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The question for any unpopular politician facing an election: “how to make people vote for me when they hate me?” This problem is particularly acute for any politician who is on the wrong side of history and (unlike their great role models) does not rule over an autocratic dictatorship that allows them to correct the people when they mistakenly vote the wrong way – or, even more simply, give their opponents a dose Novichok.
In fairness to Donald Trump, he is not the first politician to find themselves in this position. In 1933, after several elections (that he kept re-running to get a better result), Adolf Hitler realised that the population needed a little nudging. In 1933 it required the passage of an ‘Enabling Act’ to end any formal opposition, but at the same time he set about creating the Hitler Youth. If you can’t convince the population to like you, just indoctrinate their children with propaganda until they do.
Unlike Trump University, Trump’s patriotic education programme will be a real course (otherwise known as the 1776 project) and has set about to rewrite American history after the liberal agenda started to pervade just a little bit too far when it suggested a constitution that wrote African Americans were 3/5ths of a person may not have turned America into the land of the free for all people.
Trump’s decision to launch his patriotic education comes after The New York Times Magazine launched the 1619 Project on the 400th anniversary of the beginning of slavery in America. The project set out to “reframe the country’s history by placing the consequences of slavery and the contributions of black Americans at the very center of our national narrative.” However, with backlash to Black Lives Matter showing how ungratefully Americans have received the revelation that the United States had not treated African Americans as equal, it was obvious that the needle had swung too far. Trump had to swing it back.
But Trump’s launch of a patriotic education, to teach the youth of America why they (or their parents) should be voting red in November comes a little late to actually influence the election result. With it being just two months until election day, no amount of Star-Spangled Banner and salutes to the flag will swing the dial in his favour enough, instead he has to rely on the same strongman-ship that took him to the White House in the first place and more direct tactics to influence how people will vote.
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This was never clearer than in the debate in Cleveland Ohio on Tuesday night, where Trump spent the entire debate interrupting, lying, shouting and insulting his Democratic rival, Joe Biden. Although he produced a few lines that were undoubtedly funny – his comeback to Biden about shutting down the economy would have produced a half smile in even the most stoney faced Trump critics.
His refusal to condemn white supremacy in the debate also plays into this same image that he built in 2016, that of a racist, xenophobic, misogynist that other racist, xenophobic misogynists could vote for. His constant comment about Joe Biden being senile and “sleepy Joe”, rings significant echoes of his ableist jeering about a reporter in the 2016 election, who he mocked for their disabilities on the campaign stage. His comment on Biden’s faculties are a clear realignment with hating on a group that he has been relatively quiet about since assuming office. Whilst Americans do not yet have sufficient education to vote for Trump, he is railing against anyone who does not make up his base in a bid to motivate his own voters.
Given that without his patriotic education having time to marinate in the brains of young Americans, it is unlikely that his hatred will be able to make much of an impact in the election, so he is still faced with the problem of the people not wanting to vote for him. Although his base think like him, with their white supremacist and anti-Semitic rallies throughout America in the past few years, he has not been able to teach the rest of America how to hate just yet. This is a path that will only carry him to a small percentage of the votes; it is practically a given that he will lose the popular vote.
This is something that would obviously lead to defeat, but that is not something that can be stomached by such a narcissistic politician, so instead he has to stop the voters he doesn’t like from voting. In recent days we learnt that he had done this in 2016, and that it carried him to the White House. Using extremely advanced voter targeting technology by taking social media user’s data (often stolen by third parties) to estimate the likelihood of voting for Trump; once it was established, they wouldn’t, the Trump team launched a sophisticated campaign to dissuade them from voting.
This was partly responsible for the significant drop off in the African American vote throughout many swing states of America and although many commentators and analysts have stopped short of saying this was decisive, when the three states that decided the election (Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin) were decided by less than 100,000 votes between them and by only around 20,000 votes on average from an electorate of around 4 million, it seems pretty likely that Trump’s tactics worked.
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If it is not clear from the above, Trump’s team were engaging in a targeted voter suppression campaign which primarily focused on African American voters; the long history of suppression of political rights for the black community was of no consequence to the campaign. The implication is that Trump recognises that he is not liked amongst the population (or at least his campaign does, he still seems surprised that he gets booed whenever he’s in public) and as such are trying to stop those who dislike him from voting.
This is not even the illegal part, the dissuasion of voters from voting is a common campaign tactic that is not just engaged in by Trump – though the systemic dissuasion of black voters goes far further than most campaigns ever would have previously – but Republicans throughout the country have been far more overt in their attempts to make it harder to vote if you intend to vote against Trump.
Joe Biden spent much of the debate on Tuesday night emphasising the need to vote, “and vote early” which suggests the campaign are aware of Trump using similar tactics again. Trump’s campaign has spent significant time pushing the talking point that “in a free and fair election, Trump will win”, but it is clear that Trump is doing everything he can to keep it from being free and fair. Tuesday night’s debate may have been the worst debate in American history, but it was fair deeper than that. It was the attempt to wrestle the election back from the risk of being unfree and unfair.
Biden has wanted to pitch the election as a choice between light and darkness, with Trump casting a shadow on American democracy. But with such clear attempts to circumvent the will of the people, the choice presented on the Cleveland debate stage is perhaps far more significant than that.
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Calum Paton is a History and Politics graduate from the University of Warwick. His writing predominantly focuses on American and British politics. Twitter: @Paton_Calum
