Amplification vs Narrativisation: what part did digital media play in Trump 2.0?
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I live in London, and so last Tuesday I went to bed at a normal time and set a bunch of alarms. 3am, 4am, 5am, 6am.
The story of President Trump’s re-election unfurled for me in bleary-eyed glances at my phone. That first feeling that maybe this wasn’t going to be particularly simple. That second realisation that the dominos were following in favour of the Republicans. That final, doom-laden, comprehension that this wasn’t ever going to be a close-run thing. At 6am, I went downstairs and watched the television, staring blank-eyed at history unfolding before me.
I’m not a political pundit — and I’m not an American — but I really felt that Vice-President Harris would win. This is only in part because my tiny European brain can’t comprehend wanting to vote for a man like Donald Trump. It’s also because I felt like the Trump campaign was approaching the election in the same way that beer companies approach a Superbowl commercial. Make as much noise as possible, and watch the ripples spread. Wassssssup? Nothin’, just watchin’ the game, havin’ a Bud.
The Trump campaign demonstrated a near total lack of scruples in terms of where they put their candidate. In the week before the election, they allowed him to do a 3-hour sit-down interview with podcaster Joe Rogan. That’s basically unheard of in election history: allowing your candidate to put himself up for scrutiny lasting as long as a viewing of Schindler’s List. And yet, Team Trump did it, and Rogan played ball, rarely removing his tongue from Trump’s boot for long enough to ask a challenging question. And all this has led to the suggestion that Trump just managed to amplify his message more effectively. The 2024 Presidential election is being called, in some summaries, “the podcast election”, “the TikTok election” or “the internet election.”
I want to challenge the idea of amplification, because I think it simplifies a vast, uncontrollable trend. Amplification makes the process of political communications sound like it’s simply about being as noisy as possible, ensuring that as many people hear your messages as possible, when, in point of fact, it’s almost the opposite. You might want to call it signalling, you might want to call it selective amplification — I prefer to call it narrativisation.
Take, for example, the issue of reproductive rights in America, an issue that the Democratic campaign was relatively (though not unrestrainedly) vociferous about. The basic belief was that a slender majority of Americans are pro choice, and therefore it would be a vote-winning policy. Simple enough, as a calculation. And yet every time a liberal politician trumpeted a pro-choice position — amplified the noise there — they were also boosting a pro-life message. Every Democrat who went on TV and said “we want to defend your reproductive rights” was sending a message to voters who agreed with them on that issue, and those that disagreed with them.
This is part of the reason that good campaigns often avoid simple binaries (and why referenda often throw up more puzzling results than complex elections). If Trump comes out and says “we’ll fix the economy” he is not also inadvertantly making a signal to voters who don’t want the economy fixed, because such voters don’t really exist. Even the more polarising statements — deportation of illegal migrants, for example — are blunt positions in a nuanced debate. The noise doesn’t come with an unwanted echo.
And yet, for all that I’ve just said, I felt like the Democrats were much more judicious about their messaging that the Trumpists. They believed — incorrectly, as it turned out — that the “not Trump” message would be strong enough to deliver the White House. The GOP’s campaign, meanwhile was carefully calibrated to combat that. And that’s where the process of narrativisation comes in. The purpose of the Trump media blitz in the last months of the campaign — appearing with YouTubers and podcasters, at sports stadia and on social media — was to create a new narrative about Trump’s role in the election. It’s ok to vote for Donald Trump, was the most important message in town.
After January 6th, 2021, it wasn’t immediately clear that it would ever again be within the pale to publicly support Donald Trump. To do so was to associate yourself with Q-anon weirdos, violent thugs who injured 174 police officers, and the nutter who attacked Nancy Pelosi’s husband. That sort of thing. The prospect of Trump 2.0 had resided, because the narrative was now running against him: he had lost to a weak Democrat candidate, Joe Biden, and soiled the office by association with a militia of intemperate hicks. It was not unreasonable to anticipate getting egged if you wore a MAGA hat in public, such was the strength of anti-Trump sentiment. The Republican establishment, who had never wanted Trump, was looking forward to normality returning. Maybe Trump would even end up in jail.
And yet, here we are. The narrative shifted. Much ink will be spilled in the years to come on the memefication of the Trump campaign. Here in the UK, Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader at the 2017 and 2019 General Elections, was sometimes referred to, ironically, as “magic granddad”. Trump had some of the same energy: the cut-loose American patriarch, pontificating loudly after a Jack and coke. The fact that much of this renaissance was conducted by kids who were scarcely old enough to be politically conscious in 2021 was no coincidence. Their credulous boostering of the Trump campaign offered validation to a generation of American voters who needed little encouragement to return a Trump vote to middle American normality. If the kids are getting behind Trump, they would say, and they’re the wokest generation ever(!!), then the guy is clearly back in the mainstream.
To the European mind, the way that the US election unfolded was, frankly, bizarre. Most of Europe is in thrall to macho technocrats like Keir Starmer, Olaf Scholz and Emmanuel Macron — politicians who have a transparent policy platform and a command of the detail. Neither Republicans nor Democrats were keen to discuss policy in this election cycle. They traded slogans, and Trump’s were more effective. “Fix the economy”, “deport the illegals”, “make America great again” — they were all headlines for a plan of action that was never published. When you have a policy platform, you have something to amplify; when you have a candidate with a hatful of vapid slogans, you need to build a story.
Donald Trump’s victory is a huge, and depressing, feat of narrativisation. A man who had already had a fruitless crack at the Presidency, who faced legal threats and assault allegations, who had fomented violent insurrection, who was (/is) old and doddery and sketchy on even the simplest of briefs — in the space of a few months, he was turned into an avuncular ex-President, a man with wisdom and experience, and a connection to the American heartland.
Once that dial was shifted, everything fell into place. Every election result is the sum of its constituent parts: every campaign message, every leaflet, every voter interaction, and, eventually, every vote. But not all those parts are weighted equally, and in this election by far the most consequential unit was a vote for Donald Trump. Normalising that act was all that mattered to the Republicans. They didn’t need to talk about the economy or immigration, healthcare, crime or education, because Brand Trump already signalled in those directions to the American electorate. They just had to make it feel normal and sane and strategic to vote Donald Trump. They had to allow him to interact without fear of interruption. They had to show him kicking back with different generations, different ethnicities, different genders. They didn’t even need to talk politics — they just had to treat him like a respected former incumbent of the highest office in the land.
And that’s what digital media can do. I remain unconvinced by its ability to tap into previously untouched voters, to open new communities to political exposure. But I do, very much, buy its role in shifting the energy of the campaign. It’s a powerful tool, but one that incumbents will always find hard to utilise.
And with the dice already loaded against political stability, that’s a scary notion.
