Late in October 2018 opinion polls in the USA and NZ happened to coincide. In both countries the political leader was at 45% approval. For Jacinda Ardern this was the highest percentage she had reached. For Donald Trump, too, the number was higher than other recent polls had indicated. In NZ we hear about Jacindamania, and it must be admitted that whatever one’s take is on the state of the country, it would not be easy to summon up excessively strong dislike for a Prime Minister who matches the public mood as closely as any in living memory. Yet she is no more popular in her country than Trump is in his, and he is uniquely awful.

True, by midterm election eve a fortnight later, after spewing a torrent of lies based on racist and xenophobic venom, Trump was said by pollsters to have lost ground, but he was still at 40%, the lowest approval rating for a President at his first mid-term of any predecessor since modern polling began in the 1950s. But that was not reassuring.

It still seemed that as many Americans were about to support Trump as people in NZ would support a typical leader of either of the two main parties, none of whom have matched, or will likely ever match Trump, for being repulsively stupid, nasty and ignorant. When a newly elected Trump announced his Muslim ban, he explained it by asserting that he needed to find out “what the hell is going on?”. We have to ask the same question of him (and answer it – unlike Trump, who answers none of his own absurd rhetorical questions).

In this Watchdog series I have previously suggested that Trumpian support was essentially cultural rather than economic, and this now is the consensus. Certainly, the man himself thinks so, with his “base” the only constituency he (says he) wants to represent. It is also unarguable that he thought he could hold support for the Republicans by inflaming panic about people who were not white-skinned and Christian.

Just What Is Trump’s Appeal?

But 40% of Americans are not the crude haters that their hero is – not even close. So, the answer to the question that has been posed over the last three years, when he announced his candidacy amid amusement and contempt from commentators, is still not altogether clear. Just what is Trump’s appeal?

At first it could have been that he was panicking, knowing how unlikely he was to attract the vote of civilised people, but a panic cannot be a permanent condition. Conversely, he could have assumed that most people shared his prejudices. All reports indicate that the President cannot concentrate his mind or listen to advice he is predisposed to dislike, and there would not have been any cunning “spin” motivating him. But in the background, mostly unknown to the man they work for, there are legions of Republican spinners, and Trump’s excesses have suited them just fine.

The guiding principle had been what commentators call “voter suppression”. In districts where demographics suggest that likely Democrats are close to a majority of the population, Republican candidates are advised to disgust citizens who are black, Hispanic, female or politically uninterested, knowing that sowing a mood of cynicism about the possibility of social advance will induce many to stay home on election day. This is the “plague on both your houses” gambit.

Another trick is to demand identification which poorer or less educated people might not have. Then there’s gerrymandering, the drawing of electorate boundaries so as to lump together likely Democrats in one electorate where the natural geography would have allowed for two or more narrower wins (the party in power locally has the ability to draw these boundaries). The tactical hope was that the same Trump rants that get out the vote amongst the deplorables will induce the less inflamed, the moderate and the apathetic to abstain.

As the conventional wisdom is realising, American politics have gone “tribal”. Voters identify on the basis of what sorts of people they see themselves as, and as they do, they become less likely to identify with tribes with whom they feel no kinship. The political and cultural divide is between Trump’s “base” and what they see as the System. The Elites, Them. This applies powerfully to “the media”, Trump’s favourite demon of late. “The media” is full of self-righteous, pampered eggheads, who don’t like “the base”. And the more Trump deteriorates, and the more “the media” report it, the more “the base” reacts. People are in holes, digging.

In the months before asylum seekers became the favoured Trumpian scapegoats, the right to mow down fellow citizens with assault weapons and the right of judges and Senators to deny women control of their bodies were the big issues with Republicans. As long as moral indignation can be whipped into hysteria and intolerance can be fanned into hate, then “the base” can prosper.

It has always been noted that uneducated white males are disproportionately among the base. So too are Christian fundamentalists, who gave Trump his edge in 2016. They vote. A 2012 survey found that the 20% of Americans who reported having no religion made up only 12% of voters. The atheists and agnostics favoured Clinton over Trump by a three to one margin. Compare that to evangelicals, who are also 20% of the population but 26% of voters. Six years on, in an increasingly moralistic and polarised ethos, the evangelical turnout was undoubtedly even higher.

If the plunge into identity politics has been the focus of the Right, the Left can blame themselves for having spent decades neglecting bread and butter issues and making their version of identity politics fashionable. Republican jibes at political correctness might be motivated by their wish to prevent minorities from leading richer and healthier lives, but they have been helped along by moralistic condescension from the liberal “elites”.

Trump loves it when the “media” and the “liberals” talk lifestyle because it builds his “base’s” energy. Rarely has liberal “PC” (which has often been as silly as conservatives claim) touched matters which interest average people and it has not increased support for the Democrats. As comedian Bill Maher put it: “Republicans rule without shame and liberals shame without ruling”.

Khashoggi & Kavanaugh

Leading into the election, Trump spouted literally hundreds of lies, many of them reversing the truth. “The base” didn’t care. Many would have loved the display of contempt for objectivity, an “elite” value. Let’s look at just two episodes from October 2018: the disappearance of a US resident after he entered a consulate in Istanbul, and the confirmation of a Supreme Court nominee.

