As I Was Going Up The Stair, I Met a Campaign That Wasn't There
"This was never a campaign; it’s just a guy, on TV, talking about being president."
Frank Spring is the authorial equivalent of an actor you’d pay to hear read the phone book. He is the Sam Elliot of letters. If his prose were physical beauty, it would look like Janelle Monae. Today, in “As I Was Going Up The Stair, I Met a Campaign That Wasn't There,” Frank makes an astute and as far as I can tell original observation: Donald Trump is not functionally running a re-election campaign. Frank’s a brilliant thinker, but you’re going to want to read this just for the fun he has with words.
The greatest trick Donald Trump ever pulled was convincing millions of Americans, including media figures and political analysts and other people who - if we’re getting right down to the brass tacks of who deserves to get paid and who doesn’t - really should have known better, that he is some kind of strategic thinker, in business or politics or anything else. By now it should be clear that he is not; there has been no three-dimensional chess, there have been no carefully crafted plans to achieve political or legislative or even personal goals. There has been what Trump thinks makes him look good on television, which can be grouped into broad themes like Appearing Strong or Getting One Over On The Haters and Losers, and then there’s been a field of ancillary concerns like the policy goals of his coterie of ghoulish hangers-on, or the fate of the world’s largest economy, or getting two scoops of chocolate ice cream when everyone only gets one, or the pandemic claiming the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans.
This, in itself, is a hard thing to fully accept. Some weeks ago I spent a few minutes jovially arguing the toss with the host of a radio show over Bob Woodward’s spectacularly tardy revelation that Trump had deliberately trivialized the seriousness of the pandemic. “Wouldn’t it just have been easier to develop a national strategy to deal with the pandemic, as opposed to going to the trouble of trying to cover it up?” he asked, an incredibly good question to which I was happy to give a deeply unsatisfying answer. Yes but that was never an option because Trump is incapable of conceiving of something like a pandemic - or a recession, or a war, or an asteroid striking the earth - through any prism except how it makes him look on television for a target demographic of exactly one person: himself.
It’s not that Trump advances strategies that are evil or half-assed, it is that his narcissism and cognitive decay combine to make him actually incapable of conceiving and executing any strategy at all. The people around him have strategies, many of which are evil and almost all of which have been half-assed on a scale previously unknown to history, but Trump himself is past the point where he can conceive a plan more demanding than touring various of his properties receiving the adulation of a parcel of wealthy degenerates and telling them to have a great time. There’s a decent chance he was never up to much more than that, really.
It’s not that Trump advances strategies that are evil or half-assed, it is that his narcissism and cognitive decay combine to make him actually incapable of conceiving and executing any strategy at all.
I am not the first person to note that there is no there there with Trump, and I came around even later on the full implications of that reality, one of which is that he is so dysfunctional that not only can he not conceive a strategy, he makes it impossible for people around him to do so, or even much want to. This goes a long way toward explaining why this election cycle, even before the pandemic, felt so unpredictable and itchily surreal: for the first time in...a century? Ever?...an incumbent president has not, functionally, run a campaign for his own reelection.
As I write this, the Trump campaign is cancelling ad buys across the Midwest - first Ohio and Iowa, then Wisconsin and Minnesota and Michigan. Campaigns adjust the timing and scale of ad buys all the time, but this one is strange because, as sharp readers will surely have noticed, Trump is very clearly losing ground in all of those places and has less than a month in which to make it up.
The problem, as so often with Trump, is money, or rather the lack of it. This was not always the case; his reelection campaign, which began immediately after his election, has raised more than $1 billion for the various committees responsible for making sure he gets four more years. The whole enterprise was entrusted to Brad Parscale, who ran Trump’s digital operation in 2016 and whose approach to budget management recalls George Best accounting for the disappearance of his entire fortune by explaining that he spent a lot of money on booze, women, and fast cars, and the rest he just squandered.
The problem, as so often with Trump, is money, or rather the lack of it.
What Parscale and the Trump campaign’s senior leadership didn’t piss away on the private jets and first-class accommodation that typically attend a campaign about to reach financial paralysis, they used on expenditures that in the best light look like breathtakingly brazen self-dealing and in bad light look like stone-cold embezzlement. Parscale himself has made millions by routing the campaign’s largest expenditures through companies that he owns himself and which he set up for that explicit purpose; he was fired not for this, but because Trump’s infamous rally in Tulsa was a mismanaged flop. (That it also killed Herman Cain does not appear to have factored into Trump’s decision, or even particularly caught his attention.)
The campaign is now in the more trustworthy hands of Bill Stepien, a man who has both years of professional campaign management experience and also the coronavirus, so as a manager he’s a bit of a mixed bag at this point. By the time Stepien took over in July of this year, however, the campaign’s money had largely been spent; cash-flow was always going to be a problem for an enterprise that should have had a stupefying financial advantage heading into the most important phase of the campaign. But it had reserved air-time in swing states, it had enough cash to run a digital program of sorts, and it had supporters willing to go knock doors (something the first Trump campaign largely eschewed even in the absence of a crashing pandemic). Campaigns have been won on less.
