"trump, v.t., to deceive - n. trumpery, showy and worthless stuff, rubbish; ritual foolery".

At the time of writing it has been confirmed that Joe Biden will be the next American President. The sitting President disagrees. Before the votes had been tallied he announced he had won and continued to charge that the election was "stolen" by "fraud". You've heard all about it. Meanwhile Covid infections and deaths soared to record levels.

What's happened since, now when you're reading this? Have neo-Nazis surrounded Biden's house? Has Trump informed us that Hillary Clinton's paedophile ring rigged the ballots? Will it matter now that a conventional politician will soon take office? Let's look at Trumpery as it emerged over the last five years. History suggests the chaos and nastiness is about to get worse.

By the time Trump emerged as the Republican candidate in 2016, Party strategists had determined that the only way to win was to persuade working class white men to switch to their side. This was the only demographic that was large enough and culturally close enough to the Republicans to get their man over the line. To campaign on real issues that mattered - like the economy or the environment - was never an option.

No plausible Republican economic policy that would appeal to workers existed, and no plausible idea as to how to clean up the environment could exist, not when part of the reason for the Republican Party's being there in the first place was to drive down wages and lay off workers while polluting corporations could profit.

The other pressing issue for the majority is healthcare, and all indications are that Americans want to keep the options introduced by President Obama. Rather than cancel the Affordable Care Act, as Trumpery wants, the majority want to extend coverage. Republicans hate the thought of healthy constituents, which would cut the gross profits of Big Insurance and Big Pharma.

These big problems for Trumpery are why a diversionary appeal based on racist hysteria appealed. But after eight years of a popular black President and 50 years after civil rights laws were embedded and George Wallace, the last Presidential candidate to solicit support based directly on race, had got nowhere, this would have been too high a hill to climb. An overt appeal to bigotry and hate would fail (for a reminder of who Wallace was, see my review of "The Trial Of The Chicago 7" movie, elsewhere in this issue).

The Solution Lay In Changing The Narrative

The strategists had concluded (correctly) that the way people talk to each other and the language they deploy to do so set the boundaries of what is possible to discuss. This is all the more the case for being implicit. The way societies evolve norms is not a conscious choice they make. They're taken for granted. No-one will say that they reject fairness and decency, for instance, because they think that unfairness and indecency are preferable.

The targeted working class men were no different from other Americans: they accepted liberal values like tolerance and diversity, so they had to be induced to change their minds. They had to be persuaded to adopt a new Narrative. For this to succeed the front man needed to have certain qualities of nastiness. Enter Trump, stage right, the one public figure who could pull it off. Trump was the authentic hater. He would never get trapped into a semblance of good manners or good sense because he had no concept of manners or sense. He could be relied on to talk up The (new) Narrative.

The strategists would not even have to tell their dupe what they were up to. With the attention span of a flea, he would not have listened, the only topic to engage any flickering interest being the one topic he knows: himself and his unerring brilliance. Trump knows that values like cooperation and compromise are losers. He knows that social institutions and norms are the tools of the fake news elites who allowed America to be Not Great any more. They had to go. And he has always known that black, brown and female people are inferior.

At first Trump had talked of protecting his base from Chinese competition and "free trade", but not because of any coherent alternatives he might have imagined. There are no such things and never have been. In October 2020 Trump was asked by a TV interviewer what his priorities might be for the next four years. This is the first question that any candidate for any office would expect, but for Trump it was inexcusably hostile. He stormed out of the studio, whether because he could not answer or because he felt it was belittling to have to respond. Or for both reasons. At any time over his four years of his Presidency he could have practised an answer, but never thought to do so.

In the face of plunging farm incomes and soaring debts the early talk soon faded away and the candidate of 2020 had forgotten his 2016 lies. And he never talked, albeit hypocritically, of how great are the Republicans. They might grovel before him, but he does not think to talk up the Party because he cannot conceive of anything that merits attention that is not about him. The only way to go was The Narrative of hatred and chaos.

