Trump's Tactical Innovation

A quick thought about why Trumpism is so exhausting.

I'll draw a metaphor from a card game that my friends and I sometimes play. The details of the game don't matter, but basically you get to draw one card per round, and the cards are passed around the table round by round until they are all gone. The cards interact in various ways and at the end of the game the player with the most points wins.

There is a particular card that has the following attributes: at the end of the game, the player who has accumulated the most of this card gets 6 points, and the player who has accumulated the least gets -6 points. Beyond that, the number of cards doesn't matter. A distribution of 5-4-3 would have the same effect on the final score as a distribution of 11-1-0.

So one of my friends simply stopped taking this card. As a result, he always has the fewest at the end of the game and always takes a 6-point hit (a 12-point hit if you count the entire gap between him and whoever wins the race for the most of this card). But the key point is that he pays once and then benefits every time the other players fight over the 6/-6 cards (leaving good cards for him to snap up). Ideally the other players will get into a really vicious arms race, but even if they don't, they collectively end up with a bunch of cards with low average value.

Now consider Trump. One of his principal tactical innovations is to be crass, racist, and otherwise grossly inappropriate almost all the time. This imposes a heavy cost, as demonstrated by his very low favorability numbers. A lot of people are repulsed by him, including some Republicans and independents who might otherwise align with him ideologically.

But Trump effectively pays once. (Not entirely, as I'll describe below, but to a close approximation.) At this point it's not even a minor news story when he sends a tweet that, if it had been sent by Obama, would have caused a week-long frenzy. Trump's crassness is priced in.

This has given him tremendous flexibility. He doesn't have to code-switch in the manner of most Republican politicians (really most politicians of all parties). He can say exactly what his racist base wants to hear. Also, the bar is so low for him that if he simply doesn't fuck something up, he can expect laudatory pieces in the mainstream press.

A more subtle dynamic is that our institutions are generally incapable of taking into account just how far Trump has pushed. At various points he has engaged in attempts at witness intimidation that would be impeachment-level scandals if they had been carried out by email. But because Trump uses Twitter, and because our legal and journalistic standards don't know what to make of this activity, it skates by.

Now unlike in the card game mentioned above, the dynamic here doesn't involve a truly fixed cost for Trump's strategy. However, the nature of the strategy is that it is easily visible to everyone, and so the fight basically consists of Democrats and other anti-Trump figures pointing out just how degraded and degrading Trump's rhetoric is, while Trump's defenders play games with what-aboutism and charitable readings and so forth. The game here is to make Trump and the Republican Party pay the full price for his horribleness, or on the other side to keep the price as low as possible.

None of it is new to anyone, and there are very few people who could possibly change their minds at this late date. So in effect the price Trump pays is close to fixed, and can be thought of that way. Meanwhile people are fighting over tiny margins and it is incredibly repetitive and exhausting.