Tin-eared Donald was initially happy to tell the world’s TV audience that he would not want to lose $US100 billion of arms exports to Saudi Arabia. He phoned the King, who knew nothing. That could even have been thought through as the King reportedly has Alzheimers and would not have been involved in policy. But this probably gives Trump undeserved credit for some subtlety of tactics. Then, he began to pretend to condemn the murder of Jamal Khashoggi (a columnist for the Washington Post, a US newspaper, even if one that is on Trump’s hit list of “fake news” spreaders). The next Trumpian take was a compromise hatched in Riyadh that would keep all bases covered.

OK, the guy had been tortured, killed and probably dismembered, but it was the work of “rogue elements”. The Saudi Arabian government knew nothing, saw nothing. Then a few days later, the President gave up the pretence at morality or respect for a free press and went with the Saudi Crown Prince. The assassination never happened. For a few degrading weeks the Saudis and the Americans continued to play for time, hoping to come up with a story they could pretend to believe, knowing that neither the Yanks nor their key European partners could get offside with the Crown Prince. They would have calculated (correctly) that after a while the world’s interest would dissolve.

We can imagine some scenarios of key moments in history. Suppose that Trump had been Prime Minister of the UK in 1939. At the beginning of September, the Foreign Office, MI5, MI6 and the British Army announced that German troops had entered Poland. That weekend shots of Hitler’s tanks played at movie shorts. The PM announced:

“The Army and the secret service are very fine people, but I have spoken to the Chancellor and he was strong in his denials. Maybe something was happening in Poland, I don’t know, but stuff happens everywhere all the time. So, maybe something happened. I don’t know. The Chancellor says it was a rogue element and he’s looking into it. We get on. He’s nice to me. So, OK. The Poles should have spent more on their military. It’s their fault. Their problem”.

Or there was the Kavanaugh Supreme Court debacle, when the favoured Republican response was to adopt a serious expression, look into the camera and say something like “I believe the judge. He’s a family man and he is suffering from all these stories. He used to play wide receiver at Yale. I don’t doubt that something happened to his accuser, but it was a long time ago and…” (in its fake aping of being “respectful” and “balanced”, this response was the most evil of all, in its evasion of responsibility).

So, let’s suppose that Judge Trump presided over a previous enactment of privileged male versus female, the OJ Simpson trial. The Judge’s summary: “Mr Simpson was strong in his denials and I believe him. He was a fine running back and a credit to his race. I don’t doubt that something happened to his wife and her boyfriend that night, but OJ says it was a drug deal gone wrong. Who knows? I like OJ’s story. He’s a big strong man”.

“And look at his wife. She wasn’t that hot. Would I have grabbed her pussy? Maybe, but who knows what happened? Lots of stuff happens. Don’t forget that the cop looking into it was a racist guy. That’s important. And that woman prosecuting. She was a dog. And that guy Nicole Simpson was with. He looked weedy to me. He could have been a Democrat for all I know. So not guilty, OJ, you’re free to go. Let’s have a round of golf” (a jury acquitted Simpson, so at least some of this thinking was endorsed in real life).

It’s About Culture Rather Than Economics

“The base” are not the economically downtrodden. In 2016 the two lowest earning deciles favoured Clinton by 52% to 42% for Trump, and the four highest deciles all favoured Trump. With the US economy doing better than it has for a long time (as are other leading Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development [OECD] economies) the Trumpian refusal to divert from the “caravan” and “the wall” to claiming credit for all the money has confused conventional conservatives.

A 2016 poll had found that voters ranked the economy as the most important issue. For Trumpians it meant a tax cut for the 1%, so while they might sneer at Trump in private, they will say nothing against him in public. The Democrats know that health care - identified as the main issue this time round - slashed welfare, precarious jobs, a feeble minimum wage (and climate change) are what matters to most of the 79% who are not evangelicals or one per centers. The election would have hinged on how many of the deplorables - who are quite normal people when they are not being seduced by their false prophet – voted for their interests, that is, against Trumpian Republicanism.

They chose not to. The white middle classes of middle America went for the Republicans, the elections turning out much as the pollsters had expected, with the Democrats winning the House of Representatives, though by not much more than in a typical mid-term, when the party that is not in the White House usually does well (it’s similar to the by-election pattern in parliamentary democracies, which often trends away from governing parties).

At least Congress looks more representative of the country now, with quite a few youngish women, two of whom are Muslim. Trump might wish to use an Executive Order to remove them but he will presumably be pleased that one of the new women is Native American, making her about the only American politician who is not from immigrant stock.

Trump has some reason to celebrate the midterms. In key swing states like Ohio and Florida his lot did well and in the days after the election, he signalled that he was about to behave even worse than usual, if that is possible. For the next two years we can expect him to blame everything that he does not like and everything that goes wrong – everything - on the House. He will whip up the “base” by pushing for legislation which he knows the Democrats will oppose, giving him ammunition. Nothing will happen. The culture wars will intensify.

The day after the election, Trump fired his Attorney General and we know that the Mueller probe is the reason. Whatever results, the Democrats are not likely to help out “the base” by calling for an impeachment which they do not have the numbers to achieve, but they will try to conclude the investigations into Russian election meddling, and they might subpoena Trump’s tax returns. If they find a smoking gun, the fallout will be nuclear – only metaphorically, let’s hope.