I think the key to understanding Trump’s ongoing appeal and Biden’s failure to match it is contemplating the phrase “he said the quiet part loud.” Often leveraged as a criticism, this phrase perfectly encapsulates what Trump supporters love about Trump. To them, and to many Americans long disaffected with politics and politicians, coded messages and double-talk are exhausting indications of a Washington world utterly disconnected from reality. Saying what you mean, on the other hand, is a rare and laudable act. The more outrageous or unacceptable, the better, because it indicates authenticity.
Let’s take the most recent example of wide deployment of this phrase as a criticism. Trump was interviewed on Fox & Friends, criticizing possible all-mail voting as a response to the coronavirus pandemic: “The things they had in there were crazy,” Trump said. “They had things — levels of voting that, if you ever agreed to it, you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.”
Now, it’s been common knowledge throughout my lifetime that Republicans benefit from low turnout, while Democrats succeed with high turnout. And more recently, this has taken the dark turn of Republicans overtly enacting voter suppression methods, especially in poor and minority communities that both typically vote Democratic and are traditionally disempowered by Republican policies. Everyone knows this is happening: pundits, politicians, the media. And everyone but the politicians are allowed to say it, to talk about it. But there’s an unwritten rule that politicians can’t actually say it, even though it’s universally understood and acknowledged by everyone, because of… what? Decorum? Dishonesty? The obsessive myth of American exceptionalism, that only our politicians are honest and true beacons of our ideals?
Trump comes in and smashes these norms. He says it. And he’s roundly lambasted for saying it, for “going there,” for making overt what all of his colleagues only think or whisper. But there’s a refreshing integrity in saying the quiet part loud, even if it’s coupled with loathsome beliefs or actions. This was widely lampooned from the left in 2016 with a viral New Yorker cartoon that depicted a wolf on a billboard saying “I am going to eat you” and the happy sheep supporting him saying “He tells it like it is.” This cartoon is both funny and misses the point. If your alternative is another wolf saying “I am not going to eat you,” the honest candidate actually is preferable.
Like so many folks who shared this cartoon, Democrats missed the lessons of 2016 when tackling 2020. In a hasty effort to copy what was successful about Trump, they fell in behind Biden, perhaps largely noting many superficial similarities between the candidates. He’s an old white dude! He’s a buffoon! Don’t Trump supporters like buffoons? He sticks his foot in his mouth, Trump supporters are gonna love that. He’s creepy and people know his name? We’ve got this in the bag!
The trouble, of course, is the main distinction Biden tries to draw between himself in Trump, the one that so many Democrats laud and crow, is also his major undoing on the Quiet Part Loud front. It’s his belief in decorum. His phrase for it is “a return to normalcy.” And to millions of Americans terrified of Trump and exhausted by his yelling bravado, this sounds comforting. But it also represents a return to politics as usual, to saying only the carefully crafted, fully vetted, neatly packaged loud part loud. Put another way, to lying. To telling people what they want to hear. To telling the sheep you’re not going to eat them.
On face, this sounds like a feat that Biden couldn’t possibly accomplish, given his endless propensity for gaffes, accelerated to a fever pitch in 2020 by either dementia or a lifelong stutter, depending on who you believe. But the nature of Biden’s failure to filter tilts less to the surprisingly honest and more to the weirdly unhinged. His most off-the-cuff moment from the 2020 primary campaign was when he called a young woman a “lying dog-faced pony soldier” in response to her question at a New Hampshire rally. And he has a bizarre tendency to tell people not to vote for him, virally at another campaign stop in a voter’s face, but most recently announcing yesterday in an MSNBC interview that anyone who believes Tara Reade’s sexual assault allegations against him “probably shouldn’t vote for me.”
The problem is that these admissions and outbursts don’t serve the purpose of revealing to his voting base how hard he’s willing to fight for their beliefs, how he’s even more invested in their viewpoint than a normal politician would publicly admit. They mostly seem to reveal that he’s out of it.
And look, Trump has plenty of moments where some special blend of dementia and derangement has revealed itself. He tweeted “covfefe.” He mocked a physically disabled reporter in the most horrifying style of a playground bully. He is prone to long-winded rants of his own brand of upselling word salad. He’s hardly on securely high ground in a race to sanity or coherence against Joe Biden.
But Biden doesn’t have any of those other moments, the times when he says the quiet part loud in speaking some fundamental unsaid truth about what the left wants in American politics. The closest he’s come actually served the opposite purpose, when he told a room of wealthy donors that “nothing would fundamentally change” about their standard of living if he were elected. This was saying the quiet part loud, but to demonstrate that the Democrats are also trying to be the party of the rich, to serve the interest of the wealthy, to put Wall Street over Main Street.
The closest anyone on the left comes to saying the quiet part loud is AOC. Even Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren tacked toward decorum and stability in their image, avoided saying things like they were going to “eat the rich,” which is basically what the emblematic quiet-part-loud message would entail from the left. I’m not even sure AOC has ever publicly said something like “eat the rich.” Bernie admitted he would raise taxes, but was very hesitant to focus on this as a strategy or talking point in his favor.
And so the alternative Biden seems to be offering is all of the unpredictability and instability of Trump, plus most of his ick-factor, but none of his ability to admit what he’s actually thinking unless he’s at a well-heeled fundraiser. It’s a return to politics as usual, to playing nice and being diplomatic and telling the right things to the right people at the right times. In a way, it’s its own version of “Make America Great Again,” just where the greatness was featured from 1992-2000, from 2008-2016. For those who loved and still love Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, I understand why this feels like manna from heaven. But in awkwardly trying to copy what looks like it works about Trump, it misses the fundamentals of what actually underpins his success and, in so doing, risks another bad, embarrassing, and predictable loss.
