As a one-time CIA analyst, interrogator and press briefer in Vietnam — and as a long-time investigative journalist with more than a few pinstriped pelts on my belt — I have no trouble understanding why Trump prevailed.
That may sound insufferably smug, but don’t touch the dial just yet.
Based on my experience (including what I learned in the CIA), anyone willing, able and cynical enough to tank truth and peddle disinformation in its place, and tailor messaging to whatever poorly informed, harried innocents need to hear in the moment, whether it’s bullshit or not, wins every time.
Kamala’s “problem” is that she had – and has — too much integrity to play that game. It wasn’t that Trump had a better case to make. His secret was that he had no scruples about making any case that got a rise out of any audience at any given opportunity.
Add to that the echo chamber provided by an utterly truth-indifferent social media, the trauma and alienation (particularly among young voters) left over from of the dissocializing pandemic, and the abiding misogyny and racism of too many religious traditionalists and good old boys and girls who simply can’t bring themselves to vote for a woman as president, let alone a woman of color – add all this together and you’ve got your Rosetta Stone, baby.
The anguished cognoscenti in the Democratic Party and the snotty know-nothings among Trump’s top advisors will blow through many bottles of Jack Daniels trying to psych out why the American public voted as it did.
Hear me again: The answer is as obvious as Pinocchio’s nose.
In an info-sphere driven, non-stop, by streaming screaming headlines, click-baited punditry and scholarship dominated by precooked, fact-defiant ideological precepts, truth is toast. It just is.
Soundbites keyed up by anger-inducing algorithms and AI generated-eye candy are the last things you absorb at bedtime and first things you encounter over breakfast.
After wolfing down nuked caffeine and fake frozen waffles, which your never-available general practitioner warns will give you cancer without preemptive medical tests not covered by your insurance, you dive into insufferable traffic or retreat into the isolation of remote at-home work or the uncertainties of a contract day-laborer with no benefits.
Over the next few hours, when you’re not suffering isolation DT’s or delayed sticker shock over escalating gas and food prices, you’re likely checking your iPhone for updates on your life and times.
And where do these updates come from? Most likely, news media determined to demonstrate balance by peddling whatever false equivalencies fit neatly between two three-minute ads for luxuries way above your pay grade, or for Ozempic, ED remedies or wrinkle removers that only underscore your own failing condition.
If you are one of these harried folks – and most of us are some variation on the above — you can be forgiven if you’re suffering a certain numbing malaise.
Trump took this malaise and the exhaustion and blind spots that came with it and played them like broken keys on a piano, managing in the process to convince us we were hearing the Hallelujah Chorus and bound for deliverance.
So yeah, I can understand why he won, even if I can’t forgive it and tremble at the prospect.
All too many Americans just didn’t have the strength or down time to fact-check him as required, or to reexamine long-held, often odious biases. Kamala’s wisdom and wholly justified warnings became white noise. A record number of voters stayed home, compared to the Biden-Trump match up last time. That is a telling fact. Simple overload tipped the scales for many of us and left Trump free to run the table.