Iowa was a blow-out, and now New Hampshire, Trump’s latest decisive win, where nearly three-quarters of Republicans told pollsters they are with him. For a year, the media has tried to foster a genuine race for the Republican nomination, and, when that was clearly not happening, it tried to pretend there was a competition, or to will one into being. As recently as this past weekend, before yesterday’s New Hampshire primary, pundits were citing the many upsets in the state and imagining Nikki Haley, Trump’s one-on-one challenger after Ron DeSantis threw in the towel, in that role. Indeed, thanks to non-Republicans crossing over to vote in New Hampshire, she may even live for another few weeks until she gets whacked in South Carolina, her home state. But no one believes she has a future, even a desperate media.
US politics, particularly in primary races, unfolds in fairly reliable rhythms. There are surprises in Iowa and then New Hampshire restores calm. Or a predictable conservative win in Iowa, and then a reset in New Hampshire to the middle ground. On the Democratic side, Joe Biden was nowhere in both Iowa and New Hampshire in 2020 until the primary in South Carolina reinvented him. It’s a process of expectations, regional voices, competing organisational strength, and ultimately the winnowing of the field, and often to an unexpected result. It is always a fluid situation. Until now.
There really has been no 2024 Republican race, even with Haley as a recent sweetheart. It isn’t politics as usual. Trump has hardly even campaigned. But yet we continue to treat this race as a function of politics: anyone can win, anyone can lose. Money, momentum, ground game, debates, flubs, in the end it’s a function of the variables aligning more for you than against you. Except that this is not true for Donald Trump. And any application of a standard political analysis will fail to see this, or fight like hell not to accept it, because by any political measure he should be, if not wholly out of the game, highly vulnerable — instead of inevitable.
Ron DeSantis sized up Trump in political terms and reasonably saw all of Trump’s political weaknesses, and, in contrast, his own political strengths. This was a fateful misunderstanding that has now finished off his woeful candidacy and might well end his political career.
This puts him in a whole other world… It’s fandom, fan culture... fans don’t judge, they fetishise
He is hardly the first Republican to so miscalculate.
Trump is as unchallengeable a figure among a dedicated majority of his party as any US politician in the modern era. In addition to his two primary victories, there are the litany of polls finding not just blind devotion but reality distortion, not least of all, the large majority of Republicans who continue to believe Trump remains the legitimate president. Democrats, that small minority of anti-Trump Republicans, and the media at large, are left without the political tools and models to understand this. They are reduced to a plaintive, “how can this be?”
Or, as weakly, “what do people” — millions and millions, 70âmillion in 2020 — “see in him?”
In 2016, with a campaign designed less to win than to promote, Trump began to hold large-venue rallies. And while these events began to attract truly outsized and unique numbers, his opponents yet regarded this approach to politics as somehow low-rent, inefficient, and, well, kind of vulgar. The fact that other candidates then, as well as now, struggled to put an audience of a few hundred together, and Trump could, often literally with an overnight announcement, amass an audience of 30,000, was given no significance.
As much as it is difficult to explain the devotion of Trump’s base, the nature of his rallies seems even more confounding. From an outsider’s point of view, they represent something dark and threatening. But that almost entirely misses the other aspect of what’s going on: everybody seems to be having a fantastic time. It’s a celebration. It’s entertainment. From the second Trump’s favourite Lee Greenwald anthem, God Bless the USA, begins to play, the mood becomes country-fair happy. Trump is enjoying himself as much as anyone. The length of his long monologue is a sign of how much he wants to be here and how much he wants to stay. There is no place else it might seem that Trump and his audience would want to be. Whatever life might be outside of this or that sports or concert venue, here it’s trouble-free, light and easy. Even when he reaches the dark part of his monologue — “the grievances,” as his staff and speech writers refer to them — telling his audience how bad their lives are, how they’ve been screwed over, how they’ve been insulted and forgotten, the mood doesn’t really change. Rather, everybody is part of a collective experience that is satisfying, embracing, full of camaraderie and good feeling.
It’s fandom. Fan culture. A fan community. A pop phenomenon. People linked by a popular, obsessive, even habituating, culture interest. A personality at the centre delivering recognisable (and, over time, finely tested) gestures, images, tropes. And then this is expanded out into a larger participatory, lifestyle, and merchandise experience. In other words, Trump may have a lot more in common with Taylor Swift, Minecraft and Lionel Messi, than with Joe Biden.
This puts him in a whole other world of judgment. Fans don’t judge, at least not if the experience and the identification with the experience continues to be more of the same. The experience is exceptional; it exists on its own terms; it’s…fetishistic.
This then, to say the least, becomes very hard to understand in terms of political cause and effect. Participating in politics — analysing politics — presupposes a set of desired outcomes, more or less rationally measured. Fandom has no end other than the enjoyment of being a fan.
But Trump is a politician and his support and election do have real life political consequences, grievous ones possibly, surely people must understand that, insist the earnest and literal-minded. But if that were the measure, or even a part of the measure, then the Republican primaries would have likely been a much more varied debate about who might deliver what. Even if Trump might yet have won, there would have been a natural factional political contest among quite a diverse field.
But there wasn’t. Because this isn’t about politics.
This is the new world the Democrats don’t get.
