On Sunday in Pennsylvania, Donald Trump took up post in McDonald’s for the afternoon. In a white shirt, red tie and blue apron, the former president served French fries and handed out free meals through the drive-thru window. This was kitsch-Americana turbocharged; he looked like the subject of a Norman Rockwell painting. Anyone not totally corrupted by their prejudices could take one look and realise that it was a stroke of aesthetic and electoral genius.
But of course we let our prejudices corrupt our better senses all the time. Trump’s venture under the golden arches was met with a rather thin-skinned reproach from the Guardian. He was merely “cosplaying as a minimum wage worker” for a cynical photo-op, a columnist wrote; he only does things “out of self-interest or out of spite”, she added. Worst of all? “The customers who had passed through the drive-thru in the 30 minutes he stuck around were all pre-screened.”
If Kamala Harris loses the election, I cannot help but think po-faced liberal diatribes like this will have a lot to answer for. The instinct to cry foul in the face of any Trump overture is unstoppable. A politician posing for a photo-op? Never have I encountered such a naked Machiavel. And, he is of course the only presidential candidate motivated by a healthy dose of self-interest in America’s storied history. As for pre-screening the customers? A man subjected to more than one assassination attempt in this campaign should have a thicker skin, face the American people and American guns head on, secret service be damned.
We shouldn’t get bogged down in one worthy article. But it is revelatory of a wider disposition. Now that Trump has been registered in the liberal psyche as a bad person with dangerous politics (fair!), everything he does becomes filtered through this lens.
Whether he is dancing on stage, charming a crowd at McDonald’s or masterfully punching the air moments after being shot – whatever Trump does, in the eyes of his opponents, is cynical, ugly and wrong.
This is a useless disposition for any liberal with an interest in beating the former president. Trump is good at politics in a narrow but valuable way. Discrediting his moments of rhetorical or aesthetic flair as the work of nasty impulses ensures the Democrats will never learn from them. But Kamala Harris should be looking to Trump’s McDonald’s stunt and wondering how she can replicate the effect; reflecting on why her own trip to the restaurant failed to produce such noise and interest.
Worse than that, however, is that by refusing to acknowledge the good or the wisdom in their opponent, the never-Trumpers are hobbling their chances of defeating him. How to understand the man if he is cast as a one-note cartoon villain? And what about the motivations of his voters? If everything Trump does is evil or stupid then liberals are drawn to the inevitable logic that his voters are evil and stupid too. Holding half the electorate in such low esteem is no good way of bringing them onside.
It is tempting to accuse our opponents of being victims of false consciousness – that they are operating under an illusion, while we are clear-eyed and in lockstep with reality. Trump voters are simply shackled by his lies and right-wing media, unable to see the truth, so the Dems argue. Their logic is rather flimsy. It comes bearing the ludicrous end point that unlike Maga, the Democrat orthodoxy is entirely lit by rationality and sense and never prone to throes of emotion or social pressures. These are the same people who like to categorise the world into discrete groups: “right and wrong side of history”. As though they are in possession of such omniscience that they can declare the exact trajectory of the universe.
Nevertheless, we saw this idea at work in Brexit. Remainers contended that Leave voters were victims of lies, Russian interference, a self-serving populist elite. It was more comforting to them to believe that than the scarier alternative: that their opponents had a point, interests that were valid, ideas that were compelling. In a counterfactual history of the referendum, had the Remainers acknowledged this in 2016, who knows where Britain would be today. Better off, I suspect.
But instead, there they stand facing a man who may well beat Harris in the election, hoping at least that the rest of the world can see he is a conniving opportunist; that, in contrast, their candidate is at least motivated by purity of thought and nobleness of intention. It may make their loss feel gallant and worthy, but it won’t bring the Democrats any closer to real power. Instead, they are going down with the ship, like righteous losers.