It is telling that William Barr, Trump's Attorney General and the person who most obviously combines the roles of tactician and apparatchik, talks publicly of "The Narrative", as he has done. This is a specific indication that the foul language that reeks out of the White House is the expression of this tactic. For Trumpery to prevail, Americans had to be dunked into a moral sewer where concepts like civility and truth could not survive.

In his important analysis of the role of language and culture in shaping the political landscape (reviewed by me elsewhere in this issue) Thomas Piketty argues that the "real seizure of power" by those seeking a fundamental shift in a democracy is "ideological and intellectual before it (is) political". As an example, he points out that the need to reduce inequality is accepted (in public) even by Rightists, just as it was in late 19th and early 20th Century America, when the robber barons of steel and oil became the world's first billionaires, and private property and free markets were being discredited.

Back then the justifications for unwarranted privilege, expressed through phrases like "freedom", and the notion that inequality was an aspect of "nature", could no longer be dangled before a credulous population, allowing a more inclusive language to emerge. Piketty starts with the thesis that "ideas and ideologies allow us to imagine new worlds".

In the era of John D Rockefeller it was thought to be "natural" that some were massively rich and others were starving. Look at Darwin, it was said. He showed that "the survival of the fittest" was just the way reality worked. Barr and Trump have been manipulating their supporters backward towards this past with their championing of "freedom", "fake news", misogyny and racism. Pseudo-science like social Darwinism was not available to Trump's advisers. They needed to find a way to pretend they wanted more equality (as in Draining the Swamp) while ensuring inequality could widen by talking up a populist chimera.

Trump's original slogan, with its wish to "Make America Great Again", was his instinctive understanding of this process, but for him the way to frame The Narrative was more accessible: his constant and instinctive lying. Always delusional, he believes nonsense if it resembles what he wants to be true. And as the election neared and he seemed to be losing his grip on the base, he was threatened as never before. He panicked.

The Rhetoric Became Quite Loony

Joe Biden and his son were crooks, and always had been; the virus was going away; testing for it increased the number of infections; science was a joke; Biden was a paedophile; neo-Nazis were OK, a plot to murder the Governor of Michigan was nothing to worry about. Did he say anything at all over the last few months that was not a lie, a slander, an absurdity, or a conspiracy theory? Has he ever?

A week out from polling day, after many of Trumpery's plots to suppress voting had failed, Trump and Pence were still denying that there was a problem with any pandemic. But cases were soaring, and the liberal elites and the scientists and other losers could not be silenced. So, a White House spokesman hoped to shut them up by ending the conversation.

He suggested the virus could not be contained. That revealed ludicrous new depths of incompetence. Trumpery was simultaneously asserting that there was no problem at all and that the problem was insurmountably bad. These nonsenses were offered on the same day - one on which five of Pence's staff tested positive. And it worked. Trump tended to get his highest vote tallies in states with the highest Covid death rates.

In common with reactionaries around the world Trump wanted to say that he needed to get the economy "open". What else could he claim? To him this meant the stock market, and it was booming. In the first month of the pandemic, from March 2020, American billionaires increased their wealth by $US282 billion. For most, though, the ventures not represented on Wall Street, it was less bullish. In that same March 22 million lost their jobs as small businesses were in deep disarray.

So, how could so many non-billionaires still rally round the orange buffoon? Conventional American commentators - the journalists on dinosaurs such as the non-Fox TV networks, magazines and newspapers - habitually refer to Trump's supporters as "non-college educated white men". This is misleading in that it suggests that education in itself creates the cultural divide. But formal education has never guaranteed good judgement, and neither has the lack of it guaranteed poor judgement. Often the opposite is the case: conspiracy theories are typically hatched by liberal arts graduates or IT geniuses.

