President Donald Trump's Failure on Technology Was His Undoing
And what's to be done about it moving forward
Once upon a time Candidate Barack Obama laid it out.
You go into these small towns in Pennsylvania and, like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not.
And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy toward people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
Those bitter clingers, those deplorables! Why can’t they get with the program?
Why are they so particular when they express their attachment and affection for l’ancien régime? And why do they reach out for Donald J. Trump, who flyover country rightly groks is public enemy no. 1?
Trump was seen as their bodyguard, a defender who refused to “surrender this country or its people to the false song of globalism.”
But what is globalism? Globalism is but the movement of goods, people, and information.
President Donald Trump understood the first two — the tariff and restrictive immigration — but not the final one and that has proven to be his undoing.
Trump was all talk on tech.
It was the Indians who first banned (and then cloned) Tik Tok. Trump’s failures to do much about tech dominance is why he has lost (or was it stolen?) a very close election. His enemies had it in for him.
As if to add insult to injury and to remind us all that Silicon Valley, not DC, rules America, Twitter appended to every Trump tweet that Trump had, in fact, lost the election, much to his wailing and bitching. If you cannot protect your people you’ll find yourself alone. And alone is not where you want to be politically.
What a shame. How not a surprise. Narcissists never really make for great leaders.
I wish President Trump all the best in his quixotic effort to overturn the elections results. He knows that I have dedicated manpower and resources to see to it that Donald Trump gets a fair hearing, as if such a thing is possible in a deeply politicized America. But I more or less sat out this election. I did not vote in it and I did not run a team of people committed to helping Trump win re-election. Trump allowed himself to be played by Jack Dorsey. This was ultimately why I could not support his re-election. I said as much to the Wall Street Journal. Trump was unserious and now he pays the price.
To be fair there’s not much we can do when the judges he appointed ruled against him. Were you really fooled by the Federalist Society again, Donald!? Didn’t hiring and then firing FedSoc loser Rod Rosenstein teach you anything?!
Rosenstein, who once allegedly joked about wearing a wire to bring down the President, is now fighting for the right of an Israeli firm to spy on Americans without a warrant. Why yes, that’s the same Israeli firm that’s hacked thousands of Americans and which is currently being sued by WhatsApp. Your 4th Amendment rights are no much for our Greatest Ally but I suppose if the President no longer has those rights did you ever really have them?
You cannot be #AmericaFirst if you don’t understand the interplay of goods, people, and information.
This is as true for Marxists as it is for libertarians as it is for globalists but I repeat myself. All of these ideologies get the essential thing wrong: people, well, people are very different from one another. We aren’t interchangeable Man but fathers and sons belonging to clans, tribes, and races. We don’t forget where our dead are buried.
How different remains to be seen but it’s increasingly apparent, all the way down to the genetic level. You even get Covid differently depending on your genes.
It’s the West that’s weird. How weird? Very weird, in part by being too in love with abstraction. That weirdness and the West’s uniquely weird behavior is even the title of a very good book, The WEIRDest People in the World: How the West Became Psychologically Peculiar and Particularly Prosperous by Joseph Henrich.
Professor Henrich makes the very obvious point that the institutions, namely ending cousin marriage, were selected for and had lasting, genetic consequences. To be sure there are real critiques of this Henrich hypothesis and Razib Khan points out we will know soon enough. The point remains: our abstract, Western world is very abstract and very weird and Marx is the most abstract of them all by reducing us all to workers of the world, unite!
Globalism is essentially Marxism for an interconnected world. Marx favored free trade as a weapon to destroy the bourgeoisie.
What is free trade, what is free trade under the present condition of society? It is freedom of capital. When you have overthrown the few national barriers which still restrict the progress of capital, you will merely have given it complete freedom of action. ...
But, in general, the protective system of our day is conservative, while the free trade system is destructive. It breaks up old nationalities and pushes the antagonism of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie to the extreme point. In a word, the free trade system hastens the social revolution. It is in this revolutionary sense alone, gentlemen, that I vote in favor of free trade. Marx and Engels, On Free Trade (1848)
What Marx and Engels understood Sir James Goldsmith more or less observed and later prophesied. Free trade would lead to serious misery because it fundamentally misunderstood the differences of nations.
Calvin Coolidge, a century ago, understood much the same as Goldsmith.
