Facts and Truths
Trump Wins, A World Event
The City Rises, Umberto Boccioni, 1910. Image.
Welcome back to Quests, where seismic shockwaves are still reverberating across the land after Tuesday’s election.
The American president—as symbol, figurehead, and sole possessor of immense executive power—touches every corner of the world’s worlds, real and imagined.
The holder of this highest office influences how we tell stories, conceive of ourselves, and even conceptualize time (e.g., the “Obama years”).
So the transfer of American power is a moment worth dwelling on. In ways subtle and profound, national politics impacts the missions we accept in life and how we take them on.
The POTUS is part of our collective “Main Questline,” for better or worse.
If you’re a news junkie like me, you’ll have already pored over the pundits’ explanations for the election result—and found many of them wanting or just plain wrong.
I want to focus on the facts and truths of the 2024 election and suggest that Trump taps into simple desires unlike anyone else in our country’s history.
Armor up (you’ll need it), and look at this tangle of thorns.
Here’s a tequila shot of Philosophy 101:
In life, there are facts and truths.
Facts are objective, indisputable, closed for interpretation.
Fact: “The sun rises in the East and sets in the West.”
Truths are looser things: subjective yet shared, obvious yet hidden.
Truth: “A sunrise on a cold day with a warm cup of coffee is like heaven on earth.”
Facts are registered in our brains; truths are felt in our hearts…or maybe imprinted on our souls, buried in our unconscious minds—whatever explanatory metaphor works best for you is your truth.
As Bob Dylan said, “You don’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows.”
….unless you are a Democratic party leader, in which case you practically worship the weatherman and other chart-carrying experts (the pollster, the epidemiologist, the learn’d astronomer of Walt Whitman).
Democrats, including former California attorney general Kamala Harris, are the most skilled purveyors of facts in a country starved for truths.
Donald Trump, on the other hand, doesn’t care one iota about facts and will spin a hundred lies if it means kindling the tremendous, terrible truths incubating in Americans’ hearts. This is his greatest quality as an (anti)-politician.
So, yes, it is factual that Donald Trump defrauded banks and insurers, inflated his net worth by billions, and committed tax fraud.
But it is a truth for his supporters that he’s always been a very wealthy man—the wealthiest, he might say—with the big five letters of his name, T-R-U-M-P, a word which also means “to defeat,” “to beat,” “to triumph over,” stamped onto skyscrapers and featured on TV for 25+ years (on the Simpsons, Wrestlemania, The Apprentice).
(Quick detour: too little attention has been paid to the semantic brilliance and cosmic accident of Trump’s name—TRUMP—which he has wielded as a marketing tool since the early 80s and which has bore itself into the linguistic centers of the American psyche.)
(A second detour—or is it a weave?—in the form of a question: did you open a single hyperlink in what I wrote above? Prolly not. Facts are boring. And you and I read Substack newsletters; 45 million U.S. adults read below a fifth grade level. Truths matter more than facts.)
Sometimes the facts are in dispute, or even clearly against the Democrats, as with inflation and illegal immigration in the 2024 cycle. These were losing issues that, to the intellectualizing Democratic mind, must be hard countered with economic report cards, deep investigations, and, worst of all, “fact checks.”
If Democrats want to continue to lose elections, they will keep fact-checking. The majority of Americans do.not.care.about.facts, even if they claim otherwise. Their actions betray their words. They care about truths.
Here are some Trump truths; note that I profess nothing about the truth of these truths; these are whispers in the minds of people: the half-felt, half-thought, emotional-semantic bubblings that gradually accumulate into a vote for Trump:
Trump says what he thinks.
Trump fights elites who think they’re better than us.
Trump is a businessman who will make everything more efficient.
Trump will protect America’s borders.
Trump projects strength.
Trump got shot and immediately fist-pumped to the crowd. That was badass AF.
Trump doesn’t need facts to imprint these truths on his voters. In addition to his sheer self-image, he has a deep tool bag of tricks and tactics, including name-calling, relentless repetition, scapegoating, fear mongering, etc.
It’s absolutely awful and awfully effective. The man—and that he is a man ( 6’3”, heavyset, with the blonde combover) is significant—fundamentally understands that more people vote with their guts than do with their brains.
You may not like the truths of the MAGA imaginarium. But, like the rest of us, they are grasping for something solid in an increasingly post-religious, choose-your-own-adventure melange of moral perspectives. This is what happens in a culture that is, for lack of a better word, spiritually adrift.
Now, on the flip side, there are the leftist truths of a multicultural, accepting society that provides for the least (the poor, the crippled, the lame, the blind), protects the planet, counterbalances powerful corporations, and so on.
And there was a populist candidate in 2016 who spoke to all of this, and the Democrats rigged the primary against him and his “bros.”
Here are some Bernie Sanders truths:
Bernie fights for the working class, not the billionaire class.
Bernie has been saying the same things for fifty years.
Bernie believes healthcare is a human right, not a privilege.
Bernie will create a fairer economy.
Bernie is a good, honest person.
Now ask yourself: what are the Kamala Harris truths?
She’s brat? We’re not going back? Unburdened by what has been?
Thrust into the candidacy with only months to work with, Kamala Harris gave us a smattering of platitudes, nervous laughs, and, yes, facts without fight.
That, to me, is the story of the 2024 election.
Looking ahead to 2028, the Democratic Party should find a candidate who is populist in sensibility, an outsider (please not a lawyer), business-savvy, mad-as-hell, and prepared to insert, as if by inception, fundamental, factual truths into the minds of voters.
That’s the only thing that’ll work in our Tik-Tokified information ecosystem; the policy-driven, Just-the-Facts ship sailed away long ago.
So don’t say, “I just can’t believe it” or “I don’t understand how so many people could vote for him.”
Stop looking at facts. Think in the simplest of truths: theirs and yours. Pay attention to how people feel.
The truths will set you free.