[AE.Politics] Trump's Labors Lost
Hey, what's up, subscribers? It's been a minute. I've been working on some work-life balance stuff, working on building a daily work routine that I can slot tasks into as needed. I'll talk more about that in a later update or a Twitter thread, in case it's useful to anyone. You'll know it's going well if you get one of these every weekday this week.
Via Mediaite:
https://twitter.com/Mediaite/status/1434178084975091714
Even before he successfully captured the White House for a single ignominious term, Donald Trump had a knack for sharing holiday wishes that weren't exactly in the spirit of the holiday. It's hard to imagine a Republican sharing a sincere Labor Day message, but using the long weekend to dump a shorthand grievance about his own fall from power possibly takes the cake.
Tommy Christopher for Mediaite describes the "statement" (square quotes in the original) as being "cryptic" and looking like a tweet without being one. He plays coy about the obvious implications for a bit...
"The message doesn’t clarify what, exactly, should be fixed about a notoriously hated year, or who should do the fixing, or what should be set aside while the fixing is done."
...before coming clean and admitting that we all know what it's about:
"Those who have followed Trump’s actions since he lost reelection to Joe Biden, incited a violent insurrection, and spent months convinced he would be reinstated to the presidency in August can likely guess that the 'fix' Trump is looking for is of the election that he lost."
Well, yes. The headline on the conservative UK outlet Daily Mail's write-up spells it out right up front: "Donald Trump releases three-word, all-caps Labor Day statement saying ‘FIX 2020 FIRST’ in latest claim that Joe Biden stole his election victory".
It jumps out to me that the headlines on both of these pieces, in ideologically opposed outlets, are both much longer than the statement they're referring to and each of them projects a different lens on them. Mediaite's headline ("Trump Celebrates Labor Day with Bizarre ALL-CAPS 3-Word ‘Statement’ That is Not a Tweet But Looks Like a Tweet") wants to point out how deeply surreal this is, while the Daily Fail eagerly amplifies Trump's intended message up front and throughout even while hedging by not endorsing it or being willing to label his election lies as more than "accusations".
While both the pieces compare the statement to Trump's infamous tweets, and the fact that they do so while also perfectly divining the not-so-hidden message behind a three word slogan that appears to have been made up on the spot tells us much about how Trump was able to use Twitter so effectively before he was banned: even if he doesn't understand the economy, the ever-cheap Trump knows how to be economical with words in ways that defy conventional logic of conversation and public discourse. His tweets and speeches have long been full of this kind of buzzwordy sloganeering.
Where his rivals and opponents waste time and energy worrying about how they look or sound and making sure they get their message across, Donald is content to let others work his message out for themselves. That way people who agree with him will internalize his message all the harder because the conclusion comes from within their own head.
As somebody who has scrutinized many of his speech and interview transcripts line by line and word by word, I can say that a lot of what comes out of his mouth makes no sense when you string it all together and try to diagram it out, but his audience hears all the keywords and high notes they're looking for and they go away satisfied that they know what he's about.
Leaving it to the faithful to pick out his real message also has the benefit of plausible deniability. After all, we all hated 2020. If there's been a broken year in recent memory, it was 2020. So who wouldn't want to fix it?
While a statement referencing 2020 is necessarily looking backwards, the only reason we need to care what Donald has to say about last year is what it will token for the future.
Here I am of two minds.
On the one hand, I think that the more he focuses on the idea that 2020's election can and should be "fixed", the more likely it is that he sees 2024 election prospects slipping away, which is good.
On the other hand, the more he gives up on a legitimate veneer on a return to power, the more willing he's going to be to seize power through other means. And while those who have forgotten the lessons of 2016-2020 are likely to say that there's no way he could succeed, I would caution them to consider how much further damage he could do in even a doomed attempt.
The best omen for the future that I can see is how little impact or news presence this statement had, as it was no doubt intended to make a dramatic splash over the weekend.