The Republican political consultant Richard Berman is something of a legend, often credited with taking the art of negative campaigning on behalf of undisclosed corporate clients to the next level. When “60 Minutes” did a profile of him, in 2007, he was portrayed as the “Dr. Evil” of the Washington influence game. More than a decade later, when I visited his office in downtown D.C., he still had a tongue-in-cheek “Dr. Evil” nameplate on his desk. (“If they call you Mr. Nice Guy, would that be better?” he asked me. “I don’t think so.”) Berman devised an acronym to capture his firm’s aggressive approach to politics: FLAGS—fear, love, anger, greed, and sympathy. Of those, he believed, anger and fear were undoubtedly the most effective.
I’ve often thought of Berman’s formula while watching the descending spiral of American politics in the past few years. It’s not all that complicated, unfortunately: fear and anger, peddled by a skilled demagogue like Donald Trump, have captivated a large segment of the Republican electorate. Other politicians, recognizing Trump’s appeal, also increasingly eschew love, sympathy, and even greed in favor of this simpler and more straightforward approach. The 2024 G.O.P. primary is shaping up as a veritable stew of hatreds, with the candidates raising alarms about everyone from scary trans activists to marauding migrants and “woke” radical-left Communists. In 2016, during Trump’s campaign, he promoted a “Muslim ban” to protect L.G.B.T.Q.+ Americans from “a hateful foreign ideology”; this time, as the political writer Dave Weigel recently noted, Republicans are courting Muslim voters by promising to protect them against threatening L.G.B.T.Q.+ ideologues. The point is to have an enemy—or many enemies—whoever they are.
For Trump, the fear-and-anger script has never varied, even if the specific objects of his demonization come and go as quickly as the chyrons on Fox News. Win or lose, the guy who launched his Presidential campaign in 2015 by warning of evil Mexican rapists still has one playbook. During a speech at his country club in Bedminster, New Jersey, on Tuesday night, shortly after his arrest and arraignment on federal criminal charges stemming from his possession of a large trove of classified documents, Trump offered a parade of by-now-familiar horribles: people “allowed to pour through our open borders”; “rigged” elections; raging inflation; interest rates out of control and taxes spiralling upward; murderers “allowed to roam the streets of our Democrat-run cities unchecked”; the “persecution of Christians, pro-life activists, parents attending school board meetings, and even future Republican candidates”; the “fake news” and the “leaking sieve in Washington”; and, of course, “the corrupt Biden Administration” and its allied “band of closet thugs, misfits, and Marxists” who “tried to destroy American Democracy,” or at least turn it into “Venezuela on steroids.” Listening for Berman’s FLAGS in Trump’s address, there were almost too many to note.
It’s all so familiar by now that it’s easy enough to tune out, unless you are part of the target Republican audience that subscribes to these core tenets of Trumpism. Where Trump deviates from the script of generic Republican fearmongering these days is in the voluminousness and specificity of the personal grievances with which he seeks to arouse his audiences. Let Nikki Haley, Ron DeSantis, and the others try to scare Republican voters with the bogeyman of “biological boys” showing up in girls’ locker rooms or the horrors of political correctness run amok at Walt Disney World. Only Trump would try to scare them with all the ways in which he himself is being persecuted.
This is precisely what Trump did during his post-arraignment speech. Among the FLAGS I flagged were his complaints about “one of the most outrageous and vicious legal theories ever put forward in an American court of law”; “the horrific violation of my rights by Crooked Joe Biden’s weaponized Department of Injustice”; and, no surprise “Deranged Jack Smith,” the special counsel who brought the case against him in Florida and who is a “raging lunatic,” as well as a “thug,” whose previous work as a war-crimes prosecutor took place in “globalist tribunals not beholden to the Constitution or the rule of law.” (It should be noted that Trump also called Alvin Bragg, the Manhattan District Attorney who indicted him in a hush-money case earlier this spring, a “lunatic.”) Even Trump’s complaints about previous investigations of him, such as the “Russia, Russia, Russia” hoax or the “Mueller witch hunt,” have now been upgraded to sweeping systemic threats, lumped together as part of what he called a years-long series of “illegal psychological warfare campaigns against the American people.” The point is that this is scary stuff, targeting you and not just him.
Notably and understandably, neither CNN nor MSNBC carried this speech, with its toxic but predictable cocktail of misinformation and lies, live on their airwaves. I watched it on Fox News, which briefly showed Trump alongside an image of President Biden making his own speech. A chyron flashed across the screen during this split-screen moment: “Wannabe dictator speaks at the White House after having his political rival arrested.” Talk about fear and anger. Fox is an entire network premised on their enduring marketability.
But there is, I’m afraid, an important reason to listen more attentively than ever to what Trump is saying. As he faces the very real threat of conviction and imprisonment in the criminal cases now pending against him, he has dramatically escalated the apocalypse quotient in his rhetoric. It’s no longer enough merely to bemoan “American carnage,” à la his 2017 Inaugural Address, or to portray himself as the savior who will do something about it. With his own survival on the line, Trump has now embraced a Presidential-campaign platform of do-or-die-ism. There is a chilling urgency to his words as he calls on his followers to show up for “the final battle,” a phrase I first noticed him using earlier this year. “We will get reëlected,” he said in his speech this week. “We have no choice.”
Trump’s 2024 campaign is turning out to be a master class in fear, his own and that which he seeks to inspire in his supporters. His doom-casting is designed not only to provoke their emotions, but to lead his audience to the inescapable conclusion that radical action is required. “Republicans all, you must finally get tough,” Trump said on Tuesday night. “You’ve got to get tough and you’ve got to show them, when you arrest your leading political opponent, we no longer have a democracy.” He concluded with a promise to “obliterate” his enemies in the “deep state,” and to appoint a “real” special prosecutor to go after Biden, “the most corrupt President in the history of the United States of America,” and Biden’s family, too—the very politicization of justice of which Trump claims to be a victim.
The speech ended on the dictatorial note that has become the chilling, messianic signature of his 2024 campaign: “I am the only one that can save this nation,” he said. L’état, c’est Trump. ♦
