Who Do You Trust?
Or, the Democratic Party & the Crisis in Confidence That Created Trump
Note: Thanks to Will Robinson for inspiring this piece. Check out his blog.
37%. That, at least, is Trump’s approval rating according to Gallup. The last time his approval rating was lower than this, it was immediately after January 6. The last time his approval rating was as low as this, we have to go back to shortly before Charlottesville.
Will it go lower? Who knows for sure. So much can happen from one point to another. But here is what I have learned so far: to get people to change their beliefs on Trump, you first have to attack his credibility. Or, better put, the reason they trust him in the first place.
As Paul Tully once put in in 1989, “a presidential campaign is a request for a proxy—a request to take from the voter the responsibility to lead this country somewhere.”
That is why Epsteingate has been so effectively used against Trump thus far. It hits at that core trust issue—that question of why MAGA decided to place their faith in Donald Trump the Man. It goes to something much deeper than policy. It goes to the personal brand Donald Trump has successfully sold completely to about 30-40% of the population.
Sure, has MAGA been affected by tariffs? Yes. Will they continue to be affected by tariffs? Yes. But they can still have faith that, somewhere, somehow—no matter what anyone else tells them—that Donald Trump will work it out.
“He is playing 4D Chess,” you often hear them say. “He has a plan. Just wait a little longer.”
Yet with Epsteingate—even if just for a little while—Trump forced MAGA to question who he was even fighting for. Was he really fighting against the Swamp, like he promised? Or was he himself the Swamp?
Of course, I would say he is the Swamp. Why else would you be close friends with Jeffrey Epstein for 15 years, even if you didn’t know he was a pedophile? According to even Tucker Carlson, Epstein was a man who made his contempt for working-class Americans quite clear. They were “less than human” and fit only to be used at the pleasure of “their betters.”
How could you be ex-best friends with a man like that? And how could you wish a serial liar and sexual abuser and sexual trafficker and Epstein confidante like Ghislaine Maxwell “well” all these years later? Unless you too thought like Epstein, and agreed with Epstein, and acted on those beliefs like Epstein.
If MAGA comes to realize that, if MAGA ever starts to have that epiphany, Trump has a problem. He is not “anti-establishment”; he is the worst of the establishment on steroids. There is no reason to “wait and see Trump’s strategy” because there is nothing you or I can look forward to.
He doesn’t care about us, or you, or anyone else but himself.
Yet for Democrats, that is not enough. To win voters back, they have to win back the voter’s trust too. And to win that trust back, they have to figure out why they lost it.
So, why did they lose it? And why did Democrats lose last year’s election?
The short answer? Well, for the longest time, the Democratic Party allowed people like Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump and Elon Musk to be Democrats in the first place. Instead of doubling down on our party’s working-class roots, our party decided to cozy up to the same sleazy billionaires who clearly hated everything about working-class people.
We took the money of Big Tech and Silicon Valley. We caved to the banking class and repealed laws like Glass-Steagall, which protected ordinary people from predatory billionaires. We sold our working-class jobs away to multinational corporations with trade agreements like NAFTA.
And boy, have Democrats paid the price for selling our soul to play ball with the already-soulless Republican Party. Now, these same billionaires our party once enabled see an opportunity to finally kill our democracy. Once and for all. With the help of Donald Trump.
American democracy is dying. The Democratic and Republican Party pre-Trump built the coffin. Then Donald Trump came along to try to shove our body into the coffin and bury us alive.
If we want to gain the voter’s trust back, we have to take responsibility for our role in creating this crisis of confidence.
Good analysis. Democrats have made the mistake of only being corporate-like strategists detached from voters and thereby muddled about what the real job here is. A political party is a non-profit, public service organization to facilitate voters finding people to vote for who will represent their interests. The term proxy is perfect.
If you are going to give your proxy to someone, you don't just look at that person's political policies, you look at whether you can trust that person. You see if that person mirrors your worldview. Trump voters did that. Although in my opinion, they were conned. Nevertheless, voters did trust him and still want to trust him.
Therefore, the detailed policies and intricate plans for governing Democrats put out may be necessary, but they are not sufficient. Voters had a choice between Trump with his fake trustworthiness and Democrats and their abstract plans. Democrats seemed to have expected voters to take time out of their busy lives to do homework. Most everyday people don't look at policies in the abstract. They don't say, "I don't trust Hillary, but her plans are great, so I'll vote for her". Democrats keep expecting voters to behave this way. The realitiy is most people just go with how much they like the politician and then assume the policies will follow.
So, I totally agree, it is high time Democrats tear down Trump's credibility. The voters are the jury. Tear him down like a seasoned trial lawyer cross-examining a bad-faith witness. However, this is but the first step. The next step is to build up our own credibility by looking people in the eye, correctly diagnosing their problems and demonstrating through both words and deeds our commitment to both work with them and for them to try and solve those problems.
I’m not sure the Democratic Party CAN win back the trust of more than half the voters. They engaged in 7 or 8 conspiracies and called half the country “conspiracy theorists”. There is a lot that the Dems just can’t make right. I think would be better for the country if they would just disband, and let another party rise in their place. They are intentionally serving as an obstacle to the 60% of reasonable Americans in the middle receiving representation.