Top Five Reasons to Dump Trump (and MAGA) Now
It’s time to take down the entire Republican Party brand.
Why should we take the focus off Trump and MAGA?
Because what we’re doing now isn’t working.
Because attacking Trump and MAGA only makes them stronger.
Because persuadable voters ignore character attacks.
Because we need to beat ALL Republicans.
Because it’s time to take down the entire Republican Party brand.
I know this is a lot to chew on! Let it ruminate in the back of your mind as you enjoy holidays with your friends and family! We can dive into it further in the New Year.
Happy Holidays!
1: What we’re doing now isn’t working.
Too many people still believe that Trump would be a better President than Joe Biden, the best President we’ve had in nearly a century.
Our working hypothesis has been: “If we point out that Trump is a horrible and dangerous person, a threat to democracy and so on, people will conclude that Biden would be a far better choice as President.” For some reason, that seems indelibly logical to us: we cannot get our brains to accept that it just isn’t the way people’s brains work.
According to both cognitive science and empirical data, attacking your opponent simply does not work. There have been several comprehensive studies on attack advertising, and they show that it is ineffective at best, and counterproductive at worst. (See Notes below.)
When it comes to Trump, we’ve been doing the same thing since the 2016 campaign and, despite being on trial for 91 felony counts, Trump is as popular as ever.
You might ask, “How can we not sound the alarm about the dangers Trump poses to our society and our democracy”? As incredible as it sounds, voters just can’t hear that alarm, not when it’s coming from us.
We have to try something else.
Thank you for reading Reframing America! This work is reader supported. To make sure you don’t miss a column, subscribe now to receive new posts by email!
All content is free, but some people choose to become paying subscribers to support this mission of helping everyone on the Left effectively communicate what we believe to American voters!
2: Attacking Trump and MAGA makes them stronger.
The first rule of framing is that what you talk about is what you get.
The more we talk about Trump, even to talk about what’s wrong with him, the more we activate his neural networks in people’s brains, making them grow physically stronger. Unfortunately, as neural networks grow stronger, our brains perceive the concepts they contain as increasingly normal and/or good. That’s the science behind the phenomenon of “normalization.”
Apparently, the more we talk about the idea of Trump as a dictator, the more we normalize the idea of Trump as a dictator. It’s nuts, I know, but brains are biological, not rational.
Not only has Trump not been hurt by press coverage of his statements that immigrants are “poisoning the blood of this country” or that he will be a “dictator on day one,” they have now become standard applause lines in his stump speech. According to a new USA Today poll, “Trump’s escalating rhetoric makes many likely Iowa Republicans more likely to back him.” To Trump supporters, his aggressive and even violent language is the feature, not the bug.
Demagoguery is a form of gaslighting. The Trump persona is an elaborate fiction put forth by Trump himself. His followers happily believe him. That doesn’t mean we have to play along. If we keep talking about Trump as a phenomenon, as a powerful cult leader, as immune to societal norms, as unstoppable in the Republican primaries, even as a dictator, we help him build up that version of Trump in people’s minds.
The Trump we talk about is the Trump we get. We should significantly reduce the time we spend talking about Trump. But when we do talk about him, we should talk about the Trump we want: the Trump who is pathetic and soon to be irrelevant, a failed businessman and habitual criminal who will most likely be in jail by November. Our words should make him seem smaller and weaker, not bigger and stronger.
Trump thrives on playing the victim. Being our “enemy number one” is Mr. Trump’s main source of power. He thrives on his supposed victimhood and uses it to get attention and fundraise. His uses it strategically to delegitimize his opposition (political and legal) and to get people to perceive attacks on him as attacks on them, so he can be their “retribution.”
Attacking MAGA helps Trump. Opposition to us “woke liberal” Democrats is what’s driving Trump’s base. When we attack Trump and his MAGA followers, we bind them together in their grievance and make them ever prouder to identify as MAGA.
