The Roots of TDS in the Dem Rank and File

 

Most of the TDS we see and react to originates in the figurative space we call Inside-the-Beltway. Politicians, mass media opinion-shapers, deeply entrenched bureaucracies in the federal government, including the judiciary, the intelligence services, the innumerable money-dispensing and regulatory agencies, and the bicoastal social elites generally, who are bound to DC by ties of family, friends, and financial affiliations. We know that this sizeable group of powerful people hates Trump for very personal reasons, mostly fear and envy. He is a direct threat to them in every part of their lives, from career security to potential scandals involving corruption and/or sex.

But what about all the people from outside the Beltway? The otherwise ordinary 75 million people who voted for an utterly unqualified candidate in the 2024 election. A woman who rose to the top the old-fashioned pre-feminist way, on her back, and proceeded to fail or phone in every position or responsibility she had in government. Before she was suddenly ordained as the rescue candidate for the Democrats no voter had had a chance to vote for or against, she had become a national laughingstock. Why did they vote for her in the tens of millions? Because they hated Trump too, just not quite for the same reasons the DC universe has.

You can find them in abundance out there on Instagram, TikTok, and ‘X.’ The common factor in these Internet hangouts for the haters is that they are severely character-constrained. I’m referring to characters in the sense of letters of the alphabet, numerals, and blank spaces. These are counted by the host apps and strictly limited. When you exceed the allowed number of characters, maybe a hundred words in, the characters you add are displayed in red with negative numbers indicating how many spaces over-budget you are. Forget all the shibboleths about ‘brevity’ being the soul of whatever (wit, not wisdom actually). It really isn’t. If you want to explain your position or back it up with verifiable facts, you need to write a blog or a Facebook post, which many do, but nowhere near 75 million of them. Instagram has 2 billion users worldwide. Why would anyone prefer it as a medium for communicating their insights to the population at large?

Because they just gotta. Interestingly, their posts are almost always a function of borrowed content, someone else’s slapdash bullet points, inept variations on high-visibility memes, flat out declarations of superiority over the MAGA “morons,” namecalling. The unifying term to describe them is unoriginal.

Since the recent tidal wave of AI-generated intrusions on our Internet interfaces (if you’ve missed this cause of deteriorating Internet response time, wake up…), I’ve been getting Instagram notifications first thing every morning, usually billed as “a topic you’re interested in,” meaning new hateful TDS fare. I look because I’m curious about the question I posed up front: If you’re not a corrupt member of Congress leading a secret life of illicit sex and insider trading, why would you hate Trump this much?

This morning, when I was looking for something else on YouTube, I came across this video, which turned up anomalously on my search results. Dated 2016, it struck me when I watched it as a kind of Rosetta Stone for TDS everyman-style:

The YouTube header for this was “Andy Griffith Predicts Trump.”

The movie Griffith was discussing was one he had starred in back in 1957, A Face in the Crowd. It earned him good reviews and probably led to his casting in the iconic TV series “Andy of Mayberry.” The plot of Face was the career arc of a small-time entertainer who became a huge radio star and then crashed and burned because he was not the folksy good guy he played on the air but a selfish, cruel bastard who finally got what he deserved.

What strikes me about this video the most are the 2016 posting date and the differences between the character Griffith is describing and the one the DC crowd is warring against. What’s important about the date is that it’s the year the mass media we’re working hard to embed a Trump narrative that would end his presidential candidacy by nipping it in the bud. He was not to be taken seriously. He was a popular entertainer with name and face recognition but the serious candidates and the press would make short work of a career that consisted mostly of being a big business con man. A very rich white man in short, which meant he was also reliably considered to be dishonest, racist, and sexist Cause don’t forget three marriages (no black wives or girlfriends), some shady bankruptcies, and a lingering reputation as a philanderer. 

That narrative failed in the life-and-death politics of presidential campaigning. Trump embarrassed the mass media time and again by outliving their successive predictions of “Now, finally, he is done..” to win the Presidency and keep most of the promises he made on the campaign trail. A way higher percentage of promises kept than any president in living memory. The narrative has to be replaced with one that acknowledged his uncanny gift for winning against all odds. How, by degrees the official narrative got from lightweight attention whore to Russia Russia and Hitler reincarnated with oak leaf clusters. In other words, the mass media had to do a 180. Trump was not stupid, he was no easy target, he was a relentless heavyweight who bulled his way through every obstacle, no matter how daunting, which is why the obstacles placed before had to be unprecedentedly massive. Right now, today, the insider Democrats are so terrified of him they find themselves backed into the position of having to defend violent urban crime, child mutilation, racism as Social Justice, violent illegal immigrants, foreign terrorist regimes, endless U.S. engagement in foreign wars, and their own hugely unpopular anomie. Why do they hate Trump? He maneuvered them with Machiavellian skill into this impossible political position, and they can’t seem to find a way out.

But that’s not the core content of the Instagrammers. They are still republishing poster art of the same old debunked bullet lists about bankruptcy, number of indictments (as if they were settled criminal convictions), and unverified sexual allegations. Left to their own devices, they prefer to describe Trump as a racist sexist (his Cabinet, ahem…?) conman who has failed at everything in life but stealing money and elections. They flock to threads in which they can lowball each other’s estimates of just how low Trump’s IQ is, settling for most part between 85 and 95. They offer no insights about current issues, dismiss any comparison with the failed Biden presidency as ancient history, and seize on spasmodic wishful thinking memes like ‘Trump is dead!” as an excuse for showing off how bloodthirsty they are. The “Trump is dead” refrain is not coincidentally a direct heir of the “Now, finally, he is done…” meme of 2016. Which is where the Instagrammer narrative is still stuck. Why?