The base might be white and (most obviously) male but it ranges across income groups. The working class as it was had a keen sense of what was in its interests and what would make life better. Look closer to home. The last time before 2020 that Labour won a clear majority was in 1938 when poorer workers rewarded the Savage government for building State houses and investing in public health. That mandate was temperamentally and culturally as far from Trumpery as you can get.

America's Rifts Cultural, Not Economic

Remaining ethics of social cohesion have been slipping away. In the intensely individualistic USA of today there are few unions or town hall meetings or working men's clubs to guide and fewer communal societies to bind. The Protestant churches that preached wellbeing and amelioration have lost influence as the extreme Rightist evangelicals attract a congregation of upwardly mobile entrepreneurs whose preachers confirm their belief that to be wealthy is to be blessed.

And, as is often pointed out, social media is random and unfiltered by gatekeepers. Everyone gets their impressions of things from different sources. Facebook targets intensely specific audiences. The Deplorables have no real idea of what the "liberals" and the "losers" are like because they have no real experience of them. Barack Obama has explained that Trumpery is not the cause of the mayhem; it's a symptom of a neo-liberalism that succeeds by forcing division and inequality and inauthenticity (actually, he did not use any of the words in the last sentence that followed "symptom").

The non-college educated men, whether rich or poor, inhabit provincial America. That is their disadvantage. Urban liberals, part of Biden's base, enjoy a variety of ways to connect with the wider world. Their benefit is not education per se but social inclusion. Piketty would agree: America's rifts are cultural, not economic.

Had it not been for 2016, when Hillary Clinton was expected to coast home, Trump's chances this time round would have been written off. As the campaigning came at last, mercifully, to a grotesque finish, he had been deserted by most of those who had previously worked for him, as well as quite a few Republicans of the old school variety. Around half the electorate voted early, which had never happened before. Did it mean that the country had at last been roused to end the appalling reign of Trumpery and terror? Or did it mean that Trump had energised potential supporters who do not traditionally vote?

To encourage the latter outcome Trump over the last few days toured the country maniacally, super spreading the virus at his rallies. At which he said that doctors were lying about Covid cases so that they could cheat more money for themselves. And that the Supreme Court would make sure he would be declared the winner. And that it was good to see his thugs harassing and intimidating Biden's supporters.

Meanwhile Republicans were openly trying to stop people voting in areas likely to be mostly for the Democrats. And conspiracy theorists and neo-Nazis were still letting it be known that Biden ran a child sex ring. Trump says things that normal people would not even think possible, let alone express. Yet Trump says them openly to the whole world.

My understanding of the phenomenon was clarified some time ago when I was chatting with a friend, a Trump supporter, about eruptions in Hawaii, a place we both knew. A TV news image had shown lava crossing a road towards a parked car. I wondered why the car's owner had not driven it to safety. Was he away? Had no neighbours phoned him? My friend was dismissive. The picture, she knew, was a fake. The car had been added to make the image more entertaining.

What she took for granted I had never, till then, conceived. I had thought, and still do, that mainstream news media presented events as they occurred. I had always known my interlocutor to be conservative, but this was not the usual difference of attitude between, say, Labour and National. It was a different concept of reality.

Deliberate Absence Of Trust

The essential trait of Trumpery's mindset is that it does not trust. It is sure that you can never know for certain what is real or what other people are up to. In the longer term this alienation could be even more damaging than all the bigotry and violence. Hatred based on biology and ethnicity is rejected by the majority, and barbarism and superstition are in a historic long-term decline. But when people do not trust each other or institutions and conventions, civilised coexistence is not viable. Everyday life in a democracy assumes a rational, mutually beneficial societal cooperation. It dies so tacitly in a myriad of ways.

Trumpery's Narrative would be completed when the West has no institutional links, no common agreements, no shared community values, and its governments say they have no mandate to seek social wellbeing. When Distrust rules, public money will be lavished exclusively on the military and the police and maybe a few new expressways. The rich will continue to get richer and the poor will continue to get poorer - but at a much faster rate than they do already.

