The
100-day reviews are in, and they’re terrible. The health care
faceplants just keep coming; the administration’s tax “plan” offers less
detail than most supermarket receipts; Trump has wimped out on his
promises to get aggressive on foreign trade. The gap between big boasts
and tiny achievements has never been wider.
Yet
there have, by my count, been seven thousand news articles — O.K., it’s
a rough estimate — about how Trump supporters are standing by their
man, are angry at those meanies in the news media, and would gladly vote
for him all over again. What’s going on?
The answer, I’d suggest, lies buried in the details of the latest report on gross domestic product. No, really.
For
the past few months, economists who track short-term developments have
been noting a peculiar divergence between “soft” and “hard” data. Soft
data are things like surveys of consumer and business confidence; hard
data are things like actual retail sales. Normally these data tell
similar stories (which is why the soft data are useful as a sort of
early warning system for the coming hard data). Since the 2016 election,
however, the two kinds of data have diverged, with reported confidence
surging — and, yes, a bump in stocks — but no real sign of a pickup in
economic activity.
The funny thing about that confidence surge, however, was that it was very much along partisan lines
— a sharp decline among Democrats, but a huge rise among Republicans.
This raises the obvious question: Were those reporting a huge increase
in optimism really feeling that much better about their economic
prospects, or were they simply using the survey as an opportunity to
affirm the rightness of their vote?
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Well,
if consumers really are feeling super-confident, they’re not acting on
those feelings. The first-quarter G.D.P. report, showing growth slowing
to a crawl, wasn’t as bad as it looks: Technical issues involving
inventories and seasonal adjustment (you don’t want to know) mean that
underlying growth was probably O.K., though not great. But consumer
spending was definitely sluggish.
The
evidence, in other words, suggests that when Trump voters say they’re
highly confident, it’s more a declaration of their political identity
than an indication of what they’re going to do, or even, maybe, what
they really believe.
May I suggest that focus groups and polls of Trump voters are picking up something similar?
One
basic principle I’ve learned in my years at The Times is that almost
nobody ever admits being wrong about anything — and the wronger they
were, the less willing they are to concede error. For example, when Bloomberg
surveyed a group of economists who had predicted that Ben Bernanke’s
policies would cause runaway inflation, they literally couldn’t find a
single person willing to admit, after years of low inflation, having
been mistaken.
Now
think about what it means to have voted for Trump. The news media spent
much of the campaign indulging in an orgy of false equivalence;
nonetheless, most voters probably got the message that the
political/media establishment considered Trump ignorant and
temperamentally unqualified to be president. So the Trump vote had a
strong element of: “Ha! You elites think you’re so smart? We’ll show
you!”
Now,
sure enough, it turns out that Trump is ignorant and temperamentally
unqualified to be president. But if you think his supporters will accept
this reality any time soon, you must not know much about human nature.
In a perverse way, Trump’s sheer awfulness offers him some political
protection: His supporters aren’t ready, at least so far, to admit that
they made that big a mistake.
Also,
to be fair, so far Trumpism hasn’t had much effect on daily life. In
fact, Trump’s biggest fails have involved what hasn’t happened, not what
has. So it’s still fairly easy for those so inclined to dismiss the bad
reports as media bias.
Sooner or later, however, this levee is going to break.
I
chose that metaphor advisedly. I’m old enough to remember when George
W. Bush was wildly popular — and while his numbers gradually deflated
from their post 9/11 high, it was a slow process. What really pushed his
former supporters to reconsider, as I perceived it — and this
perception is borne out by polling
— was the Katrina debacle, in which everyone could see the Bush
administration’s callousness and incompetence playing out live on TV.
What
will Trump’s Katrina moment look like? Will it be the collapse of
health insurance due to administration sabotage? A recession this White
House has no idea how to handle? A natural disaster or public health
crisis? One way or another, it’s coming.
Oh,
and one more note: By 2006, a majority of those polled claimed to have
voted for John Kerry in 2004. It will be interesting, a couple of years
from now, to see how many people say they voted for Donald Trump.
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