The Partisan Rationalization of Donald Trump's Rhetoric

Trump's supporters have reasons to not take his words seriously -- they're just not good reasons.

Photo by Sebastian Herrmann on Unsplash

Today the hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World wants to follow up on the last point made in Friday’s newsletter — about why some of Trump’s supporters are clear-eyed about his rhetoric bit support him nonetheless:

There clearly remains a sliver of the vote that does not like Trump but thinks, for some reason, that his nastiness and bullying are presidential assets. This might be nuts — but it does represent a clear preference ordering….

The truth is that Donald Trump remains competitive in this race because some Americans believe that despite his myriad flaws, he would be an effective president.

That is a crazy notion, but it is not due to disinformation. It’s due to some weird alchemy of traditional campaign bullshit and the gut instincts of rationally ignorant voters. Misinformation is a sideshow.

Some of the comments to this post requested further elaboration. So here we go — be warned, this is a long newsletter.

To explain things a bit further, I’m going to rely heavily on the New York Times’ Shawn McCreesh, who conveniently filed some copy about Trump’s business-friendly audience at his Detroit Economic Club speech. McCreesh describes a swathe of Trump voters who do not necessarily possess the highest opinion of Trump as a human being — including his racist, fascist campaign rhetoric as of late — but nonetheless intend to vote for him. McCreesh explains: “One of the more peculiar aspects of Donald J. Trump’s political appeal is this: A lot of people are happy to vote for him because they simply do not believe he will do many of the things he says he will…. They found it easy to tune out the other versions of him.”

McCreesh’s story illuminates three reasons supporters don’t take Trump’s words literally. Let’s discuss each in turn!

First, some supporters find it impossible to take his entire “weave” seriously. Trump talks so much that he devalues all of his words:

“I think the media blows stuff out of proportion for sensationalism,” said Mario Fachini, a 40-year-old Detroit man who owns a book publishing company. His black hair was gelled back and he had on a boxy, black pinstriped suit with a gold pocket square peeking out. There were tiny model globes hanging from his cuff links. He held up his wrist and gave one a spin.

Asked if he believed Mr. Trump would purge the federal government and fill its ranks with election deniers, Mr. Fachini sipped his iced tea and thought for a moment. “I don’t,” he said. So why was Mr. Trump saying he wanted to do that? “It could just be for publicity,” Mr. Fachini said with a shrug, “just riling up the news.”

This is — by far — the dumbest reason not to take Trump seriously. Sure, Trump says crazy-but-trivial stuff on a daily basis, so maybe a one-off statement by Trump could be discounted. Trump has been pretty adamant about, say, the election denialism, however — and it’s not like Project 2025 does not exist.

Furthermore, on the economic issues that some supporters allegedly care about, Trump has been consistent and persistent about his policy plans. It can be reduced to four points:

1. Jack up tariffs;

2. Deport all illegal immigrants (and some legal ones as well);

3. Extend his tax cuts and then some; and

4. Allow for unlimited hydrocarbon energy exploration.

The only way Trump has varied on these four prongs of his policy platform has been to double down as the campaign has gone on.

The economic jury is in on Trump’s economic proposals, and the verdict is real bad. Both Penn’s Wharton School of Business and the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget conclude that Trump’s policies would increase the national debt by far more than Kamala Harris’ policies. But the cost of Trump’s core policy planks run far deeper than that:

• The Wall Street Journal: “Most economists think inflation, interest rates and deficits would be higher under the policies former President Donald Trump would pursue in a second administration than under those proposed by Vice President Kamala Harris, according to a quarterly survey by The Wall Street Journal…. If anything, the margin has grown since July.”

• Sixteen Nobel prize-winning economists: “Many Americans are concerned about inflation, which has come down remarkably fast. There is rightly a worry that Donald Trump will reignite this inflation, with his fiscally irresponsible budgets. Nonpartisan researchers, including at Evercore, Allianz, Oxford Economics, and the Peterson Institute, predict that if Donald Trump successfully enacts his agenda, it will increase inflation.”