The more we identify extreme Republican candidates as MAGA, the more we reinforce the idea that Donald Trump is this powerful leader. These candidates don’t “believe in” Trump. Most are just bullies and opportunists. People like Kari Lake are no more loyal to Trump than he is to them.
3. Persuadable voters ignore character attacks.
Sadly, projection, inoculation and false equivalence are effective media strategies. Trump and friends accuse us of what they are about to do, so when we accuse them, it sounds like yet another “he said/she said” partisan fight. Trump was impeached, so they try to impeach Biden for no reason. If you recall, Bill Clinton was impeached. It only made him more popular. Voters don’t care.
Voters ignore character attacks, because they don’t trust political actors or the media as reliable sources. They see character attacks as subjective opinions expressed by people with political motives. We’ll be lucky if voters even accept “a jury of their peers” as an unbiased judge, when verdicts come down in Trump’s trials.
So how do you defeat a demagogue in an election?
According to people who have beaten authoritarian candidates in elections in other countries, you campaign against them as though they were normal people instead of attacking them for their authoritarian statements and behavior. It would absolutely infuriate Trump if we treated him with indifferent politeness, talking about his actual record as President, and evaluating his future proposals as if they were serious policy choices.
4: We need to beat ALL Republicans.
We have to win seats all across this country, from the federal level to school boards. Many of our opponents will be extremists masquerading as “regular” Republicans. Many may actually be “regular” Republicans. We have to defeat them all.
Also, Trump might not be the nominee. What if he’s convicted and we end up with Nikki Haley or even Chris Christie? It would be professional negligence to not be fully prepared to run against candidates other than Trump.
Some people are afraid we can’t beat “regular” Republicans. Some Democrats are hoping for Trump to be the nominee or even backing MAGA candidates in primaries, because they think we can only beat Republicans if they are extremists. This is – pardon my French – chickensh*t.
First of all, the best way to prevent a fascist takeover of our country is to do everything we can to prevent Trump’s being the nominee. If bad things happen, you make the best of them, but you don’t try to cause bad things to happen. That’s playing Russian roulette with other people’s lives. It’s plain wrong, and our voters and volunteers know it.
We absolutely can beat regular and extreme Republicans on the merits and must be prepared to do so. To not even try is cowardice or incompetence or both. The American people support the issues we support. They just need to see us fighting for those issues and not backing down in the face of criticism or pressure from the media.
5: It’s time to take down the entire Republican Party brand.
How do we run against Trump without talking about Trump? How do we run against his primary opponents without elevating any individual candidate? How do we run against both extreme and “regular” Republicans? It’s simple. We run against the Republican Party as a whole. The entire Republican Party needs to be held responsible both for their dysfunctional behavior and their destructive legacy of market fundamentalism.
Political elections are a battle of Party identification or “brand preference.”
According to authors Rachel Bitecofer (political scientist) and Drew Westen (clinical psychologist), people vote for the Party they like and against the Party they don’t like. These judgments are emotional, not rational.
It is well established that the strongest indicator of someone’s vote is whether they identify as a Republican or Democrat. Democratic campaign legend Hal Malchow says that, given that fact, our number one mission should be to get more people to identify as Democrats. I have said this myself MANY TIMES.
We label some candidates “MAGA” to separate them from “regular” Republicans. We’re trying to give Republican voters an “out” – a way to vote for individual Democratic candidates without feeling bad for being a Republican. But that approach assumes party identification is unchanging, when in fact, changing it is the whole ball game. Bitecofer points out that people should feel bad about being a Republican. That’s how we get them to stop being a Republican.
Everything we say in the public debate has a cumulative impact. The Republican Party’s reputation should suffer a death by a thousand cuts. Every time we call someone or something MAGA, we are wasting a precious opportunity to deliver one more cut, to expose people’s brains to one more negative association with the Republican Party name.
We need to change our strategy to reflect the fact that elections are less about individual candidates and more about which Party the American people believe to be on their side.
BONUS REASON
6: This election is about economic fairness.
Some Trump voters are not Trump fans. Why do they say they will vote for him anyway?