What and who are they really mad at? Back to the Andy Griffith video topic…

This was an important movie at the time. Directed by Elia Kazan, the brilliant filmmaker who gave us On the Waterfront, and written by Budd Schulberg, who polished off what remained of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s reputation in his novel “The Disenchanted.” The character named “Lonesome Rhodes” was a fiction, but he was based on a real personage who was still very much alive when this movie was released. In fact, just the year before Hollywood had taken another veiled shot at the same radio celebrity in a serious film called The Great Man.

Look at the size of this trailer!

Which major celebrity merited two scathing reimaginings of his career in two consecutive years. His name was Arthur Godfrey. 

I heard him on radio and saw him on television myself when I was a kid. He had a friendly voice and played the ukulele because he wasn’t trying to put on the dog with anybody. He was good at what he did. He had a gigantic radio audience five days a week, sponsors sought him out because he did their commercials on air as part of the show, and he was good at that too. He made a bunch of young talents into stars by having them on his show as regulars. The supposedly innovative radio hosts like Don Imus and Howard Stern who had sidekicks in studio with him owe it all to Godfrey, who was a bigger star than they ever were. At one time, he was seriously considered the most famous man in America. Then he lost it all with one terrible and terribly revealing decision:

By 1959, his show ended after years of declining audiences. His death of lung cancer years later was covered as a kind of “Whatever happened to..” finale. He had essentially vanished from public view by then. 

Not that he hasn’t been exhumed from time by the mass media, who know his fall from grace, was the kind of catastrophe that’s always waiting for media sensations. This one, by Jane Pauley in 2005 could just as well be a prompt for the “Where are they now…?” question about herself.

The Julius LaRosa Firing vid above contains an attempt at explaining why one show business firing could have had such a nuclear effect on Godfrey’s career. To his audience, the speculation goes, he was a kind of media Father Figure, wedded to the millions of mothers who were his devoted, um, housewives. Firing LaRosa, whose popularity had outstripped Godfrey’s, however temporarily, was akin to disinheriting a beloved son and throwing him out of the house. Betrayal. Unforgivable. Ever.

How does Trump and the TDS housewives of both sexes on Instagram fit into this mythic family crisis?

You’re free to ponder the evidence of your own. I have a few thoughts to share before I leave you to your ruminations.

Arthur Godfrey the actual person doesn’t matter at all here. It doesn’t matter if anyone who liked Andy Griffith’s “prediction” has never heard of Godfrey. It doesn’t matter if Instagrammers never saw Griffith’s video. What matters is the nature of the marriage contract that binds low-information Democrat voters (say, 67% of the total) to their government. It’s impossible for them to keep up with all the decisions and data involved in actual governing. Democrats asa group tend to share the belief that the government is there to help them, mistakes and missteps aside, because they are the party of good intentions. The products of those intentions are, in this analogy, their children, their sons and daughters and extended family. Into this settled, long unthought about arrangement comes Donald Trump, riding down that escalator in 2015.

He does in fact have a history his own before this moment. He is perhaps most famous for a Top Ten TV Show called “The Apprentice,” in which a plainspoken billionaire pits celebrities, poseurs, and ambitious civilians against one another in business-like situations where they will be judged for their management and interpersonal skills. Ironically, the show’s gimmick is that he fires someone in every episode. On the air. He’s good enough at this that his show remains Top 10 popularity for 10 years. 

Is he kind of a father figure to millions of housewives in spite of his colorful escapades on Wall Street and in divorce court? He clearly knows how to have fun, even showing up on HeeHaw and WWE wrestling shows. He’s brave enough to guest on tal shows where seems to treat know-it-all news hosts like he does contestants on Apprentice. What’s not to like? A Trump headline or fictitious sendup of him on Law & Order is easy clickbait, usually good for a chuckle or two. You could like him or not but still follow his antics and critics without getting angry…

Then comes the escalator. Running for President. The whole universe of people in and around the Government are appalled. He’s not qualified. He’s never held elected office. He talks too much, says things that offend people who aren’t broad-minded (which is a lot of people). Worse, he’s saying that the entire government of the United States is broken. That only Donald Trump can fix it. This is where I’m hearing echoes of the outrage about Julius Rosa. ‘We are Democrats because we basically trust the government. We thought you were a Democrat. Now you want to throw all the good intentions and the benefits we all receive from those intentions out of the house. Are you crazy!’

Is Trump crazy?

Everyone else on both sides of the political aisle (Democrats and Republicans) is asking the same question. The mass media rush in, the same ones that sustained and promoted the entertainer version of Trump for all those years, are now at pains to explain that Trump is in over his head, an entertainer who got starstruck about politics, a pure amateur possessed of inherited wealth and no academic distinction, and well known for exaggerating the truth in the process of selling his latest project to the public. Racist, sexist, homophobic…? uh, probably. He’s an old white golfer on his second trophy wife. And all those mean tweets to ugly women. What does that tell you?

That’s the deal not even Trump could close in his favor. The little-D Democrats, housewives of the welfare state, didn’t need to hear anything else. They didn’t need to understand all the investigations, the lawfare indictments, the media narratives about everything Trump said (lies) or did (crimes) to keep right on believing that he was just a low-IQ golf-playing rich bow scumbag who just wanted to see his own solid gold toilet seat in the White House.

And here we are. Two different castes in the dying Democrat Party. Two completely antithetical narratives about who the evil Orangeman is. Who could it be exactly!

The man who broke the hearts of all those gender-fluid Mommies.