One of the sillier pieces of apologia about candidate Donald Trump, which spread with calendar quote-like speed in 2016, was by right-wing commentator Salena Zito. “The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally,” she hot-taked for The Atlantic.
Ostensibly a trenchant observation of why the media failed to “get” Trump’s appeal, in fact Zito was just offering another version of Trump’s core narrative — that there’s a liberal elite wholly out of touch with real Americans and diametrically opposed to their interests.
But taking Trump literally was very important indeed, as he proceeded to govern exactly as he campaigned: maximising division, stoking hatred, pursuing personal enrichment, incoherently and incompetently responding to events. His supporters — who apparently didn’t take him literally — revelled in him doing exactly what he said he would do.
And the longer the Trump disaster went on, with a body count in the hundreds of thousands and a bitterly divided America, the more literal he became. It culminated in Trump urging an armed mob (mob they were — sorry, ACMA) to go to Congress to prevent the process for confirming the election of Joe Biden, the man who defeated him.
Contra Zito, the mob took him very literally. There’s a death toll to show for it.
Prosecutors, too, are taking Trump literally. The events of January 6 2021 are just one part of the broader conspiracy Trump engaged in to overturn the November 2020 election, for which he has now been indicted: trying to throw out legal votes; organising fraudulent groups of pro-Trump electors for January 6; pushing the Justice Department to undertake sham investigations; pressuring vice-president Mike Pence to overturn the election result — and storming the Capitol.
The conspiracy Trump engaged in — with the strong support of Fox News and other right-wing media, which persistently peddled what they knew were lies about a “stolen election” — was of a piece with Trump’s whole time as president: unlawful, deceitful, incompetent, bordering on farce until the deaths began mounting.
It was also the logical culmination of the entire Trump project.
That project was the elevation of Trump as the avatar of “ordinary Americans” to destroy an “elite” engaged in a conspiracy against America. That elite was initially liberals, Democrats, the media and moderate Republicans, but eventually expanded to become anyone who disagreed with Trump, from Pence down through the vast ranks of officials who had briefly worked for him and had been sacked or left in disgust.
The project was fundamentally anti-democratic, as it became clear through 2020 when Trump began insisting that there was no way he could lose the November election — a win for Biden would have to be the result of an elite conspiracy. Trump, in his own eyes and those of many of his followers, was organically connected to ordinary Americans, not so much l’état, c’est moi as le peuple, c’est moi, a heaven-sent leader who needed no democratic confirmation of his divinely ordained status. Elections were at best an unnecessary inconvenience, at worst a mechanism for the elite conspiracy to bring him down.
Trump calling for the US constitution to be “terminated”, as he did in 2022, was only confirmation that he views US democracy as an enemy in and of itself.
So we were always destined to end with Trump being prosecuted for attempting to overturn American democracy. If he’d won in 2020, he’d be planning to overturn the two-term limit, or suspend next year’s presidential election — backed by a Republican Party in thrall to him and media enablers like Fox News (which doesn’t make it into the list of unindicted co-conspirators in the Trump indictment).
Indeed, if there was anyone who was guilty of not taking Trump seriously, it was Murdoch and other American corporate heavyweights who saw in Trump the perfect vehicle for their own corporate interests. Trump complemented, like a hand in a snug-fitting glove, the Fox News business model of stoking division and white grievance. And he offered the chance for large US corporations to bend the federal government to their will on matters like corporate taxation. Trump’s racism, misogyny and commitment to dividing Americans, his railing at the media, his trashing of basic standards of discourse, his attacks on the rule of law, his lurid tales of conspiracy, were taken as mere campaign theatrics.
Even as the awful truth became clear to the executives and broadcasters of Fox News, who all knew perfectly well the “stolen election” claim was a lie and Trump’s supporters had attempted an insurrection, that network continued to support him because it was good for their business model. They continue to do so now.
After the latest indictment dropped, with whom did Trump dine? According to The New York Times, with Fox News CEO Suzanne Scott, who wants to make sure Trump attends the first Republican candidates’ debate later this month — because Fox is hosting it.
The business model is more important than anything else for Murdoch. And Trump’s business model is all about overturning democracy.
Is this the end of Donald Trump’s demolition derby on American democracy? Let us know by writing to letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