Trump trails Biden on nearly every issue that matters, and has since the summer, but, incredibly, there is still one issue on which he is competitive, or was until very recently - the economy. Why this is the case could be the subject of a dedicated article (indeed, a dedicated library). The American electorate’s mind-boggling relationship with The Economy should probably have its own entry in the next edition of the DSM; suffice to say that historically it has been the subject on which the views of voters and empirical reality are estranged to the point of hostility.
Those last two paragraphs are, of course, fanfiction, as divorced from reality as Trump’s Mar-a-Lago pals are from their previous four wives.
The path to victory for Trump has never been wide - essentially every major variable broke for him in 2016 and he barely won, but incumbency has its advantages and before the pandemic he had a fairly clear, if challenging, road to victory. As late as this summer, he still technically had one, albeit much narrower: hammer the holy hell out of I Will Lead a Recovery That Will Make the Economy More and More Than Ever Before in a narrow selection of critical states and hope to hang on by the skin of his teeth (aided by the most blatant campaign of voter suppression since segregation). In this model, every communication - official and political - is about the economy; nothing else exists, because everything else is a loser for him.
Even the financial challenge could be partly circumvented through Trump’s greatest structural advantage in 2016: his ability to get earned media, or in layman’s terms, the extent to which he can get free airtime by making the news. His campaign spent surprisingly little in the last presidential on ads; it didn’t need to, because he was on television all the time anyway. As network coverage of him has become a touch more critical, with chyrons and anchors pointing out his lies in real time, and the novelty of Trump’s live act has worn off, the need for actual commercials that convey a clear campaign message has increased, but the fact that any president can just get on the news any time they want is a huge advantage if you want to hammer home a single, disciplined message for free. That path was certainly open.
Those last two paragraphs are, of course, fanfiction, as divorced from reality as Trump’s Mar-a-Lago pals are from their previous four wives. The campaign itself has made feints in this direction, but Trump doesn’t want to talk about the economy, except in passing, for the same reason he doesn’t want to talk about anything else more than in passing: the economy is not him, and he wants to talk about himself and whatever comes into his head. And so he and his spokesgoons have done what they were always going to do: careened wildly from inchoate promises about the pandemic that no one believes; to hamhanded attempts to make Joe Biden (Joe fucking Biden!) into a militant radical and a literal threat to god himself; to fanning the flames of racial grievance (a winner for Trump in 2016 and an increasingly severe loser for him ever since) for an audience of people (the anxious suburban housewives of white working men) that does not actually exist.
All of this calls the question: what is a presidential campaign? Among its essential parts must be: a professional staff oriented toward winning at least a minimum number of votes in enough states to achieve an Electoral College victory; a communications apparatus conveying a series of carefully considered and strategically planned messages designed to persuade or motivate various components of a winning coalition; a structure to identify those voters and engage them (collectively or individually) through the moment they cast their ballots; a mechanism and plan to pay for it all; and so on.
What is a presidential campaign?
Does this sound like the Trump re-election campaign at all? In any part? What has the Trump campaign been doing (besides enriching a coterie of staff and consultants)?
The answer is in its media buys, which once included states he had no hope of winning (New Mexico), then were limited to states more closely resembling a real victory map (much of the Midwest), and are now in full retreat from more states than he can afford to lose in order to shore up states in which he should never have had to spend a nickel (Georgia and Arizona).
But there is one outlier in his spending: DC, where Trump is still spending money. It’s an expensive media market, worth three electoral votes, and Trump has no hope of winning it. These are ads purchased for one purpose: to please Trump himself, who - and forgive me for belaboring this point - wants to see himself on television more than he wants anything in the entire world.
This is what his reelection has always been: a ghastly Potemkin village erected to keep Trump happy. There has been no other priority. Initially, his team kept him happy because it kept them in position to rob his committees blind and because they were too incompetent to see how destructive this path was; now, they keep him happy because it’s better for your professional prospects to be on the team that got him across the finish line than it is to be the people he tossed overboard three weeks before an historic defeat. So his campaign squandered money in states it couldn’t win and hired pollsters whose work is rose-tinted bullshit and staged rallies that were always doomed and serfs streamed from the doors of facades to proclaim their love for the passing Tsar before the whole edifice was abandoned to rot in the elements.
From a distance, squinting, this looks like a presidential campaign, but it is no more the real thing than an inflatable innertube is a yacht just because both can keep you afloat while you drink beer. This was never a campaign; it’s just a guy, on TV, talking about being president.
To quote Beavis, Frank Spring rules. If you, a wise and discerning reader, have enjoyed this piece as much as I have, check out his previous contributions to The Experiment which include “Neither Gone Nor Forgotten,” “Oh, DaveBro,” and “In Praise of Gold Leaf.” Follow him on Twitter at @frankspring.
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