I want to see the American standard of living maintained. We shall not be misled by any appeal for cheap goods, if we remember that this was completely answered by President McKinley when he stated that cheap goods make cheap men. By restrictive immigration, by adequate protection, I want to prevent America from producing cheap men. ([Emphasis mine], Governor Calvin Coolidge, Labor Day, September 1, 1919).
A cheap man is a replaceable man and that is precisely the point. Indeed globalism’s assumptions are more or less the same as Marxism: that all humans are interchangeable and therefore ultimately replaceable. Aren’t they just cogs in the global supply chain? We become like the robots we fear will replace us which just makes it easier. It’s said that there’s a plaque on the wall in Microsoft Beijing which reads “In China when you’re one in a million there are 1700 people just like you!” So much for your essential human dignity! Just shut up and make my iPhone, slave!
And don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Marx is right: Mechanization leads logically to enslavement—if the price of labor goes down. The cotton gin, far from putting slavery on the path to ultimate extinction as the founders envisioned, turbocharged it. Abraham Lincoln was fond of quoting George Fitzhugh, who argued that slavery was a positive good that should be extended to black as well as white. He was not alone.
Indeed if there is a surplus of people rest assured they’ll be put to use by someone. Just ask those who built the pyramids. No, technology may lead to mass unemployment and in turn, mass enslavement. So sorry, Universal Basic Income proponents. As long as there are illegal immigrants there will be those willing to put them to work.
Marx is also clear. If you want to control a people first control its means of production. (The Communists, upon taking government, extended this insight by also controlling the means of communication, which we have explored in other posts and will explore in greater detail. See generally Martin Gurri, The Revolt of the Public: And the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium.)
Conservatives, echoing my old boss and friend, Andrew Breitbart, are fond of saying that politics downstream from culture — as if “investing” in a bunch of art projects somehow ‘moves the needle’ — but this is wrong: culture is downstream from technology.
Technology means doing more with less. Technology wastes what is abundant to preserve that which is scarce, in the parlance of writer Andy Kessler. Trump wasted tweets to preserve attention and leveraged it into the presidency. He just didn’t really know what to do when he got there.
But real technology means changing the material conditions on the ground, in the real world, in a measurable way. Technology means surprise: that “aha!” insight or that “Eureka” moment. I repeat technology means surprise. Jared Kushner may talk about running a data driven campaign but his tactics and techniques were paint by numbers: he was easily countered and destroyed. That is, when Facebook and he weren’t pilfering the money donated by the hoi polloi.
In 2016 Trump was shocking and surprising. In 2020 his campaign was the same old stuff — Democrats are the real racists! We must support Israel! Gay rights! And so on!
He, in other words, accepted the frame.
Even when the Trump Administration was right on the merits — banning Chinese facial recognition companies, say, or raising the alarm about China’s reneging on Hong Kong’s special status they did so out of weird abstract appeal to human rights.
Why can’t our leaders say that China is bad for America?
Hilariously Trump’s Commerce Department rightly understood but the argument wasn’t that SenseTime is bad for Americans but that it’s bad for the Uighurs.
Trump understood the traveling carnival — MAGA with a splash of Jackie Gleason —but the shtick wore thin. As Saul Alinksy put it, “A tactic that drags on too long becomes a drag.” And what a drag it became.
Trump did not pay attention to the details and so the details wound up getting him. He was closely monitoring the situation but never, it appears, doing much about it.
The ballot box was where he was least in control. Trump allowed the Democrats to control the mechanism — and therefore the underlying technology— of the election. In his ineptness he permitted a sort of flu d’état and he got rolled by all the blue state governors and #NeverTrump governors, fearful of being called racist and willing to give away the state.
Mastery of technology means mastery of scale, and therefore politics. This is why those who master technology become celebrities. The masters go one to many and quickly. To be a great president you have to be great at technology. It is a tool to help you defend the country against enemies foreign and domestic.
Take a look at how some of America’s best presidents used the leading technology of their day.
Silent Cal wasn’t very quiet. He had radio and he used it to great influence.
Coolidge was one of the last presidents to write his own speeches and it shows. He was one of the last presidents to be classically educated and he shared his insights.
“I am very fortunate that I came in with the radio,” Coolidge told another senator. “The invention and development of the radio has been one of the most wonderful incidents of the advance of civilization,” he once said. In artfully using radio, Coolidge became, as C. Bascom Slemp, Secretary to the President put it, “the first President to communicate directly with all the people.”
