Why Trump Will Lose

The dissociated feeling some of us have gotten watching politics play out in 2024 came in part from watching conventional media and sensibilities fail to process this brutish, multilayered, densely referential, meme-drenched idiom. When Mr. Trump promises that he will be a dictator but only on “Day 1,” is it a joke or a terrifying threat? Possibly both, but in muddying the distinctions, he makes liberal warnings about constitutional norms seem like ninnyish Karening. Traditional discourse looks for stage directions, for mainstream media, which once had the power to define reality, to referee, and judge. Big-R Reality values are judgment-free, however: Attention is attention is attention.

But if there’s one thing that’s true for all TV genres, it’s that the medium is always looking for the next new thing. Mr. Trump dominated TV during a time when the shouty, humorless alpha white guy was a dominant cable archetype. In recent years, the freshest and most popular reality shows have been more ironic, more infused with queer sensibility, more, dare one say, joyful. The light-on-their-feet “FBoy Island,” “Below Deck,” “Summer House,” and “Too Hot to Handle” have paved the way for Alan Cumming’s charming “The Traitors” and Joel McHale’s “House of Villains” (which has returned Omarosa to the spotlight). “The Mole,” rebooted and airing on Netflix, is hosted by NPR’s Ari Shapiro doing a deadpan camp turn for the ages.

Mr. Trump’s recently cast political opponent seems to have grasped the vibe shift. The playfully self-deprecating memes and the repeated invocation of joy: She’s reality lite. If Mr. Trump is still doing Gordon Ramsay, Kamala Harris is giving us Lisa Vanderpump.

Michael Hirschorn

So why's he gonna lose? Because his act is old. People are sick of it. It simply comes down to that.

If you are puzzled why Trump's popularity has been so persistent, but now seems to be ebbing, I think there is no more robust explanation.Too many people don't see Trump as a human being who inhabits the real world; they see him as TV personality in a show where they love rooting for the anti-hero, the rules breaker, the one who understands better than anyone how to beat the system that they feel oppresses them. What impact he actually has in their real, day-to-day world doesn't matter. They don’t expect what happens on the screen or in a rally to make a difference in their humdrum lives. Trump’s appeal lies almost wholly in his ability to provide an escape from that.

This is not a new idea especially for those who know their McLuhan and Postman. Many before have pointed out that Trump sees the presidency as an extension of his stint on his Apprentice shows. But I've been sending posts about politics recently not just to be another bloviator using an online soapbox to spew his political opinions, but to connect what's happening in politics to the themes presented in the Cathedral Lectures. The point of these posts is to strive to see what's happening in real time through the lens of the ideas developed there. 

One of the primary themes I developed in those lectures was how we are all slowly moving into what Baudrillard called the "hyper-real", where what we experience on screens is more real than the real world we live in. For many, perhaps most, Trump voters, the only important thing is what happens in the hyper-real world. Most of the rest of us, I hope, are in the in-between. We  still have a foot in what until recently was broadly understood to be the real world, but we feel the pull of the hyper-real, and we spend quite a bit of time in it, and the younger we are the more so. 1

But most of us still know the difference. Most viewers of the debate were not persuaded that Trump's explanation of his Haitians-eating-pets story was legitimated by his insisting it had to be true because it was on TV. I think Trump himself sincerely believes its being on TV makes it true. But the problem is that he’s not alone. With each passing decade more people are becoming more like Trump—increasingly incapable of discerning the difference, and is there any reason to believe that without some kind of significant intervention that this trend will abate?

So I excerpted the paragraphs from Hisrschorn's article above not primarily to make an optimistic case for Trump's demise. I never thought he could win this election no matter who ran against him because the logic of his success is now the logic of his failure. Many people were dazzled for a while by his showmanship, but the illusion has been burst. The debate with Harris the other night made that clear to those who hadn't understood it yet. She was Dorothy pulling back the curtain to expose the naked wizard before nearly 70 million people. The debate was more important for that reason than I first thought. And Harris did it in a way that Biden could not have.

And I guess it's a good thing that Harris seems to be the right person for this shift in the hyper-real, where, to use Hirschorn's words, "the freshest and most popular reality shows have been more ironic, more infused with queer sensibility, more, dare one say, joyful." I am not saying that Harris is just the new act replacing Trump's old one, just another showperson who understands better than he what the audience wants now. She's a politician, and to succeed as one these days means that you need to know how to navigate in the hyper-real. There are good indicators to suggest that she is also a person with genuine warmth and authenticity and that she has her feet firmly set in the real world. I do not see her as Hirschorn does as just "reality lite", but we won't know that for sure until we see how she governs. 

But here's the point I want to make here, and it's the theme that every post I send in one way or the other seeks to develop. What we see in MAGA is a warning of what is to come. Trump is just a crude, clownish beta version of more slick demagogues who are now taking notes backstage as they watch Trump fail. It's shocking that even at this early stage of the hyper-real someone so ignorant and so obviously inept could be so successful by his understanding a few basic rules about how to operate in it.

As technologies become more sophisticated in the coming decades, the hyper-real will become more the reality that will define people's lives, their values, their use of time, their sense of being embodied, their aspirations and fears, and just basically their sense of who they are and what makes them most real. People of good will, people who truly care about genuine human flourishing and not some hyper-real parody of it, need to resist the seductions of the hyper-real. And the argument I've been making here is that the only way to do that is for us to set our feet in what is most deeply real. Otherwise we won't have a foothold firm enough to prevent us from being swept away by the coming flood. 

Note 1. For those who did not attend the lectures or who would like to revisit them, I have their transcription available now in a single document that you can find here.

Note 2. This, btw, is why young people need to pay attention to old farts like me. I still remember what it was like to live in a world that was still mostly real, or to put it another way, in a symbol system that still did some important work to mediate the Deep Real. This is a world that on or about 1963 became really, really different, and we’re not the better for it. So I am unimpressed when young people tell me my ideas are outdated and unrelatable. To me that’s just a symptom of how badly such people have been captured the hyper-reality that the TCM is on hyperdrive to produce.