Morry Gash/AP Photo
Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally, November 1, 2024, in Milwaukee.
No recriminations. Not yet, and, if we can somehow muster it, not ever.
First, because there is always enough blame to go around. Second, because there are so many reasons someone within the universe of citizens who might conceivably have voted for Democrats voted for Republicans instead. Many of these reasons were beyond the reach of even a “perfect” campaign. Third, the abject derangement of the information environment. (An Ipsos study found that those who believed violent crime was at or near all-time highs—a lie—were almost 40 percentage points more likely to vote for Donald Trump.) Fourth, the uphill climb all incumbent parties have staying in office in a time of epidemic distrust. Fifth, the fact that the cost of gas and groceries, which for some reason the media seems allergic to educating the public has little or nothing to do with what a president does, has been maddeningly high, and, for confounding technical reasons, isn’t reflected in the official “inflation” rate. Etc.
No recriminations; but, still and all, plenty of constructive lessons to absorb. I’ll focus today on one that has been bugging me for a long time, ever since the question of Donald Trump’s “cognitive decline” and “disinhibition” rose to top of mind among those fighting to keep him out of power.
I put those words in quotation marks. Not because I deny they were happening; they clearly were. But because of how it was so easy to miss those moments when Trump’s apparent lunacy wasn’t him losing a step, but was a component of why he won the race. Sometimes, they were textbook displays of his perverse rhetorical skill in recruiting so many of our fellow Americans to join his regime of cruelty.
RETURN (PAINFUL, I KNOW) TO THAT INFAMOUS MOMENT when Trump appeared to be fellating a microphone. Trump supporters shrieked that “if you stop selectively editing your propaganda clips” it was obvious that he was mimicking fiddling with a too-low microphone stand, then leaning in closer to the faulty mic when that didn’t work—and, at first, I myself thought that criticism might have been correct. It was all too easy, after all, in those days when all of us were so desperate to find reasons to believe that Donald Trump was no more effective at political persuasion than a 98-year-old is effective at driving to the supermarket.
But note the precise moment—it’s around 29:38 in this video—when he appears to realize that his act of manipulating a pretend microphone stand resembles a sexual act. It’s a vital second to understand: a moment of direct transfer of animal energy between speaker and audience. With characteristically feral instinct, he weaponizes the accident, doubles down, and turns it into a grand show—and suddenly his cult is roaring at the top of their lungs, recognizing a favorite smear against their chief enemy: that she whored her way to the top.
To those who listen to political speeches for logical arguments, it makes no sense. But fascist rhetoric requires no logic. It teaches its followers to listen, instead, with their gut. How to replace logic with emotion, to more sharply separate the world into an us to love and a them to hate. This speech we are supposed to understand as Exhibit A for how Trump was “losing it” was actually a master class in Donald Trump at the height of his powers.
Study the long lead-up before his head starts bobbing up and down suggestively. I’ve cued it up here. Go ahead and watch. Listen, especially, to the response of the crowd, without which the fascist’s speech can never be fully comprehensible.
It was so easy to miss those moments when Trump’s apparent lunacy wasn’t him losing a step, but was a component of why he won the race.
It starts with Trump in the middle of one of his favorite lies, the one about a manufacturer whom he’d supposedly intimidated out of opening a plant in Mexico with a tariff threat. But he’s losing the crowd; too much logic, perhaps. So he lurches another way, figuring out an excuse to point out a “very beautiful girl” in the middle of the crowd, in order to launch into an aside about how you’re not supposed to call a woman “beautiful” anymore.
He points to Sen. Ron Johnson (R-WI), who “would never do that; that’s why he’s a great politician!”
The crowd is laughing now: With a lightning one-two punch, quicker than Muhammad Ali, Trump has lured them back under his spell. The first blow was that jab against the symbolic tyranny of the woke mob. (“It’s the freedom to say what’s obviously true as a free man and not a slave,” Tucker Carlson said of this sort of utterance.) The second was the punch downward, showing Johnson, the mere “politician,” who is boss. He flattens him: showing him as a weak man who follows the enemy’s silly rules, which Trump, their champion, promises he will never, ever respect.
After this exchange, at least part of the crowd is suddenly unable to hear him. They chant, “Fix the mic!” A picayune everyday irritation, the kind you’re just supposed to put up with. But not if you’re Trump, or under the protection of Trump. Reading the frustration of the crowd, he inculcates how a real man handles such irritation. He jerks a thumb in the direction of the invisible subalterns whose job it is to serve him; and, serving him, serve you: “Do you wanna see me knock the hell out of people backstage? Wanna see?” They roar in appreciation. He is their vengeance.
Feeding off their roar, he revs his momentum, turning his victimization at the hands of incompetents into a hero’s quest: “I’m up here seething, I’m working my ass off with this stupid mic … I’m blowing out my damned throat … These stupid people”—again, note the lightning quick suppleness with which he improvises this grievance narrative out of the most unpromising material; really, out of nothing at all. Which people? Those people. The ones always at the ready to sabotage Trump; which is to say, ready to sabotage you.
But try as they may, they can’t stop Trump. He loves you too much to let them win.
