Trump Has Literally Lost The Plot
Dropped from the narrative like a sack of bricks thrown off a speeding train
Good to see y’all again. Thanks for sticking with me during the hiatus. This is the beginning of what I’ve come to think of as Season Two of this substack. Expect 5-8 posts before another (shorter) hiatus. I’m still writing about The New Disorder - the way that the institutions that shape and influence our lives serially and absurdly fail the people they were meant to serve - and adding more focus on how narrative figures into that. You can see more about how I work with narrative here and here.
I didn’t think today would be the day that I’d start writing this again but sometimes circumstances drop their guard and practically beg for a quick jab-hook. And speaking of getting punched repeatedly in the head, let’s talk about Donald Trump’s performance at the National Association of Black Journalists yesterday.
By any reasonable measure, it was a debacle, in all sorts of ways. But I want to talk specifically about the attack line Trump tried out against Kamala Harris. It goes like this: Kamala Harris spent her life only claiming her Indian ancestry, until it was politically convenient for her to claim to be Black. That’s putting it more eloquently than Trump did, but that’s basically it. The crowd openly laughed at him, and should have; the idea is absurd on its face.
The episode illustrates not only how desperate Trump is to find an attack line on Harris specifically, but how much his skills as a communicator have degraded over the past decade and how methodically the Republican Party, writ large, continues to piss away its once prohibitive advantage over the Democratic Party in storytelling.
As I’ve written elsewhere, humans crave the known. We like familiar types of narratives populated by recognizable characters. This is not just about comfort; I would argue it’s a survival mechanism, a basic function of our brain without which we could not process the world well enough to navigate it. Unfamiliar stimuli pay what’s called the Novelty Penalty, which occurs when humans are confronted with a piece of information that doesn’t immediately fit into their predictive systems (essentially, the routes within our brain that allow us to easily classify and evaluate things). When we don’t recognize a thing and have no framework for evaluating it, we either stop thinking about it entirely, or we try to jam it through whatever predictive system seems most applicable, and then we stop thinking about it. That’s the Novelty Penalty.
Trump’s attack on Harris has its roots in two stories familiar to a conservative audience (both of which, not coincidentally, involve an intersection of gender and race). The more recent could be called the Elizabeth Warren Attack, which, as you might recall, went like this: “Elizabeth Warren is a White woman who claimed Native American ancestry so she could take advantage of affirmative action to get jobs for which she wasn’t qualified.” That Warren genuinely believed herself to be of Cherokee descent, and did not benefit professionally from this identity, is beside the point; the story stuck, to the point that she felt the need to publicly take DNA tests.
The older story is one of the most powerful political narratives in American history: the Welfare Queen. You could make a career out of unpacking the gender, race, and class anxieties reflected in that specific story alone. It isn’t always racialized; indeed, it isn’t always about women. But the original, medicinal-grade story went like this: “Black women are pretending to be poor so they can trick inept bureaucrats into giving them huge amounts of welfare money to fund their lavish, immoral lifestyles.” Ronald Reagan popularized this story and wielded it more effectively than anyone, but if you need to be reminded of its durability and power: Joe Manchin used a version of it to kill the expanded child tax credit in 2021.
Those are the bones of Trump’s attack: “This is a woman pretending to be something she is not, for advantage she does not deserve.”
As a narrative, this fails on two critical counts. The first is the simplest: a narrative must resonate with the lived experience of some of its audience, which is to say: some aspect, however limited, must be recognizably true. The Warren Attack is substantively false, but it is rooted in one essential truth: Warren, a White woman, did publicly identify herself as being of Native American ancestry for many years. Her motives for doing so, and the consequences thereof, are utterly different from what’s implied in the Warren Attack, but that single element is real.
The truth at the heart of the Welfare Queen attack is a little broader. That story came from somewhere - Linda Taylor was a real fraudster (and, it seems, much worse besides), but the essence of that story is a widespread sense of systemic mismanagement and unfairness that built through the 1970s, based, at least in part, on the lived experience of the first stage of the uncoupling of wages from productivity.
