One of the dreariest aspects of our long national MAGA nightmare is how little we ever seem to learn from the experience. I am concerned that, here in the third act of this unbearable Groundhog Day reboot, we are making some of the same mistakes that allowed this rough beast to first slouch into Washington.
Bottom line upfront: We’re spending way too much time obsessively focusing on Trump and too little promoting Democratic messages and candidates. We either think this helps us or…we aren’t thinking much at all, just emoting or freaking out or maybe looking to go viral with a post on the latest weird Trump or Vance statement.
I can’t say I’m not guilty. But it’s all about keeping things in perspective and keeping our eyes on the prize. Simon Rosenberg, the Democratic operative and analyst who always seems to be playing three-dimensional chess when so many others haven’t advanced beyond Tic-Tac-Toe, simply suggests that we maintain a healthy balance in our communications, like say, two-thirds squarely focused on messages that benefit Democrats and one third on our horror at MAGA insanity.
Rosenberg is particularly critical of those of us who spread fear of Trump and his legions, as he noted in a recent Substack video:
“When we get distracted [by MAGA nonsense] and we start worrying, using their tactics and the things they’re saying…to make us and other people in our family worried, you become an enabler of MAGA by doing that. I just hope everyone understands how much…they want you to…take the bait every day. They want you to all the sudden say…my God, I’m terrified! Well, when you do that, you’re working for MAGA. And so, we’ve got to be far more disciplined.”
Yes, I understand the power of “negative partisanship” – that people are often more motivated to vote against whom and what they fear and revile rather than for whom and what they like. But the fact that we’re still so puzzled by Trump’s staying power shows that we haven’t grasped how he has continually turned this phenomenon on its head.
Let’s go back to 2016 when some sharp observers noted that Trump long ago learned how to capitalize on bad publicity as much as good. Michael Kruse wrote an excellent piece on this topic in Politico on July 21, 2016. As he put it: “bad publicity hasn’t torn him down. It consistently has kept him in the public eye, and kept his opponents scrambling for attention.”
Nor has Trump kept this strategy of his a secret. It’s even in his best known (ghostwritten) book:
“Ten years before, in one of his first lessons concerning a round of bad publicity, he had had workers jackhammer valuable Art Deco bas-relief friezes to make way for Trump Tower—after telling the Metropolitan Museum of Art he would donate them. ‘Obviously,’ the New York Times scolded in an editorial, ‘big buildings do not make big human beings.’ Trump shrugged. He claimed the attention helped him sell more apartments. His takeaway from the incident, according to The Art of the Deal: “from a bottom-line business perspective, bad publicity is sometimes better than no publicity at all.”
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I know this is hard for many of us to comprehend. How can coverage of his many acts of fraud, from “Trump University” to his long time overvaluing of his properties, his acts of sexual assault, his racism, his nastiness – how can all of this help him? One way to think of it is to consider every news cycle as a precious non-renewable resource – like a lump of coal burned away, once passed, it is gone, wafted up into the atmosphere, never to return. Now how many of these news cycles continue to be clogged with stories on Trump – which we help to perpetuate by spreading them across social media?
It may hurt him with those who see through his BS but also helps him as he not only regularly gets his messages out to his supporters and even to undecideds but he also gets to hog media and social media airtime that might otherwise be devoted to getting Democratic/progressive messages out.
I’m not great with sports analogies, but it’s something like when a team that’s ahead executes a strategy to simply hold the field rather than allowing the other team to have any chance to score. Back in the halcyon days of college basketball, University of North Carolina (UNC) Coach Dean Smith pioneered what was called the “Four Corners Offense.” His players would stand at four corners of the court and simply pass the ball back and forth to run down the time remaining for the other team to get their hands on the ball, unless they fouled one of the UNC players.
Shot clocks have since made such techniques infeasible, yet they show how a strategy of stubbornly holding the field can work even though fans didn’t like them, since they are boring and seem unsportsmanlike. If you understand the daily news and spin cycle as the “field” of the election, then every day Trump keeps his own tiny hands on the ball is a day that Kamala Harris and the entire Democratic team are denied the chance to grab it and score a few points of their own.
Much of the mysterious “Trump magic”, “defying political gravity” or whatever pundits choose to call it, boils down to this: he makes sure that everyone is alwaystalking about and focusing on him and nothing and no one else ever. “Sucking the oxygen out of the room” is my preferred way to describe the phenomenon. It’s the distraction technique of a master shell game con artist.
So what do we lose when we play along with these MAGA games? The opportunity to supplant his messages with ours. This difference could decide not only the presidential election but also the many critical downballot races for House, Senate and local offices, all of which will have a profound impact on the lives and livelihoods of Americans.
What savvy Dems and those out in the field are saying is that there is still a pool of undecideds who might vote for “the devil they know” vs. a Democratic ticket about which they say they don’t know enough. Whose job is it to educate them about our candidates and messages? Yours and mine – as well as the media’s and the campaigns’. I mean, we could spend another day grousing about or ridiculing Trump or we could spend that day telling people who Kamala and Tim are and what they stand for as well as helping promote unknown Democratic candidates for the House and Senate whose races will decide control of Congress.
Look, I know that train wrecks are hard to ignore, particularly when you and your loved ones and well. the fate of the country are in the path of that out-of-control train car. But we don’t need to ignore it, we just need to give more attention, space and credit to the heroes rushing to the scene to prevent this tragedy from getting way worse.
I’ll close with a few suggestions. First, think carefully about what you post or forward – is it something that will advance the cause, inspire and inform your fellow travelers, or will it more likely scare and depress them? Are you really spreading the messages you most want to spread and giving needed airtime to the candidates you most want to promote – or distracting from that purpose? Are you leading people directly to the actions they need to take?
Pushing the candidates who uphold Democratic values can require a little more research, but not a ton of it. First priority is to make sure voters know more about Kamala Harris from both the personal and policy perspectives. Certainly send them to the campaign bio, but do your own Googling to learn more about our nominee, from her Wikipedia page to this Politico collection of biographical facts. Lots of good stuff out there about Tim Walz, most recently, this Zen state-inducing video of him walking his good dog Scout and chatting with the guy behind WeRateDogs.com.
But there are also many Congressional races that would benefit even more from our attention. Simon Rosenberg is promoting 15 of the tightest races which will make Rep. Hakeem Jeffries the next speaker of the House if the Democrats win a majority of them. Also check out the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) Red to Blue page with the same goals. And certainly check out the groups promoting the candidates who score best on the issues you care about; for me, that’s the environment and clean energy, so I gravitate to the endorsees of groups like GiveGreen and Climate Cabinet.
So don’t let the Fox-driven news cycle determine what you post and talk about. Let’s spread OUR messages far and wide – and meanwhile, please stop filling my feed with video of Trump blathering about anything. The less I have to listen to or look at that guy, the better.
(Please sign up for my Substack, for free)
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