FDR expanded fireside chats and added a scenic drop that allowed him to seem avuncular.
JFK vs. Nixon — broadcast television
Before Roger Ailes was a bête noire of the political left he was Richard Nixon’s choreographer.
I knew Ailes a bit and he took great pride in having, perhaps, apocryphally telling Nixon that '“television is not a gimmick.”
The Washington Post examined Ailes — then only 28-year-old — on Richard Nixon’s political fortunes. Note the attention to detail.
No detail escaped Ailes in packaging Nixon for sale on those TV shows. After watching Nixon’s performance on TV, Ailes jotted down his impressions and advice, which McGinniss included in his book, word for word.
They included:
“He still uses his arms a little too ‘predictably’ and a little too often, but at this point it is better not to inhibit him.”
“His eye contact is good with the panelists, but he should play a little more to the home audience via the head-on camera. I would like to talk to him about this.”
“I may try slightly whiter makeup on upper eyelids.”
“I may lower the riser he stands on a couple of inches.”
“Color lights are hot and he has a tendency to perspire, especially along the upper lip.”
“Whenever he is going to tape a show, the studio air-conditioning should be turned up full at least four hours prior to broadcast, and camera rehearsal should be limited as much as possible in this time period to keep the lights off and the heat down.”
“An effort should be made to keep him in the sun occasionally to maintain a fairly constant level of healthy tan.”
“The microphone cord needs to be dressed and looped to the side.”
Ailes controlled the stage and so he controlled the presidency. He reportedly told Glenn Beck that he planned to “elect the next president” after Beck left Fox News.
But the television master and media manipulator Donald Trump had other plans.
Reagan mastered staging and television. Reagan aide and stage manager Mike K. Deaver famously said “people watch television.” They don’t analyze it.
People watch television news, with an entertainment frame of mind. So it has to be either interesting, shocking, enjoyable, beautiful, funny, something to get them to stop.
Deaver did not regard television news as real news. He used the image to drive the agenda. When you go to the Reagan library you can see Reagan’s notes asking about lighting and makeup.
Clinton got late night television.
Bill Clinton was the cool, buddy president. He had late night tv and intimate profiles. Who could forget him being asked about boxers or briefs on MTV?
Or doing this:
Obama essentially was elected by Facebook, YouTube, and Hollywood.
He was our cool black president, like say, David Palmer from 24 or Morgan Freeman in Deep Impact. There had been eighty years of fictional black presidents, after all.
Andrew Breitbart was fond of reminding that David Geffen — arguably the most powerful gay man in the world — had reminded the public that the Clintons were fabulous liars. But Obama was cool, at a distance.
Trump was the Twitter and reality TV president.
These are hot mediums—and they also cheap mediums which the heavily indebted Trump could use to amplify his message. His reality TV show was wild, crazy, unscripted and silly — and all about him and nothing but him.
A review of the very good book, Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America.
Dwight Eisenhower "became president by winning the war in the European theater," writes James Poniewozik in his new book Audience of One: Donald Trump, Television, and the Fracturing of America. "Donald Trump became president by winning the 9 p.m. time slot on NBC."
But Trump isn't just on TV, according to Poniewozik. He is TV. Over the course of his life, Trump "achieved symbiosis with the medium," he argues. "Its impulses were his impulses; its appetites were his appetites; its mentality was his mentality.
Trump controlled the space. He controlled the sense making apparatus.
Trump controlled the conversation but he had nothing important to say.
The last four Republican presidents — Reagan (scripted television), Bush (scripted reality a.k.a. CIA), Bush (a second attempt at CIA control), and Trump (unscripted yet scripted reality television) — all came out of sense making apparatus.
The next Republican president will have to play with the new technology. You need some it thing. You need to be everywhere all at once.
You need to master the commanding heights of communication technology and so you need a podcaster president.
There are only three possible presidential candidates — Senator Ted Cruz, Congressman Dan “Pirate McCain” Crenshaw, and Congressman Matt Gaetz.
Each of them have a brand. All the politicians want to be celebrities while all the celebrities want to be politicians.
If you want a different future, invest in technology companies. To do that, we need right-wing venture capitalists. Which we shall turn to in a subsequent post.