When an Electorate Becomes an Audience

In his rambling address to 800 Flag officers of the U.S. military, President Trump didn’t get his MAGA boost from his audience. The 800 weren’t an audience really. They had been summoned and were awaiting further orders. If they didn’t like what they heard, they could, as Secretary of Defense Pete Hegsteth advised, resign. The President doesn’t want them to resign because as he reads the tea leaves he’s going to need this audience, which is not the audience he’s been playing to since The Apprentice. He therefore needs to find a way to make them his audience. I won’t speculate here as to why he needs the military as compliant as his Department of Justice. The mission is so transparent that we should fully expect a countering plan in place.

While it is true that the fight now is for attention in a mosh pit of opinions, clashes and truthiness where lies and bullshit don’t win the day but do a good job in darkening the glass of observation, attention is gotten if you read your audience correctly. I mean you pitch to where attention is already being paid. Attention is attracted because it confirms what an audience is already attracted to. This is the Ouroboros: what we are already attracted to is what we’ve been paying attention to.

To say that President Trump attends only to what suits his own personal interest begs the question as to how has he been able to make that interest his audience’s interest. I’ve already given the answer theoretically: he knows the likes and dislikes of his audiences, doubles down on their fears, paranoia, bloodlust, anger, impatience, bigotry and hatred of authority and those who claim authority, aka The Elite. He thusly solidifies an audience that any politician running for audience will have to attract. In short, this is an electorate now transformed into an audience.

This electorate now an audience has been paying attention to Donald J. Trump for a long time. We’ve all been paying tickets to his solo performances. Whatever was there before him suffering with dysphoria, immiseration, cognitive dissonance and dysfunction, President Trump expanded into a base for any future electoral politics.

Many are speculating as to what history will say about Trump’s presidencies but I would write this:

“That he read his audience well and took them further into the darker devils of our nature than any president before him. He created an audience that degenerated into viewing some facts as hard shell convincing to some and opposing facts as hard shell convincing to others. He turned a fact into a value in a more powerful way than any politician before him. In short, he politicized the Scientific Method and the Western tradition of rationality as well as substituting for empirically and rationally based explanations of truth and reality simulacra and the hyper-reality they produced.”

The Democratic Party and all those not of that party but determined to bring President Trump down are consistent in offering the electorate issues that a winning number of voters will support. Case in point: Government shut down. The issue for the Democrats is to extend the expanded Affordable Care Act (ACA) tax credits from the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which are set to expire at the end of 2025.  Republican leaders claim that Democrats are demanding taxpayer-funded healthcare for “illegal immigrants”. AI reports: Fact-checkers from multiple news organizations have labeled these claims as false or misleading.

What we have here is a Democrat attempt to win the support of the electorate in their fight to maintain ACA protection for forty-four million enrolled and a repeated truthful messaging that illegal immigrants do not receive health care. They are, in other words, playing electoral politics in the hope that evidence will be weighed objectively.

Republicans repeat their false assertions because they are playing audience politics. Here we have subjectivities steered by ruling passions and dismissive of what doesn’t so connect. Part of the Republican audience is two hundred million Americans who are enrolled in private health insurance. Health care doesn’t trigger that audience at all but Illegal Immigrants does. Our audience here registers anything to do with this group, viewed as criminals, as ending with an ICE rounding them up, sending them to Alligator Alcatraz or deporting them. The chilling point to note is that it doesn’t matter in audience politics if a platform is patent bullshit. What matters Is what this audience is drawn to, a connection of passion and not reason as Locke described. (1689)

No other president in U.S history has stacked up as many Constitutional violations, clear cut and probable, in such a short period of time as President Trump. Message here: There’s a whole lot for an opposing party to jump on:

Among the many outrages of President Trump’s audience politics we could list unconstitutional control of tariffs, violating separation of powers, firing career professional employees, transgressing the emoluments clause, impounding appropriated funds, dismantling federal departments, revoking birthright citizenship, violating Fourth Amendment protections and Fifth Amendment due process, deporting foreign citizens First Amendment rights, suppression of free speech and association, presidential rewriting of election laws, and the violation of the Posse Comitatus Act of 1878.

Clearly more than one walk in the park case can be made. Easy wins. They would be if the American populace maintained their role as an electorate weighing cases made in a deliberative trial jury manner. But as an audience, cases cannot be made that can be trusted, fact-checking is weaponized and what you personally like or dislike, held to be “common sense,” gets your vote. Because President Trump triggers all that, he captures his audience. And their vote.

Within the audience psyche President Trump has used and blown up to mirror his own animosities we find:

Health care is a privilege you work to pay for; private is profitable while public is Federal government spending of your money; Federal workers are part of the Deep State swamp; free speech is good but The Radical Lunatic Left uses hate speech which is bad; what is not America First, like globalization, the EU, the UN is antagonistic to those interests; Liberal legislation undermines Family Values, redistributes wealth from those who work to those who don’t, muzzles free speech, and prioritizes minorities and aberrant life styles over Everyday Americans.

Given that the audience here likes President Trump’s attraction to what they are attracted to, we are now in a situation where it’s a toss up as to who will be blamed for the present government shut down. And the longer the shut down goes on the more the Republican audience politics will go along with the rise in temperature, assisted by online and offline commentary that ride Trump’s coat tails like camp followers. Basically, when the hurt of shut down increases, passions increase. The party that plays to these and rejects evidence gains in leverage. When power passes legislation that is punishing to opposition that opposition must either co-sign to that or refuse to yield. That refusal can either be understood and supported by an informed electorate or face the cacophony of audience response politics. The U.S. has been doing such politics in a winning way since Donald J. Trump’s arrival while Democrats have either ignored or antagonized audience appeal and presumed a way of knowing no longer commonly shared. Attempting to bring President Trump to justice by a presumption of facts and evidence establishing rational conclusions has thus far proven to be ineffective.

It’s clear by now that a case cannot be made that would turn Trump’s audience from him. However, if one takes a page from Trump, Democrats would be playing the Jeffrey Epstein card. Why? Because it’s a paranoic nightmare that the audience has to follow – their attention is there — and it is already heavily invested in.

What is that investment by MAGA, its charter so to speak?

Full disclosure of what Biden and the Deep State, known as the Federal Government, hid; exposure in line with Pizzagate: conspiracy wherein Democrats officials were running a child sex-trafficking ring out of a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor called Comet Ping Pong; draining the swamp of Federal bureaucracy; and exposing Democrats as elite degenerates.

Substituting President Trump as the Dark Force here would send his audience into angry confusion.

Because President Trump did not create what his audience believed as they entered the theatre but played to it masterfully, a break with him does not mean an audience will become an issue weighing electorate again, or that the political strategies of an electorate treated as an audience will vanish, or, most importantly, that the omissions and failures of Democrats that set the stage for a desperate turn to an unmistakable con man exonerate them or suddenly resolve existentially threatening matters. The mad misrule of Trump will linger like the coronavirus.

Mitigating the existential threat of global warming as well as addressing the foundational destructive impact to egalitarian democracy engineered by a Monopoly game capitalism should have been the only platform of the Democratic Party over Clinton and Obama tenure in office. That Biden in the early days of his tenure addressed both now seems something that history alone will record.

Neither of these places where we are bleeding will be staunched by an audience appeal politics. Note that President Trump not only ignored our existential threats but has done all he can to staunch attention to them. He does so because he reads his audience well: a popular vote election winning number of Americans are not personally attracted to either global warming or rule by the wealthy. They are, however, an audience that can hate and stand firmly by those who target who they are to hate.

A case can be made that all this is tragic.