You can see the problem here: Harris has never claimed not to be Black; quite the opposite. She went to an HBCU, she joined a Black sorority, i mean jesus christ that dog just will not hunt .
The deeper problem with Trump’s attack line is that it does not hold up, structurally, as a narrative. Narratives have structure (in my work, we use an eight-point Political Narrative Model based on the behavioral psych and cognitive neuroscience literature on story), and critical to those is that there must be a comprehensible event that matters to the audience in a way they immediately understand, perpetrated for clear reasons by a specific antagonist or antagonists.
Look at the Warren Attack and Welfare Queen - there’s not one villain in those stories, but two. In the Warren Attack, the primary villain of the piece isn’t Warren, but stupid institutions that would allow themselves to be played like that because of their affirmative action policies. Warren is merely the personification of that entire process, and the story resonates with a certain type of audience who believe that they or people like them (family; friends; notional other members of their in-group) have lost out (or might lose out) on jobs or opportunities or other good things because undeserving people are favored over them. Warren’s notional offense matters to that audience because the implication is that she got something that should have gone to someone better - someone like them. You, the audience, are the victim - or you could be.
Welfare Queen is similar. The real villain are the inept bureaucrats who are so willing to give money away that they reward bad people for living bad lives at the expense of everyone else. The WQ is just the embodiment of that crime. Therein is the clarity and power of that narrative - you are paying your own money so bad people can do bad things because your government is too stupid to stop it, vote Republican.
So what is the central offense of Trump’s narrative of racial fraud by Kamala Harris? Who is the other villain? And, critically, who is the victim?
The answer to all three questions is the same: there isn’t one. And thus the story crumbles. Is Trump mad on behalf of a notional White guy who could have been Biden’s VP if the campaign hadn’t prioritized representation on the ticket and Harris hadn’t tricked her way into being seen as Black? Is he mad on behalf of, say, Stacy Abrams, who - in this telling - has always owned her Blackness (unlike the perfidious Harris) and was done out of the VP slot by a faux Black woman? What the fuck am I listening to?
The most likely explanation (beyond the obvious fact that Trump’s cognition is declining and he’s getting worse at understanding audiences and talking to them) is that Trump is trying to sell an updated version of the Warren Attack. But it’s asking a lot of your audience to equate the Vice Presidency and a major party nomination with a job or a college admission; the “bad things happen because unqualified minorities are hired into jobs thanks to affirmative action/DEI” is largely the province of dyed-in-the-wool conservatives; and and in any case, even if there were a lick of truth to this absurd story, the only victims would be other Democrats, none of whom appear to believe this story, much less share this grievance, so why should anyone else care? And for that matter, this isn’t the case of a White woman adopting a minority ethnic identity in order to prosper, which is a familiar concept in the right-wing fever swamps; the fraudster who replaces one ethnic minority identity with another is not a familiar trope in mainstream American political narratives. Trump is paying the highest retail mark-up version of the Novelty Penalty with this story.
Which leads us to the obvious point: what I think we’re really seeing is Trump trying to squeeze the ascent of Kamala Harris through his own predictive systems. His beleaguered brain does not have a mechanism to allow for a potential majority of Americans preferring a Black woman over him, so he’s using the only system he has: this must be affirmative action fraud, and the victim is me because I shouldn’t have to face off against a Black woman. This kind of self-pity has no persuasion universe; if you care about Trump’s feelings being hurt, it’ll get you outraged, but then, you’re already voting for Trump. If you don’t care about his feelings, this is the dampest of squibs.
Harris’s ascent as the candidate has thrown Trump off the narrative like a man falling overboard a speeding cigarette boat. He’s frantically swimming after it, cursing all the while. Imagine the desperation. There’s stranger stuff to come.