Donald Trump and the law of diminishing returns

As pundits ponder the resiliency of a former President they despise, they’d do well to consider that people become dulled to controversies, real and imagined,  and the accompanying rhetoric, causing both to lose their potency.  There are few politicians, especially in recent memory, who have been denigrated as aggressively and hyperbolically as President Trump. 

Lately, the pundits and prognosticators have grown increasingly baffled by former President Donald Trump’s resilience.  The race is much, much closer than they think it should be, so close that if the recent battleground state polls are any indication, the former President is more likely to prevail than not.  To them, this is near impossible to believe considering the unmitigated joy Democrats have been said to experience since Vice President Kamala Harris’ coronation, including what most saw as a triumphant convention and dominating debate performance just two weeks ago.  In their view, the Vice President should be riding a wave of positive vibes straight to the White House, especially against an opponent they routinely describe as unfit, chaotic, unhinged, autocratic, and more.  CNN’s Stephen Collinson, perhaps, typifies this conventional view more so than anyone else.  On Monday, he claimed with only barely hidden surprise, “Trump is getting wilder and wilder, but the White House race remains a toss-up.”  As he put it, “Democrats have bet the destiny of the White House on the premise that once voters remember the chaos and divisiveness of Donald Trump’s presidency, he’d suffer an election-defining slump.  Wild weeks of outlandish rhetoric by the ex-president have revived memories of the cacophony of his four White House years and shattered perceptions that he’s running a more disciplined campaign than in 2020 or 2016. But the nature of the race — a toss-up contest in swing states — has not budged.”  After recounting the latest developments in a fashion seemingly designed to make President Trump look as bad as possible, especially considering much of the chaos he referred to was and continues to be a creation of the media more than anything else, he finally comes around to asking the most important question on his mind, “So why does the contest remain so tantalizingly close?”  He begins his answer by repeating a litany of the former President’s previous controversies, as though he can’t come to grips with the reality that the electorate might well choose a president he and his colleagues in the mainstream media so strongly oppose and obviously despise.  “Trump’s comeback attempt is, after all, a stunning story considering he left office in disgrace after inciting an attack by his supporters on the US Capitol on January 6, 2021, and after refusing to accept he lost the election. Trump, who was twice impeached, is a convicted felon who is facing more grave criminal charges. It’s inconceivable that any other politician could have survived such a torrent of scandal and still be within reach of the Oval Office again.”

That might well be true, but at least part of the answer to Mr. Collinson’s question lies with the mainstream media itself:  The law of diminishing returns.  In economics, this principle holds that increasing investment in a specific area will lead to a decrease in the rate of profit at some future point because other variables, such as available resources, remain constant.  In politics, it simply means that people become dulled to controversies, real and imagined,  and the accompanying rhetoric, especially from political opponents, after a time, causing both to lose their potency.  There are few politicians, especially in recent memory, who have been denigrated as aggressively and hyperbolically as President Trump.  Whether these accusations are real or imagined, accurate or over the top, they have been accompanying him since June of 2015, when his initial announcement that he was running for President was met by immediate accusations that he was an unfit racist who could never win under any circumstances.  If anything, the rhetoric only worsened after he prevailed in 2016 when then-MSNBC pundit Chris Matthews described his inauguration speech as “Hilterian.”  Thus, we might rephrase it as the Hitler Principle:  You will generate headlines by referring to a political opponent as the second coming of Hitler the first time.  You might get a few more the second time.  You could even get one the third, but by the hundredth time, no one is paying attention.  At this point, the former President has been compared to Hitler more times than anyone can count.  Just yesterday, in fact, The Washington Post ran an opinion piece titled “Don’t scoff at the Hitler comparisons.  Trump’s rhetoric is that bad.”  Over the weekend, The Guardian asked, “Is Donald Trump a fascist?”  They began by noting “The US presidential election is neck and neck. But only one candidate has been compared to Adolf Hitler.”  A day earlier, Vanity Fair referred to Donald Trump as “America’s Hitler.”  The media is not alone, either.  There are entire books devoted to the topic, “Trump and Hitler:  A Comparative Study in Lying” and “Trump and Hitler: A Responsible Consideration.”  That particular tome is in its second edition, where Horace Bloom “analyzes the personalities, careers, and ideologies of Hitler and Trump. The result is a nuanced portrait of the political moment we find ourselves in, acknowledging the importance of both similarities and differences between these two fascinating figures” according to Amazon’s summary.  Even the academic community has gotten in on the comparison, where Gardner-Webb University has awarded an honors thesis to “Rhetorical Demagoguery: An Exploration of Trump’s and Hitler’s Rise to Power.”  After citing a “void of scholarly work that highlights the similarities between the two leaders’ use of grandiloquent language to stoke the passions of their perspective nations,” “This study argues that Trump and Hitler ascended to power in very similar ways, but primarily through a variety of rhetorical exploitations and appeals.”

