Opinion | Still Baffled by Trump's Appeal? Listen to This. – The New York Times
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transcript
This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions.
Hi, I’m Anna Marks. I’m a staff editor at “Times Opinion.” I generally cover culture, celebrity, and young people online.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Lately, I have been thinking a lot about Donald Trump. I know. I know. You’re sick of hearing about him. We’ve talked about him too much for any one lifetime, but I’ve been sort of baffled by the fact that as he gears up for his third time running for president of the United States, there seems to be some confusion about why he’s so appealing to such a large group of people in the country.
I’m hearing a lot of the same arguments about him. He is a lightning rod for people’s economic disaffection across the country. He is the best chance the Republicans have to make conservative ideas become policy, even if he doesn’t really care about the ideas themselves. He is a vehicle for people’s racism. And while there’s some truth to a lot of this, as there always has been, I think there’s something more going on with him. You need to stop thinking about Donald Trump as a presidential candidate.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
He’s not even really a former president. He is a pop star.
USA! USA! USA!
Thank you.
USA!
Think about it.
Thank you very much.
A Trump rally is just one stop on his stadium tour. His speeches, long and rambling and difficult to follow as they are, flow into one another like songs.
Ours was not a campaign, but rather an incredible and great movement.
He’s rapping on stage with rhythm and cadence.
She stroked his pretty skin again and kissed him and held him tight. But instead of saying thank you, that snake gave her a vicious bite!
He has these siren calls that are like his best hits. He’ll shout, “Build the wall.”
Build the wall. It’s going to be built. Just so you know, we’re building the wall anyway.
He loves to say, “Make America safe again.”
We will make America safe again.
I think also Trump at a rally, in general, is just looking for moments when the crowd is going to cheer.
[CHEERING]
If you’re a fan of a pop star, you demonstrate your devotion by buying multiple colors of the same vinyl or remix after remix of the same milquetoast single to help the object of your devotion top the charts. For Trump, you give whatever hard earned cash you can spare to the Trump Save America Joint Fundraising Committee. Now, Trump is not the first person to be a celebrity president turbocharged by the internet. Obama’s charisma led him to victory in 2008.
If there is anyone out there who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.
Bernie Sanders in 2016 had the makings of a pop star, too.
Bernie Sanders.
Bernie Sanders.
Both of them were restrained, Obama by his own personal ethics and Sanders by the loss of his party’s nomination. The problems emerge when someone with power is willing to do anything to retain it. That’s the particular concern we should have with Donald Trump. There’s also a conspiratorial wing of the fans that follow him that mirrors that found in the land of Taylor Swift or Beyoncé that presumes that Trump has some sort of outsized power over the events that he engages with in the public.
The fact that the comparisons are so easy to draw between Trump and pretty much every other major pop star on Earth, that should terrify you.
: I’ve spent plenty of time observing the way that online fandoms grow, from fun, easy sources of community to become an amorphous site of slavish devotion to a public figure.
The smart star can draw on that sort of devotion in order to raise money, win awards or elections, and most worryingly, vanquish their enemies. I do not think it’s too bold to say that celebrity, supercharged by the attention economy, is the most destabilizing force to democracy in this country.
When your followers behave like a stan army, that can have dangerous consequences for democracy. The most icky part of online fandom is the way that fans, in the name of their star, will engage in networked harassment. They’ll choose someone who has drawn their ire and sort of collapse on top of them with wave after wave of message, email, post, in order to intimidate people who speak out against the narrative that that star is spinning.
But when that idea is applied to politics, it becomes very, very scary, very fast. Nowhere was this more visible than the events that led to the January 6 insurrection. Yes, a fan army marched on Washington, broke into the Capitol building, threatened the Speaker of the House. They’re being punished by our justice system for their behavior, but the people who we should be more concerned about are the group of members of Congress who were still willing to support Trump’s lies about a stolen election after the Capitol was invaded.
Election workers across the country in 2020 were threatened and harassed by online groups of fans of Donald Trump for what they perceived to be nefarious behavior that has no basis in fact. The fandom polices who is allowed to be in or out. The fandom decides whether you’re a good member or a bad member, not Trump. And if Trump were ever to transgress the MAGA fandom and behave in a way that didn’t match what he was thinking they would do, he probably would be excommunicated, too.
This thing exists outside of him. It is its own force and its own utilitarian power. If he died tomorrow, MAGA would find someone new to latch on to and elevate. So if we don’t talk about fandom and celebrity as Trump’s animating force every single time we talk about him, those who care about democratic ideals and the country’s system of government are not going to be able to figure out how to combat this, either when it comes to Trump or, crucially, when it comes to the next pop star politician who comes after him, whether they’re a Republican or a Democrat.
transcript
This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email transcripts@nytimes.com with any questions.
Hi, I’m Anna Marks. I’m a staff editor at “Times Opinion.” I generally cover culture, celebrity, and young people online.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Lately, I have been thinking a lot about Donald Trump. I know. I know. You’re sick of hearing about him. We’ve talked about him too much for any one lifetime, but I’ve been sort of baffled by the fact that as he gears up for his third time running for president of the United States, there seems to be some confusion about why he’s so appealing to such a large group of people in the country.