“I’ll make you a deal. Pretend you’re listening to it perfectly and I’ll come back and do another one with a decent”—he smacks the mic violently in the mic stand. It’s ridiculous. And it works. The crowd has already reached a frenzy worthy of a Nuremberg rally. Man and mob are in perfect sync.
He weaves in a conspiracy theory—“this is the second time today that this happened”—and says that he will fire whoever’s responsible, just like “the generals that destroyed us in Afghanistan, every one of them should have been fired.” After several more insults and a literal doubling down on the conspiracy—“This is after four of these things, in all fairness”—he finally arrives at the infamous pantomime, lashing out at the placement of the mic stand—“Oh, man, it’s too low …”
Then, the pièce de résistance, that feigned blow job. It comes at the perfect moment when the crowd’s cognition has been lowered to its lowest ebb, a fog of pure feeling. They are thus primed to receive a message of purest humiliation: reducing an accomplished woman of color to nothing but a greedy, slobbering slut, with nothing to offer but sexual services.
He concludes—he really is extraordinarily good at this—by sealing the slur in a bubble of plausible deniability with the cry “Way too low!” That part is aimed at his cleverer supporters, who now get to bark “Trump derangement syndrome” at anyone who says he’s referring to oral sex. “He’s talking about a microphone, you idiot!”
The entire scene consumes nearly five minutes. It is utterly devoid of intellectual content, policy content, ideological content—but clearly not emotional content. Each beat was greeted with a roar or a laugh, louder each time.
Each was a small education in how to Trump: how to deflect, blame, dominate, humiliate. A version of a quote from a podcaster that’s gone viral calls stuff like this “a masterclass in white privilege. He can’t say enough racist things to be a racist. He can’t commit enough crimes to be a criminal. He can’t fail enough times to be a failure. He can’t say enough stupid things to be stupid … The idea of him overshadows any reality. The ‘Christian savior’ who doesn’t know the bible, the adulterer who fucks porn stars and steals from charities. It’s the promise of the protection of whiteness he represents.”
The bottom line: The intended audience leaves exhilarated, overwhelmingly grateful for the gift.
And the unintended audience—us—thrust our arms in the air in victory: We’ve proved his “cognitive decline.” Trump’s “disinhibition.”
Fellatiogate was supposed to be that disinhibition’s apotheosis. It was, indeed, key to the implicit narrative of Tim Alberta’s election eve Atlantic tick-tock about how Trump’s campaign was supposedly falling apart: how Trump had become “undisciplined.” And how can a candidate without discipline win a presidential campaign?
WOULD THAT OUR DEMOCRATIC POLITICIANS could disinhibit themselves into that level of frenzied affection, and that our Democratic strategists might finally learn history’s lesson that visions of domination are what make reactionary politics so satisfying for those who choose to go along for the ride.
In the 1970s, California was suffering a crisis born of economic dynamism: Home values were going up 3 percent a month, where in the rest of the country they were going up 3 percent a year. Property taxes skyrocketed apace. According to one possibly apocryphal story, a little old lady who lived on $1,900 in annual Social Security payments opened her bill, saw it said $1,800, and keeled over of a heart attack. Then, in the spring of 1978, voters could choose from two initiatives on the ballot meant to fix the problem. One, devised by technocrats, involved highly complex formulae intended to make assessments progressive while still preserving a fiscally healthy level of state revenue.
The other was blindingly simple—just to cap property taxes at a tiny amount and make it nearly impossible ever to raise them again, and much harder to increase any state tax—and was written with the intent of decimating state revenue. It was devised by a libertarian lunatic, Howard Jarvis, who had recently tried and failed to become the mayor of Los Angeles on a platform of eliminating garbage collection.
The sensible people backing the technocratic option were pretty thrilled to have Jarvis as an opponent: They adored his disinhibition. He would go on TV and talk radio and say things like, “I’ll die knowing I really put the hot rod up the butts of those damned stupid politicians.” And when it was pointed out that under his plan 80 percent of city libraries might closed, he replied, “Why do we need books? The schools aren’t teaching the kids to read anyway.”
His initiative, Proposition 13, destroyed the technocratic alternative on Election Day. It set off a nationwide tax revolt that the best book on the subject, by American Prospect co-founder Robert Kuttner, nicknamed the Revolt of the Haves. That revolt, built of that ginned-up anti-establishment rage, was one of the political foundations of Ronald Reagan’s presidential victory in 1980.
Forty-four years later, in the run-up to this election, it became almost genre convention in liberal-left commentary to imply that rhetoric increasingly untethered from decency and logic would be Trump’s Achilles’ heel. “Trump Has Lost His Sh*t,” ran one illustrative headline atop the daily email newsletter of one publication on the left.
What such accounts were never accompanied by, however, was evidence, or even any attempt at adducing evidence, of why this made him less appealing to the people who ended up voting for him, or consideration of whether and how it might have made him more appealing—the way that he lost his sh*t all the way to the White House. “Cognitive decline” and “disinhibition,” all too often, become our ritual alibi for how effectively Trump was inviting his supporters to revel in the pleasure of his unmitigated cruelty, licensing them to practice such cruelty themselves—which they are now all too free to do.
What do we do with that knowledge? I don’t have any good idea. All I know is that, first, we have to acknowledge that it’s true.