I could, of course, go on for paragraphs upon paragraphs citing additional examples, dating back almost a decade, but it should be obvious to anyone not blinded by hatred that the market is more than saturated with this and similar rhetoric.  The point isn’t whether you subscribe to this view or not, merely that the view has been more than thoroughly promulgated into the national consciousness and anyone not living under a rock has more than made up their minds already, probably long ago.  The same is true of the other epitaphs used by his detractors, of which there are many, far too many to list here.  For example, describing the former President as “unhinged” is something of a cottage industry in and of itself, generating dozens if not hundreds of articles over just the past month (perhaps my personal favorite from recent Google searches, The Guardian’s “Is Trump OK?  Unhinged reaction to rise of Harris worries supporters” last month, as if the progressive publication was truly worried about the mental or physical health of the former President).  Trump is “chaotic” or has “brought chaos” yield similar results – Mr. Collinson himself has used the phrase countless times.  There’s even President Trump goes “full loon” and “unglued” from USA Today just two weeks ago, but at this point, all are well past the point of diminishing returns, at least in my opinion, the equivalent of background noise upon which the current political debates and power plays are made, embraced by those who believe it, ignored by those who don’t, and obviously unlikely to influence anyone’s vote.  Perhaps if that was the Democrats only problem it wouldn’t be that much of an issue, but the law applies to the nature of the rhetoric as well as the repetition.  After you call someone Hitler, where can you possibly go from there?  Trump as the devil himself, come to Earth from the fiery furnaces of hell?  This is why many conservatives, myself included, were altogether unimpressed when soon-to-be Vice Presidential candidate Tim Walz referred to President Trump and his running mate as “weird” in July, what seems like a lifetime ago.  “You know it, you feel it,” he told a Philadelphia crowd in early August repeating the refrain. “These guys are creepy and, yes, just weird as hell.”  Mainstream media outlets immediately seized on this new moniker as if it were destined to be a potent line of attack.  To date, The New Republic has described “Trump’s Weird, Low-Energy Speech,” the Financial Times asked “Why does calling Trump ‘weird’ hurt him so much?”  The BBC wondered, “Why the ‘weird’ label is working for Kamala Harris?”  Vogue pondered, “How ‘Weird’ Became the Anti-Trump Term of the 2024 Election.”  Perhaps Yahoo News was best, “Trump Says He’s Not Weird, Then Gets Extra Weird About It.”  Meanwhile, the Associated Press offered an explainer on the subject, and The Economist discussed why it was a wise move to label him so.  Back in the real world, who cares about weird after someone has been called Hitler?  In the grand scheme of political putdowns, Hitler ranks much, much higher, so high that weird deserves barely a mention.

Between the law of diminishing returns and the reality that Vice President Harris is inextricably tied to a deeply unpopular administration, it’s not surprising that President Trump is winning on the key issues.  This was a fact that Mr. Collinson himself acknowledged yesterday, albeit he appeared far more surprised than I am as usual.  As he noted,  “Trump plays the fear card on the economy – and it seems to be working.”  In a rare compliment of the former President, he explained “when [Trump] tries to focus, he can assemble effective, populist economic arguments that help explain his dominance in polls on the most important issue in the election.”  Of course, there had to be an immediate caveat, “But Trump’s prediction about mass bankruptcies in the agricultural sector also echoed a familiar refrain — one that is the foundation of his pessimistic political creed. The ex-president adapts this construct to almost any audience as he evokes a vision of a nation wracked by crime, economic blight and an immigrant invasion.”  After yet another litany of President’s Trump’s supposed political sins, Mr. Collinson finally came to grips with reality, though with a rather back-handed recognition.  “One reason why Trump’s rhetoric has been effective — at least in cementing the loyal base of the Republican Party — is that it channels the feelings of many voters and legitimizes them.  This is where Trump’s authoritarian instincts and economic impulses come together…Trump’s enduring — and critics say fictionalized — image as a shrewd businessman and his knack for populist photo-ops help explain new polls by The New York Times and Siena College on Monday that showed that 55% of respondents in Arizona, North Carolina and Georgia said Trump would do a better job managing the economy compared to 42% who picked Harris.”  Similar results have been found consistently on a national level.  Whatever poll you look at, President Trump appears to enjoy a clear advantage on the issues that matter most to the American people this election cycle – the economy, inflation, and immigration plus national security – and perhaps most importantly, that advantage appears to be enduring despite the ebbs and flows of debates, conventions, etc.  In fact, some polls after Vice President Harris supposedly bested President Trump showed her with an increased head to head lead oddly coupled with a decrease on the issues.  As ABC News put it, “While overall vote preferences are stable, so are views on issues and attributes. The economy and inflation continue to dominate as the top issues in the election, and Trump leads by 7 points in trust to handle each of them…It’s clear, too, why Trump keeps doubling down on immigration as an issue: He leads Harris by 10 points in trust to handle it.” 

Of course, this doesn’t mean the former President is certain to prevail.  Recently, there appears to be a disconnect between national polling, where Vice President Harris is 2.1 points ahead according to the Real Clear Politics average, and state polling where President Trump is .2 ahead in the battlegrounds.  While both are substantially better than his prior efforts in either 2016 or 2020, and some are saying that the Vice President’s insistence on another debate is proof her team believes she’s losing, the only thing that seems certain is another exceedingly close race that will likely come down to a handful of states decided by a razor thin margin.  To some extent, that result alone is a miracle considering the forces arrayed against the former President.  It’s no wonder Mr. Collinson and others are shellshocked, especially as they seem never to have heard of the law of diminishing returns.