• American Immigration Council: “In total, we find that the cost of a one-time mass deportation operation aimed at both those populations—an estimated total of is at least $315 billion. We wish to emphasize that this figure is a highly conservative estimate. It does not take into account the long-term costs of a sustained mass deportation operation or the incalculable additional costs necessary to acquire the institutional capacity to remove over 13 million people in a short period of time—incalculable because there is simply no reality in which such a singular operation is possible…. Beyond the direct financial cost of mass deportation, we also estimated the impact on the U.S. economy. Due to the loss of workers across U.S. industries, we found that mass deportation would reduce the U.S. gross domestic product (GDP) by 4.2 to 6.8 percent.”

• The Peterson Institute for International Economics: “[Creating] a range of outcomes if Trump’s policies are enacted, we find: US real GDP will be between 2.8 and 9.7 percent lower than baseline by the end of Trump’s four-year term in 2028…. Employment rises between 1.5 and 1.8 percent above baseline in 2025, but it is between 2.7 and 9 percent below baseline by 2028. It stays between 0.4 and 3.4 percent lower by 2040…. The US inflation rate climbs to between 4.1 and 7.4 percentage points higher than otherwise by 2026. That means, on top of baseline inflation of 1.9 percent, inflation  peaks then at between 6 and 9.3 percent. By 2028, US consumer prices generally are between 20 and 28 percent higher.”

In other words, the policies Trump has been most serious about are the ones least beneficial to the U.S. economy.

The second reason that Trump supporters discount the worst elements of Trump’s rhetoric is that they think they have seen this movie before. As McCreesh writes:

Even some of Mr. Trump’s more hardcore supporters, the people who go to the rallies, wonder how far he can or will go. Hal Garrigues, a retired pilot who attended a Trump rally in Bozeman, Mont., this year said in a phone interview that he didn’t believe Mr. Trump would “go after” Mr. Biden or his family, “because, I mean, before he said the same crap about Hillary, and then he didn’t do anything.”

This makes a bit more sense — Trump did not do every crazy thing he said he was going to do in his first term. For those supporters who are rationally ignorant about politics, using Trump’s first term to predict his second makes intuitive sense.

The thing is, it’s still wrong. Of course, as I and others have repeatedly argued, a second Trump term would be far less constrained. He would presumably have a friendlier judicial and legislative branch, along with more loyal executive branch appointees. Many of the policies Trump wants to implement, like raising tariffs, he can do without constraint.

McCreesh makes these points in his story:

Mr. Trump and those around him have said a second term would be different, since he finally has a firm grip on his party, and because many of the roadblocks that slowed him down before have been pulverized….

As president, much of Mr. Trump’s rhetoric did become reality. What he said on Jan. 6, 2021 — “If you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore” — ultimately led to his impeachment for inciting insurrection.

In a new book by Bob Woodward, General Mark A. Milley is quoted as saying the former president is “fascist to the core.” Mr. Milley is just one in a long line of top officials and military leaders who worked for Mr. Trump and then told tales afterward about having to constantly work to prevent him from acting out his most antidemocratic impulses.

In Detroit, Mr. Trump told a version of that reality that was not entirely different. He lamented how his first term in Washington had gone, admitted that he didn’t know much about the way the town worked, and that he had to rely on people he could not trust to carry out his wishes. “I now know the game a little better,” he said.

The final reason that Trump supporters are not put off by his offensive and dangerous threats is that they look at them as a negotiation tactic:

Tom Pierce, a 67-year-old from Northville, Mich., did not truly believe that Mr. Trump would round up enough immigrants to carry out “the largest mass deportation operation in history.” Even though that is pretty much the central promise of his campaign.

“He may say things, and then it gets people all upset,” said Mr. Pierce, “but then he turns around and he says, ‘No, I’m not doing that.’ It’s a negotiation. But people don’t understand that.”

Did Mr. Pierce, a former chief financial officer, believe Mr. Trump would actually levy a 200 percent tariff against certain companies? “No,” he said. “That’s the other thing. You’ve got to sometimes scare these other countries.” (Indeed. In an interview on Fox News on Sunday, Mr. Trump said, “I’m using that just as a figure. I’ll say 100, 200, I’ll say 500, I don’t care.”)

