Trump keeps followers loyal with their drug of choice: dopamine

The Emperor’s New Clothes has been applied to Donald Trump often enough, but what if we’re missing the point?

What if the story does, in fact, apply to Trump (and his followers) but not for the reasons we think?

The Hans Christian Andersen fable tells the story of two weavers who promise to create a suit of clothes for a clueless emperor. Their magical outfit, they say, will be invisible to all those who are simple-minded or incompetent.

Of course, there are no clothes, but no one — including the emperor — dares to mention it for fear of looking stupid. It takes a child’s innocent observation to break the spell cast by the unscrupulous “weavers.”

Trump’s critics tend to view him as a con man, but the emperor isn’t the scam artist in Andersen’s tale. The weavers are.

The emperor’s conceit is that he doesn’t want to appear simple-minded or incompetent, so he plays along. He doesn’t want to look like the commoners. The irony of the story is that he’s exactly like them: They, too, refuse to admit the obvious for fear of looking stupid.  

He’s our incompetent ass

When asked why the U.S. supported Nicaraguan dictator Anastasio Somoza, Franklin Roosevelt is said to have replied: “He may be a son of a bitch, but he’s our son of a bitch.”

The phrase has been used to explain Republicans’ continued support of Trump in the face of his obvious ineptitude and lack of any meaningful qualifications to govern a country. Any country. Let alone the most powerful country in the world.

Yes, Trump does serve a purpose for Republicans. He does advance many of their agendas, and (more importantly), his presence in the White House keeps them in power. So the Somoza principle is operating here, but there’s a whole lot more going on.

Trump isn’t just a “son of a bitch.” He’s also an incompetent ass. But, Republicans might say, “he’s our incompetent ass.”

The point is this: Just like the emperor’s loyal subjects, Republicans know what a lousy president he is. They know what a buffoon he is. They know how unfit he is. And they don’t buy his lines about being the best president since Lincoln or a “very stable genius.”

Oh, they won’t admit to any of this in public, any more than the emperor’s subjects would admit that the emperor was naked. In fact, they’ll say just the opposite.

But they know the truth.

Vicious circle

The dynamic in The Emperor’s New Clothes is exactly what’s going on today.

You have unscrupulous “weavers” of false narratives — Fox News and other conservative media outlets — spinning yarns that support Trump’s vanity. Like the weavers, they’re in this for one thing: to make money. They don’t care about Trump, per se. All they really care about is getting viewers to tune in and watch the spectacle of an emperor without any clothes. They’d never admit it’s all a charade, because if they did, the spectacle would on its face ... and so would their ratings.

You have Trump, who, like the emperor, wants to believe he’s better than anybody else. Whether he believes it himself or not is anyone’s guess. It’s possible that he’s repeated it so often he’s actually convinced himself it must be true. But it’s also possible that he’s simply so insecure that he can’t bear to admit the truth — just like Andersen’s emperor. Or, maybe, he’s just a scam artist.

Then you have Trump’s supporters, who want to believe they’re better than anybody else. White supremacists, immigrant-haters, sexists, and jingoistic nationalists all flock to Trump’s banner because they want to think he represents them (when, in fact, he represents nothing but his own interests).

It’s worth thinking about that for a moment, because the absurdity of it should not be missed. Trump thinks he’s better than they are, and they think he’s just like them. Both things can’t be true. Yet what makes the whole thing almost comically ironic is this: The very fact that they think he’s just like them is what fuels his conceit that he’s better than they are.

It’s a vicious circle.

Lies and pretense

It is no surprise that Trump lies as much as he does when his entire presidency is built on falsehood. It works, so why not keep on doing it?

The more important question is why people keep buying into it.

One writer explains it this way: “This is fundamentally a desire for protection. We so desperately want our leaders to protect us that we are willing to believe they are doing so in the face of evidence to the contrary.”

In other words, we’re lazy. We want someone to do the work for us, to be our savior. This is the appeal of the bully to the masses, but it’s particularly intriguing as it relates to Republicans, who insist they hate big government and social safety nets.

Yet Trump presents himself as a savior, and they accept it. Here’s the big irony: For all their talk about rugged individualism, they want to be taken care of. How else can you explain their eagerness to accept a leader with a messiah complex — who says he knows everything about everything and vows that “only he can fix it”?

By now, there’s plenty of evidence that Trump isn’t good at fixing things: He couldn’t fix his bankrupt businesses. He hasn’t fixed the coronavirus pandemic, the North Korean nuclear crisis, the broken health-care system... The list goes on. But it’s not Trump’s ability to solve problems that attracts followers, but his willingness to say he can do it.

Making (and breaking) political promises is a practice far older than Trump, but he’s raised it to a new level. Instead of trying to spin his failures or sweep them under the rug, he simply denies they ever happened — just like the emperor denied being naked.

If it never happened, this makes it easier to convince people you’ll keep your next promise ... because they want to believe. And believing can be more satisfying than actually having that belief fulfilled.

The dopamine effect

There’s science behind this — yet another dose of irony because it involves Trump, a frequent science denier. (Climate change? What climate change? Swallow bleach to cure coronavirus!)

It works like this: Dopamine levels in your brain rise based on the expectation of a reward, not based on the reward itself. So as long as your expectations are high, you feel good. If, however, you don’t get the reward you’re expecting, you’re in for a letdown.

The trick, then, is to keep you in a state of perpetual expectation.

Trump does this by continuing to make promises on the front end but denying he’s failed to keep them when they fall through. Or simply claiming he’s kept them when he really hasn’t (such as declaring his inept coronavirus response a success). Typical politicians may try to minimize their failures, but when they’re caught dead to rights, they own up to their failures and apologize for them. Not Trump.

To do so, he realizes at some level, would be to obliterate the dopamine high and make it harder to replicate later.

So he simply lies.

Here’s where Trump and his followers agree: He wants them to maintain their dopamine high, and so do they. They’re motivated to swallow his fish stories hook, line and sinker, which is why he keeps telling them.

Why we’re stuck here

What about the child in the fable who broke the spell by insisting that the emperor had no clothes? Many people today are saying the same thing. So why aren’t the parade-watching Republicans awakened from their state of self-delusion?

There are a few reasons: For one thing, Trump has more than just a couple of bogus weavers to perpetuate his fraud. He’s got Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Lou Dobbs, Mitch McConnell, Devin Nunes, and a huge echo chamber on social media, all repeating the false narrative about how successful he is.

For another, Trump has exploited distrust of the other side by making it seem like his political opponents are worse than even hostile foreign powers. With talking about the Russians, Republicans used to declare, “Better dead than (communist) red!” Now, they’re saying, “I’d rather be a Russian than a Democrat.”

This works on two levels. First, as long as two factions in the crowd are fighting one another, neither one is going to notice that the emperor has no clothes. And even if they do, his supporters would rather follow a naked emperor than a fully clothed member of the other party. They’d rather follow an imbecile with an R next to his name than a competent leader whose name is followed by a D.

To be fair, the nation is so polarized at this point, that Democrats might well make the same choice. But the fact is, this kind of strategy plays directly into Trump’s wheelhouse. As we all know, Trump values loyalty — others’ loyalty to him, that is — above all else, including competence. Polarized extremists share those values, which is why Trump keeps playing to them.

And why they keep hailing the naked wannabe emperor.

Even though they know better.

Sorry, folks, no happy ending here. Hans Christian Andersen wrote a great little fairy tale, but the moral of the story has been lost beneath the bullshit.