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As Donald Trump’s closing pitch grows more violent and incoherent, many of my fellow pundits have wondered if he’s just losing it. That presupposes, of course, that he once had it, whatever “it” may have been.
I don’t know about the incoherence, but I don’t think the growing violence of his speech—opining, for instance, that we need a day of unchecked police violence to restore law and order—is the Lear-like meandering of an aggrieved old man. I think it’s a very conscious strategy to turn out those Trump supporters who are least likely to vote: working-class young men. Even if it’s not conscious on Trump’s part, I think his handlers know that their employer’s adding a little ultraviolence to his speeches may prod just enough smoldering incels and other angry young men to bring themselves to the polls.
Trump’s get-out-the-vote problem was well illustrated by a Washington Post poll of Michigan voters late last week. The poll revealed that Trump led Kamala Harris by a 47 percent to 45 percent margin among registered voters, but trailed her 47-46 among likely voters. That discrepancy follows logically from what we know about the candidates’ respective voting bases. Harris’s base is disproportionately female and college-educated, both groups that tend to turn out in higher numbers than male and working-class voters. Much of Trump’s base, correspondingly, turns out to vote at lower rates. And the lowest rate of all is that of working-class young men.
The Trump campaign is aware of this, of course. It’s the reason why the pro-Trump canvass operations—vexed, fraught, and inexperienced though they may be—are focusing on “low propensity voters,” who are disproportionately young men. It’s the reason why Trump is going on every independent media or social media outlet that has built any semblance of a fuck-’em-all young male audience. It’s the reason why Trump and JD Vance sat for a collective six hours with Joe Rogan and why Trump trots out Hulk Hogan at his rallies. If the voters he needs respond best to spectacles of violence, or maybe even real violence, then spectacles of violence—with the threat of real violence—is precisely what he’ll provide.
Many of Trump’s threats doubtless bubble up from his own vast cesspool of rage and are directed at figures who personally affronted him, from Liz Cheney to John Kelly. These people may be almost entirely unknown to Trump’s angry young men. But obscure though Trump’s targets may be, it’s the violent rhetoric that matters. It shouldn’t be a mystery, then, that Trump’s campaign managers aren’t trying (or at least, aren’t trying very hard) to get him to de-escalate his threats. After all, he’s consistently said that he will reward his supporters with “retribution,” which comes as close as anything to being his campaign’s raison d’ȇtre, and most certainly is for many or most of the angry young men he’s trying so hard to move to the polls.
Just as Bill Clinton told voters, “I feel your pain,” so Donald Trump tells voters, “I feel your rage—and that rage will become government policy if you elect me.”
MY COLLEAGUE BOB KUTTNER WROTE last week about why so much open, vituperative hatred now characterizes the American right, at a level that would probably appall such right-wing icons of yore as William Buckley and Ronald Reagan. Bob rightly notes that the bipartisan elite’s indifference to the significantly reduced economic standing of the working class (at least, until Bernie Sanders jolted the Democrats in 2016) surely played a role in this. I’d add that Newt Gingrich normalized the demonization of Democrats among Republican elites during the 1990s, and that Fox News and friends gleefully joined in. And given that a majority of Republicans, having swallowed Trump’s biggest lie, have consistently told pollsters that the 2020 election was stolen, the intensification of right-wing rage should come as no surprise.
I suspect there’s yet another factor that’s unhinged a number of our compatriots in recent years, and that’s the disruptions and dislocations that came with the COVID pandemic. For many on the right, the government’s attempts to stop the spread of COVID were seen as the ultimate assault of liberal elites on their personal sovereignty. That anger, its absurdity notwithstanding, is in large part with us still, and I suspect it’s the wellspring of some of the hatred that is powering the Trump campaign. Only some, to be sure; it’s not like prior to COVID, Trump spoke in fully demure fashion.
The great Menshevik leader Julius Martov had a theory of how the Bolshevik Revolution became so violent. Before they took power, Martov noted, violence hadn’t been an element of the Bolsheviks’ doctrine or playbook. He observed that when they first seized power, they abolished (briefly) the death penalty and freed many of the ministers of the government they’d overthrown.
But the hundreds of thousands of soldiers who’d been on the World War’s front lines and then sided with the Bolsheviks had understandably grown numb to the unprecedented level of violence they daily faced, Martov noted. More pointedly, as their aristocratic officers routinely ordered them to frontally attack German machine guns, to no apparent gain but to massive casualties in their ranks, many of those soldiers came to view those officers as their real enemies, for which reason there were many instances in which those soldiers killed their superiors. Properly redirected, violence was much more a solution than a problem to the soldiers who sided with the Bolsheviks. And in the initial Bolshevik seizure of power in many cities and towns, the violence began with the Bolshevik soldiers who’d left the World War’s front and transferred their own front to their domestic enemies.
If no World War, Martov wrote, then the level of enraged, sadistic violence that came to characterize the Bolsheviks’ battles might have been greatly reduced.
I wonder if the rage that many on the right—very much including working-class young men—feel toward those they regard as part of the liberal elite isn’t also a spillover, at least partly, from the presumable impositions they suffered during the pandemic. It’s absurd, of course, to equate being compelled to wear a mask during a pandemic to being ordered to make a suicidal charge in the face of machine guns, but the decades of fury at liberal elites to which the leaders of the right had conditioned them has almost surely contributed to the levels of fury that Trump is now working hard to stoke. To win those last hard-to-get votes that could put him back in power, Trump’s campaign knows he has to promise and personify violence. Happily, from his campaign’s perspective, that’s something he can easily do.