Mr. Pierce added, “He’s not perfect. And I don’t necessarily care for his personality, but I do like how we had peace and prosperity.”

This mindset stretches all the way back to Salena Zito’s 2016 argument that supporters take Trump seriously but not literally. And to be fair, this belief is not entirely grounded in fantasy. In the nine years that Donald Trump has been on the political stage, he has frequently reversed course, flip-flopped, or backed down from fights. Furthermore, there have multiple accounts of Trump believing deeply in the “madman theory” of coercive bargaining. This is the notion, one that Richard Nixon shared, that he can “scare these other countries” into submission by threatening the worst. This explains why some voters might find Trump appalling but effective. Crudely put, these folks think Trump is a son of a bitch but he’s their son of a bitch.

The idea that Trump might rant and rave and threaten lots of harm but then cut a deal is certainly appealing to Trump supporters. But there huge problems with this logic. For one thing, as I explained before Trump’s first term, this kind of gambit does not work for long in international politics:

When foreign policy leaders get angry as a theatrical tactic, the idea is to get more in negotiations. What happens the first time the president loses his cool — and then just plain loses? Then the anger will be seen as a bluff. Credible commitment is far more important in international negotiations than the ability to engage in truthful hyperbole. As political scientist Anne Sartori argued in “Deterrence by Diplomacy,” leaders don’t bluff much in world politics because they want their promises to be believed by other countries. That is the nature of deterrence. Trump pilloried Obama during a debate for not following through in August 2013 on his declaration that using chemical weapons would be a “red line” for Syrian President Bashar al-Assad (though Trump supported Obama’s decision at the time). To many in the foreign policy establishment, that decision signaled American weakness in the Middle East. The more the Trump administration makes threats it doesn’t carry out, the more other countries will not take subsequent promises seriously. They will be perceived, as Trump put it, as “just words.”

After Trump took office, the evidence continued to mount that Trump’s attempts at playing the madman did not bear much fruit. As political scientist Natasha Lindstaedt observed:

In Trump’s case it is also not clear if being perceived as “mad” is something to be feared or ridiculed. His unpredictability mostly played out on the world stage through a series of strange exchanges with autocrats – such as fawning over Vladmir Putin in Helsinki in 2018, where he took the word of the Russian president over his own intelligence agencies. Trump also allegedly threatened to kill Syrian president, Bashar al-Assad in 2017, but then decided to pull US troops out of Syria in December of 2018.

And Trump’s antics with Iran – pulling out of the nuclear deal and threatening to bomb Iranian cultural heritage sites – seemed to do little to deter the Islamic Republic’s nuclear ambitions. In fact, hardliners were then elected in the 2021 elections, which would have been the last thing US foreign policy planners wanted.

Trump did carry out some of this threats, particularly with respect to economic statecraft. As I wrote five years ago, however, those efforts at coercion yielded little:

First, the administration’s use of economic diplomacy to secure economic concessions has achieved surprisingly little, and there is no reason to expect a better record in the future. Second, the administration’s maximum pressure campaigns have succeeded at imposing costs on targets but have not led to better bargains. Third, the administration has hamstrung many of its efforts through basic errors of diplomacy. A statecraft gap is emerging between the United States and the other great powers capable of playing this game; simply put, the United States is getting worse at economic diplomacy just as other countries are learning how to adroitly wield economic instruments. By focusing on sticks to the exclusion of carrots, the Trump administration has squandered the United States’ economic leverage. In the process, it has also undercut whatever strategic advantages it inherited from its predecessors.

One last point: precisely because Trump bluffed multiple times in his first term, any attempt to do so in his second term is less likely to pay off. Other world leaders are more familiar with Trump now, along with his bargaining tactics, since he cannot help but narrate his thoughts out loud. The result will be a world in which Trump makes bombastic threats, finds they do not move anyone, and then must choose between backing down or taking costly but futile actions.

In conclusion: I get why some Trump supporters are not put off by his scary foreign policy rhetoric. I understand their rationalizations. But that does not mean they are correct. Trump is not going to reverse course on his core campaign planks. He will not be stymied by checks and balances if he gets re-elected. And his madman schtick is not going to play well in world politics, leading to bad outcomes for American foreign policy.