In the developed liberal world Trumpery is the one impulse big enough and crude enough to destroy trust. It was not enough to vote out the cult guru; his enablers in Congress had to be whipped so heavily that the spreading pandemics might be purged and - excuse the expression - transformational change could start. It certainly did not pan out that way. Trumpery got 7,000,000 more votes than it got last time. Biden might have set a record for the most votes ever, but in second place is Trumpery. Trump was supported by more Americans than either Bill Clinton or Barack Obama had been, and both of them have always been routinely described as having been very popular.

After decades of commentator talk about how democracy would benefit from more popular engagement, they got their wish, but not as they would have wanted. The previously apathetic were engaged not by seeking a mandate for progressive taxation, or equality of educational opportunity, or a responsible police force, or a clean and productive economy, or racial and gender equality, or tolerance, or peace. They voted at last because they liked the demagogue's filth.

Through all the dreadful Trumpian era conventional critics have determinedly blamed themselves for the sickness, but now that Hillary Clinton - unusual in being disparaged by both Left and Right opinion - is not available any more to be kicked around, we might look for an explanation beyond a mere scapegoat. It is probably true that Biden was helped by his persona as a working class lad with no Ivy League degree, but surely we could look to a more substantive analysis than the liberal talking heads like to offer. Trumpery is not Hillary's fault. It's not even the fault of that other favoured whipping boy, the "media".

You don't vote for a fascist demagogue who wants to take away your health insurance and kill hundreds of thousands of Covid sufferers because you didn't care for Hillary's personality. You like Trump's better? You do it because you agree with the man. How else to explain that other Republicans increased their numbers this time round, doing better than Trump himself.

America Is Gripped By Ignorance And Stupidity

Please, stop saying things like "we did not understand the Deplorables". In all the five years of Trumpery I have not heard or read or seen a single remark from Trump or his cronies or his Deplorables that was either true or important or helpful. Not one. America is gripped by ignorance and stupidity. That's easy to understand. Instead of blaming moderate opinion for the existence of Trumpery, all the so nice observers might instead ask Trumpery to do a bit of understanding themselves.

They might learn how to respect decency and democracy - and what is in their interests (in fact, this intended sympathy of liberal intellectuals comes across as an unintended patronising of the working class. The need to "understand" strange life forms has previously been said of "inferior" races and animals).

The basic rift is between the cities and the country, and rural areas have not done as well. But that's been a global trend for seven centuries, and these days technological and demographic change is speeding up the process. Obama and both Clintons might not have slowed the relative decline of the heartland, but neither has Trumpery. Quite the reverse.

At the time of writing, the enablers around Trump, appallingly, are refusing to advise him to obey the demands of good manners and common sense and tell him to concede. They instead echo his call that the election has been "rigged" and all that stuff. They reckon that Trump will be around next time and they don't want to offend him. The moral collapse of the Republican Party is complete.

But they'll be right about Trump. For him the one thing worse than all other horrible things that could happen - like getting to think you are not a genius - is to be a Loser. He has four years to turn that around. It could also turn out that the replacement of career civil servants by Deplorables is to cover up evidence of corruption. Let's see.

In the next Congress we can expect a vindictive stalemate; outside it we can expect a frenzy of tweeting and lying. The world won't likely witness something like this again because the despots who Trumpery wants to emulate don't have to put up with an independent media and democratic traditions. They can eliminate witnesses behind jail walls in a way that America (still) does not allow.

We can expect Americans will be deluged with misinformation and nonsense as the next phase of framing The Narrative gets going. If Biden gains popularity and manages to restrict the virus and restore the economy, a direct and explicit attempt to ignite another civil war is on the cards. And if the Democrats take decisive action against racial injustice and climate change and look to be on the way to providing people with affordable healthcare, Trumpery will go berserk. Present miseries could look mild.