Many swing voters ignore what they see as name calling. So, what are they basing their decisions on? It appears that they may be voting based on a misguided perception of business competence on the part of Donald Trump and handling of the economy on the part of Republicans. Those are both widely accepted myths that pre-date the election cycle and have gone almost entirely unchallenged.
Also, even to Trump fans, it’s not that Trump is magic. It’s the economic populism that sells. That’s why so many Trump voters’ second choice was Bernie Sanders. While we carry on about his outrageous behavior, he campaigns directly to voters as an economic populist, if a right-wing, grievance-based one.
Republicans are tapping into the legitimate frustration of generations who have lived through the transition from an economy in which one salary could support a family (for those lucky enough to have a good union job), to one in which even two salaries can barely keep a family afloat, as well as the hopelessness of generations too young to even imagine a path to the middle class. They’re campaigning on conditions they are responsible for creating.
Our strategy? Attack them on their strongest point.
Republicans are always way ahead of us on “the economy.” This is the residual benefit of fifty years of marketing of “free-market” economics.
If Karl Rove were working for us, he’d say, “You don’t defeat them by hitting them on their weakest point. You beat them by taking out their strongest point.” We press our advantage on abortion, but then we beat the **** out of Republicans on economic fairness.
We need to
portray Trump as a failed businessman whose only success came from fraud and other criminal activity,
expose Republicans’ pseudo-populism as a cover for their corporate elitist agenda, and
tear down, once and for all, the persistent myths of Zombie Reaganomics.
We must define our fight for economic fairness and use it to create a narrative that explains the motives behind their entire anti-freedom agenda.
This battle, and every battle from now on, will be fought over who wears the mantle of economic fairness. If it's Trump, we lose. If it's Democrats we win.
HOW to do that is a subject for another column (or all my other columns for that matter!)
Thanks, as always, for reading and subscribing! I hope you are able to use this in your work and your activism – AFTER you take a break and restore yourself with friends, food and family!
In solidarity,
Antonia
NOTES:
Donald Trump’s escalating rhetoric makes many likely Iowa Republicans more likely to back him.
By Galen Bacharier | USA Today, The Des Moines Register | December 19, 2023
“Many likely Iowa Republican caucusgoers have no issue with several of Trump’s recent statements, a new Des Moines Register/NBC News/Mediacom Iowa Poll has found, and, more often than not, they say the same statements make them more likely to support the former president.”
The Secret of Trump’s Appeal Isn’t Authoritarianism
By Matthew Schmitz | New York Times Opinion | Dec. 18, 2023
“Mr. Trump enjoys enduring support because he is perceived by many voters — often with good reason — as a pragmatic if unpredictable kind of moderate.”
Middle America: How to Beat a Demagogue (Re: Tony Evers' defeat of Scott Walker)
By Ruth Conniff | The Progressive Magazine | December 1, 2018,
"If the 2018 midterms show one thing, it’s that a common-sense appeal to the citizenry to defend public institutions against greed and corruption can prevail, even against the daunting power of organized money.
It just takes a lot of work."
BOOKS
The Political Brain: The Role of Emotion in Deciding the Fate of the Nation
By Drew Westen
Hit 'Em Where It Hurts: How to Save Democracy by Beating Republicans at Their Own Game
By Rachel Bitecofer
RESEARCH
Going Positive: The Effects of Negative and Positive Advertising on Candidate Success and Voter Turnout.
Liam C Malloy and Shanna Pearson-Merkowitz (2016).
Research and Politics, January-March 2016.
The Effects of Negative Political Campaigns: A Meta-Analytic Reassessment.
Richard R. Lau, Lee Sigelman, and Ivy Brown Rovner (2007).
Journal of Politics, 69 (4), 1176-1209.
Such as:
"Democrats got $35 insulin for everyone on Medicaid; Republicans blocked extending that to every American. If you’re paying too much for insulin, thank a Republican!"
-or-
"Failed businessman Donald Trump"
"This election is about economic fairness..." and also personal freedoms? (enumerated depending on the conversation), with overlap between those two categories.