Enabled by Post-Truth Conservative Media, Trump Mocks Ex-Supporters for Taking Him Seriously
No values, issues, or goals matter to this man. But do they matter to us?
Imagine, if you will, a candidate for office who makes one campaign promise that stands apart from his competitors and repeats it so often and so bluntly that it becomes his signature more than any other issue. Then imagine that he wins election but doesn’t fulfill that promise. Then imagine he tries to get back into office, and during the campaign he gets caught on video openly mocking the idea that anyone would have taken seriously the very promise on which he built his political mystique.
One might reasonably expect such a scenario to conclusively end such a candidate’s career, like the climax of any number of movies in which the evil mayor or boss or businessman is finally exposed as a fraud, and promptly flees the wrath of his community.
It turns out that one would be wrong. Because that’s exactly what happened over the weekend to Donald Trump, with one key difference: he wasn’t secretly recorded admitting feelings he tries to hide, but rather said it openly on a campaign stage, cameras trained on him, right to the faces of the people he conned.
During a campaign event in Sioux City, Iowa, Trump said the following:
So with all those losers out there that say ‘Trump never got,’ you remember I used to say Mexico will pay for the piece of the wall, I’ll say what’s gonna happen if they fight, I say the wall gets higher. We all had a lot of fun, but I said Mexico will pay for a piece of the wall. Well, there was no legal instrument to do that.
Apparently in Trump’s mind you aren’t a loser if you believed him in 2016; you’re only a loser if you hold the fact that he shouldn’t have been believed against him.
Aside from the tiny detail that he’s now rewriting his promise to just a “piece” of the wall when he said at the time “I don't mean like 99.2%, I mean 100%,” the idea that the government had no way to extract border wall funding from Mexico is awfully curious for those who remember Trump’s 2016 campaign, which spelled out several ways on its website:
Mexico must pay for the wall and, until they do, the United States will, among other things: impound all remittance payments derived from illegal wages; increase fees on all temporary visas issued to Mexican CEOs and diplomats (and if necessary cancel them); increase fees on all border crossing cards – of which we issue about 1 million to Mexican nationals each year (a major source of visa overstays); increase fees on all NAFTA worker visas from Mexico (another major source of overstays); and increase fees at ports of entry to the United States from Mexico [Tariffs and foreign aid cuts are also options].
Of course, there are difficulties to these instruments, from regulatory hurdles and legal challenges for trying to do them through executive action, to the deal-making and arm-twisting that would have been needed to enact them through legislation, and Trump was remarkably bad at that sort of thing.
A serious leader who genuinely cared about accomplishing such things would have leveled with his supporters about the hurdles they faced, and devoted his influence to helping elect members of Congress and party leaders more suited to helping deliver them next time.
The words “serious” and “leader” do not belong before or after Donald Trump’s name, however; this is the guy who saved the speakerships of both Paul Ryan and Kevin McCarthy plus Ronna Romney McDaniel’s position as Republican National Committee Chair, routinely rages against his own executive hires without ever grappling with how he hired so many people he came to despise, selects based on narcissistic and nonsensical criteria Republican primary candidates so bad that Democrats helped them get nominated because they’d be easier to ultimately defeat, and whose entire interest in the House Speaker fight began and ended with whether he could pretend to have played kingmaker.
With admitting any imperfection or error out of the question, that left Trump with only one option: denigrate the very idea that the promise was anywhere near as important as the person making it. This isn’t the first time Trump has resorted to this sort of thing; just a month after getting elected following months of pledges to prosecute Hillary Clinton for her crimes, he told a crowd about his famous “Lock Her Up” chant: “That plays great before the election. Now we don’t care, right?”
None of these values or issues or goals matter to the man. Nothing ever mattered beyond his own validation. But do they matter to Republican voters? Is he right that “we don’t care” in any decisive percentage? Why else would he be so brazen about the disconnect between his campaign promises and reality?
The answer is that Trump was only partially correct when he said he “could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn't lose any voters.” He has enough genuine personality cultists to put together adoring rallies and make comfortable livings for grifters. But, as we saw in 2020 and the midterms, that’s not enough to win elections.
The reason Trump can call those he jilted “losers” without fear of losing support is because he already lost virtually everyone who would recognize or care about being jilted. He only really has two basic groups left: the personality cultists who don’t care about policy, and low-information voters who, polls tell us, are currently defaulting to Trump but are open to supporting other candidates. The latter group, which is bigger than the former, does not see things like Trump admitting his word is worthless, because the conservative media personalities they listen to are more likely than not to withhold it from them.
Conservative news, commentary, and information sources have never been more numerous or varied, yet Republican voters are less informed about their candidates than in any primary of the last twenty years. Maybe we are losers.