By F.D. Flam / Bloomberg Opinion
On the eve of Election Day, anthropology professor Alexander Hinton talked to me from a Trump rally, where he was already convinced the Republican candidate would win. He’d been observing the MAGA movement in a professional capacity, attending more Trump rallies than he can count, and he says Donald Trump’s supporters display an unusual fervor for their candidate. “He knows how to choreograph a show.”
Hinton’s prediction was based on Trump’s abilities as an entertainer and the way he’s inspired faith that he can lower the price of a cup of coffee and fatten Americans’ pocketbooks.
Some of the faith in the new president-elect and his economic promises comes from a sense that he “tells it like it is”; that he speaks with blunt honesty, even as he insists he won the 2020 election and propagates numerous other fictions. This paradox has confused pundits, pollsters and other observers since Trump’s rise to political prominence over a decade ago. That he even got a chance to run for president a third time — despite losing in 2020 and despite many of his hand-picked candidates losing in 2022 — raises questions about our vulnerability to cults of personality.
Most of what passes for “telling it like it is” comes down to Trump making completely subjective judgments with a tone of certainty; that some of his enemies are “losers” or “morons” or “low IQ” or that one of his rivals somehow has a face that’s not fit for office. Some might call this brutal honesty, but there’s nothing honest about it. The Week Magazine calls it “maniacal overconfidence” which “sounds to some people like forthrightness.” In that sense, he is telling it like it is; in his own self-serving head.
“The issue with narcissists is the difference between truth and falsehood has no meaning,” says University of Chicago behavioral scientist Dario Maestripieri. They only care about what helps them. And Trump’s narcissism makes him charismatic, he said.
The certitude can make Trump sound like he’s in the know. And some enjoy the insults hurled at other people; a part of the show that can be entertaining, and also flattering, since there’s an implication that Trump’s supporters aren’t among the morons. And focusing on categories of people such as undocumented immigrants gives some people a target on which to blame their own problems. That particular group also inspired outrage among immigrants who went through all the hurdles to enter the U.S. legally.
New York Times columnist Ezra Klein had a slightly different slant recently, focusing on what he calls Trump’s disinhibition; a sometimes magnetic disregard for what people might think. Consider, wrote Klein, Trump’s strange behavior during a rally in the Philadelphia suburbs, when he stopped a question session and played music for more than 30 minutes.
That same unusual self-assurance was on display in Trump’s appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast. After watching the entire three-hour interview, I didn’t once witness Trump delivering the kind of refreshing honesty associated with the phrase “tell it like it is,” but he didn’t tell many clear-cut lies either. In fact, he usually didn’t finish a thought. Instead, he rambled and bloviated, and bragged.
When asked what it was like to move into the White House in 2016, he mentioned the Lincoln Bedroom; then expounded, as a tour guide might, about the items in the room and the personal lives of members of the Lincoln family. He also talked with bold confidence about climate, nuclear power and wind power, before going on a confusing diversion about how central California was once covered by giant lake.
For a three-hour interview, it was weirdly uninformative; but people I know who get their news from Rogan’s podcast say they only consume it passively while doing other things, or they see snippets later. That represents a radical change in the way people consumer media. With people half tuned in, Trump’s ability to speak with confidence about so many topics might look impressive; if you’re not listening too closely, he might sound knowledgeable.
When he speaks, Trump is often cryptic, or vague, issuing his subjective views as if they were facts. When he does speak in clear, declarative sentences, he tends to get ridiculed; as happened in the presidential debate against Kamala Harris when he said that immigrants were eating cats and dogs.
More often, he resorts to innuendo and hints of secret knowledge: about election fraud, foreign leaders or the origin of the covid pandemic. For example, when Joe Rogan pressed him for a real answer on whether he really believed 2020 was stolen, he first said something unintelligible, then argued election fraud is possible in theory. Rogan later endorsed him.
Trump won with surprising decisiveness, despite his evasiveness and failure to justify his extraordinary claims. It’s tempting to conclude that we live in some kind of post-truth society. Perhaps, instead, we live in a society obsessed with the truth, but we’ve lost our appreciation for explanatory depth and different perspectives. At the same time, we’re just as persuaded by a speaker’s confidence as ever.
Angus Fletcher, an Ohio State University English professor with a background in neuroscience, said people hearing just one side of a story report high confidence in their knowledge. Once they get another perspective, their confidence goes down. “A lot of disagreements can be solved just by filling in the missing pieces of information.”
Issues such as immigration look different from various angles; from the perspective of a refugee in need of a home, a teacher struggling to reach students who can’t speak English, and local people trying to accommodate the newcomers. “A narrative has different sides to it,” he said, “as opposed to a math problem, which has only one answer.”
Envisioning reality from various perspectives takes time; the kind of time some used to devote to reading entire newspaper stories or even a book, he said. “These are skills people are losing,” as they get more news from social media, short videos and long, one-sided podcasts.
Hinton, the anthropologist, predicts the MAGA movement will dissipate once Trump leaves office because nobody else matches his ability to persuade and entertain. In the meantime, regaining the ability to look at the world through different perspectives might not make America unified again, but it could at least help us break free of cults of personality and start to understand each other.
F.D. Flam is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering science. She is host of the “Follow the Science” podcast.
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