I’m hearing a lot of the same arguments about him. He is a lightning rod for people’s economic disaffection across the country. He is the best chance the Republicans have to make conservative ideas become policy, even if he doesn’t really care about the ideas themselves. He is a vehicle for people’s racism. And while there’s some truth to a lot of this, as there always has been, I think there’s something more going on with him. You need to stop thinking about Donald Trump as a presidential candidate.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
He’s not even really a former president. He is a pop star.
USA! USA! USA!
Thank you.
USA!
Think about it.
Thank you very much.
A Trump rally is just one stop on his stadium tour. His speeches, long and rambling and difficult to follow as they are, flow into one another like songs.
Ours was not a campaign, but rather an incredible and great movement.
He’s rapping on stage with rhythm and cadence.
She stroked his pretty skin again and kissed him and held him tight. But instead of saying thank you, that snake gave her a vicious bite!
He has these siren calls that are like his best hits. He’ll shout, “Build the wall.”
Build the wall. It’s going to be built. Just so you know, we’re building the wall anyway.
He loves to say, “Make America safe again.”
We will make America safe again.
I think also Trump at a rally, in general, is just looking for moments when the crowd is going to cheer.
[CHEERING]
If you’re a fan of a pop star, you demonstrate your devotion by buying multiple colors of the same vinyl or remix after remix of the same milquetoast single to help the object of your devotion top the charts. For Trump, you give whatever hard earned cash you can spare to the Trump Save America Joint Fundraising Committee. Now, Trump is not the first person to be a celebrity president turbocharged by the internet. Obama’s charisma led him to victory in 2008.
If there is anyone out there who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.
Bernie Sanders in 2016 had the makings of a pop star, too.
Bernie Sanders.
Bernie Sanders.
Both of them were restrained, Obama by his own personal ethics and Sanders by the loss of his party’s nomination. The problems emerge when someone with power is willing to do anything to retain it. That’s the particular concern we should have with Donald Trump. There’s also a conspiratorial wing of the fans that follow him that mirrors that found in the land of Taylor Swift or Beyoncé that presumes that Trump has some sort of outsized power over the events that he engages with in the public.
The fact that the comparisons are so easy to draw between Trump and pretty much every other major pop star on Earth, that should terrify you.
: I’ve spent plenty of time observing the way that online fandoms grow, from fun, easy sources of community to become an amorphous site of slavish devotion to a public figure.
The smart star can draw on that sort of devotion in order to raise money, win awards or elections, and most worryingly, vanquish their enemies. I do not think it’s too bold to say that celebrity, supercharged by the attention economy, is the most destabilizing force to democracy in this country.
When your followers behave like a stan army, that can have dangerous consequences for democracy. The most icky part of online fandom is the way that fans, in the name of their star, will engage in networked harassment. They’ll choose someone who has drawn their ire and sort of collapse on top of them with wave after wave of message, email, post, in order to intimidate people who speak out against the narrative that that star is spinning.
But when that idea is applied to politics, it becomes very, very scary, very fast. Nowhere was this more visible than the events that led to the January 6 insurrection. Yes, a fan army marched on Washington, broke into the Capitol building, threatened the Speaker of the House. They’re being punished by our justice system for their behavior, but the people who we should be more concerned about are the group of members of Congress who were still willing to support Trump’s lies about a stolen election after the Capitol was invaded.
Election workers across the country in 2020 were threatened and harassed by online groups of fans of Donald Trump for what they perceived to be nefarious behavior that has no basis in fact. The fandom polices who is allowed to be in or out. The fandom decides whether you’re a good member or a bad member, not Trump. And if Trump were ever to transgress the MAGA fandom and behave in a way that didn’t match what he was thinking they would do, he probably would be excommunicated, too.
This thing exists outside of him. It is its own force and its own utilitarian power. If he died tomorrow, MAGA would find someone new to latch on to and elevate. So if we don’t talk about fandom and celebrity as Trump’s animating force every single time we talk about him, those who care about democratic ideals and the country’s system of government are not going to be able to figure out how to combat this, either when it comes to Trump or, crucially, when it comes to the next pop star politician who comes after him, whether they’re a Republican or a Democrat.
Donald Trump’s popularity has long confounded those opposed to him — he lost after his first presidential term, has been accused of sexual harassment and assault multiple times and faces 91 felony counts in four criminal cases. Despite this, he continues to captivate millions. In this audio essay, Anna Marks, an Opinion staff editor, argues that we have it all wrong — to understand Trump’s appeal, we need to see him not as a politician, but as a pop star.
(A full transcript of this audio essay will be available within 24 hours of publication, and can be found in the audio player above.)
The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips. And here’s our email: letters@nytimes.com.
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This episode of “The Opinions” was produced by Vishakha Darbha. It was edited by Alison Bruzek, Kaari Pitkin and Annie-Rose Strasser. Engineering by Isaac Jones with mixing by Carole Sabouraud. Original music by Isaac Jones, Pat McCusker and Carole Sabouraud. Fact-checking by Mary Marge Locker. Audience strategy by Shannon Busta and Kristina Samulewski.
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