the ring in my pocket make me invisible?”
As ham-fisted as it may be, Trump’s quasi-magical bluster is dread-relevant, not fear-relevant. It promises easy answers for which the mechanics are not just simplistic and invisible . . . but non-existent. In fact, for Trump to even suggest there are mechanics would be to break the spell.
As a result, we get gems like these:
On getting Mexico to pay for a border wall: ”I would do something very severe unless they contributed or gave us the money to build the wall. I’d build it; I’d build it very nicely. I’m very good at building things.”
On how to pay to put Social Security on sound financial footing: ”Through capability. We will set it up by making our country rich again.”
On how to defeat ISIS: ”They have great money because they have oil. Every place where they have oil I would knock the hell out of them. . . . I would knock out the source of their wealth, the primary sources of their wealth, which is oil. And in order to do that, you would have to put boots on the ground. I would knock the hell out of them, but I’d put a ring around it and I’d take the oil for our country.”
On dealing with Mexican drug kingpin, “El Chapo” Guzman (Tweeting about himself in the third person): ”Can you envision Jeb Bush or Hillary Clinton negotiating with ‘El Chapo’, the Mexican drug lord who escaped from prison? Trump, however, would kick his ass!”
On what to do with Obamacare: ”Repeal and replace with something terrific.”
Or consider this bizarre exchange from the second Republican Presidential debate with CNN's Jake Tapper on how to control the actions of Russia in Syria:
Tapper: Russia is sending troops and tanks to pop up Bashar al-Assad. Russia represents the greatest threat to national security. Mr. Trump you said you’ll get along well with Putin. What would you do now if you were president to get the Russians out of Syria?
Trump: Number one, they have to respect you. He has absolutely no respect for President Obama. Zero. Syria is a mess. Look at what is going on with ISIS and think we’re fighting ISIS. ISIS wants to fight Syria. Why are we fighting ISIS in Syria? Let them fight each other. I would talk to them, get along with him. I believe and I may be wrong in which case I’d probably have to take a different path but I’d get along with a lot of the world leaders this country is not getting along with. We don’t get along with China, the heads of Mexico. We can’t get along with anybody and yet, at the same time, they rip us left and right. They take advantage of us economically and every other way. We get along with nobody. I will get along, I think, with Putin, and I will get along with others and we will have a much more stable, stable world.
Tapper: So just to clarify, the only answer I heard to the question I asked is that you would reach out to Vladimir Putin and you would do what?
Trump: I believe that I will get along, we will do between that, Ukraine, all of the other problems, we won’t have the kind of problems that our country has now with Russia and many other nations.
To people experiencing dread he is heard to say “Yes, there is a magical solution.” To others, his answers to the challenges we face as a country sound like ridiculous, weirdly circular, unsubstantiated and, most of all, impractical cliches.
If you’re hopelessly lost, the promise of a magic ring may start to sound appealing. If you’re face to face with a bear in the woods, it can only sound like an idiotic, empty waste of time . . . and a dangerous distraction from the immediately important fur-bearing matter at hand.
The promise of magical answers is such a standard part of the grammar of brand communications that it occupies a special place in the marketing vocabulary. So we have more than 17,000 registered products and trademarks in the U.S. that play on the words “magic,” “wizardry” and so on.
But the promise of magic is only relevant to an audience if they are receptive to the idea it might work . . . either as a shortcut answer to the problem of dread or as an answer to dread’s less ominous cousins, the desire for beauty, wealth, leisure, status and so on.
“Can you hear me now?”
Many have said — most notably Jeb(!) Bush — that Trump is practicing “dog whistle politics.” As a reminder, dog whistle politics is the subtle art of saying things a responsible politician “shouldn’t say” by using a coded language that only his or her constituency can hear.
As a result, dog whistles are intensely relevant to their targets but are easily ignored or filtered out by others. In fact, they’re only working well as dog whistles if they are filtered out as innocuous background noise by those who are not the target.
So, for instance, when in 1980, candidate Ronald Reagan went to the Neshoba County Fair in Mississippi to talk about “states rights,” . . . he was “dog whistling” his support for his white constituency’s resentment and opposition to civil rights. Both the site of the speech — close to the location of the ruthless 1964 murder of civil rights workers James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner — and the coded language of “states rights” that had been used since before the Civil War to signal opposition to racial reform — were the candidate’s way of signalling to his audience the things he couldn’t or wouldn’t say outright.
But dog whistles are tricky things. When they’re working the way they should, the people who can hear the whistle hear a message that the rest of us can’t hear. In that sense, they represent a kind of sleight of hand that can be interpreted either as duplicity or as a kind of magic, in their own right . . . depending on how you look at them.
They are duplicitous because they are a way of saying two things at once. But they are also magical because they allow a candidate (or any brand) to be in two places at once. To the people who can hear the whistle, they say, “I’m with you.” To the people who can’t hear it, they say, “I’m with you (or at least not against you).”
But, say what you want about Trump, there doesn’t seem to be much dog whistling in what he has to say. He’s not hiding his “real views” beneath a secret code only his target audience can hear.
Rather (as others have observed) he is the Republican party id unleashed. If he wants to say someone is ugly, disgusting or dangerous, he doesn’t say it in code. He just says it. His play for relevance isn’t a sneak attack.
Trump is full-frontal.