On the eve of Election Day, anthropology professor Alexander Hinton talked to me from a Trump rally, where he was already convinced the Republican candidate would win. He’d been observing the MAGA movement in a professional capacity, attending more Trump rallies than he can count, and he says Donald Trump’s supporters display an unusual fervor for their candidate. “He knows how to choreograph a show.”
Hinton’s prediction was based on Trump’s abilities as an entertainer and the way he has inspired faith that he can lower the price of a cup of coffee and fatten Americans’ pocketbooks.
Some of the faith in the new president-elect and his economic promises comes from a sense that he “tells it like it is” — that he speaks with blunt honesty, even as he insists he won the 2020 election and propagates numerous other fictions. This paradox has confused pundits, pollsters and other observers since Trump’s rise to political prominence over a decade ago.
Most of what passes for “telling it like it is” comes down to Trump making completely subjective judgments with a tone of certainty — that some of his enemies are “losers” or “morons” or “low IQ” or that one of his rivals somehow has a face that’s not fit for office. Some might call this brutal honesty, but there’s nothing honest about it. The Week Magazine calls it “maniacal overconfidence” which “sounds to some people like forthrightness.” In that sense, he is telling it like it is — in his own self-serving head.
“The issue with narcissists is the difference between truth and falsehood has no meaning,” University of Chicago behavioral scientist Dario Maestripieri said. They only care about what helps them. And Trump’s narcissism makes him charismatic, he said.
The certitude can make Trump sound like he’s in the know. And some enjoy the insults hurled at other people — a part of the show that can be entertaining, and also flattering, since there’s an implication that Trump’s supporters aren’t among the morons. And focusing on categories of people such as undocumented immigrants gives some people a target on which to blame their own problems.
When he speaks, Trump is often cryptic, or vague, issuing his subjective views as if they were facts. When he does speak in clear, declarative sentences, he tends to get ridiculed — as happened in the presidential debate against Kamala Harris when he said that immigrants were eating cats and dogs.
More often, he resorts to innuendo and hints of secret knowledge — about election fraud, foreign leaders or the origin of the COVID pandemic.
Trump won with surprising decisiveness, despite his evasiveness and failure to justify his extraordinary claims. It’s tempting to conclude that we live in some kind of post-truth society. Perhaps, instead, we live in a society obsessed with the truth, but we’ve lost our appreciation for explanatory depth and different perspectives. At the same time, we’re just as persuaded by a speaker’s confidence as ever.
Angus Fletcher, an Ohio State University English professor with a background in neuroscience, said people hearing just one side of a story report high confidence in their knowledge. Once they get another perspective, their confidence goes down. “A lot of disagreements can be solved just by filling in the missing pieces of information.”
Envisioning reality from various perspectives takes time — the kind of time some used to devote to reading entire newspaper stories or even a book, he said. “These are skills people are losing,” as they get more news from social media, short videos and long, one-sided podcasts.
Hinton, the anthropologist, predicts the MAGA movement will dissipate once Trump leaves office because nobody else matches his ability to persuade and entertain. In the meantime, regaining the ability to look at the world through different perspectives might not make America unified again, but it could at least help us break free of cults of personality and start to understand each other.
F.D. Flam is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering science.
