In 1972, New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael noted in a lecture that she “live(s) in a rather special world” where she “only know(s) one person who voted for Nixon”, noting that despite Richard Nixon, a month prior, having won the popular vote by nearly 18 million votes and carrying all but Massachusetts and the District of Columbia in the Electoral College, Kael lived in a world of urban bohemians. It is a refreshingly self-aware quote that has aged reasonably well, but the line has instead been bastardized beyond the point of recognition by conservative pundits, whose misquote usually amounts to something in the neighborhood of “I can’t believe Nixon won. I don’t know anyone who voted for him.”
Kael’s original quote is far more sympathetic, as it exhibits self-awareness (also, no matter how insular your community is, to not know one supporter of the overwhelmingly popular incumbent would be bizarre). But the misquote fits a common narrative—that liberals exist in their own ecosystem, divorced from the tastes and preferences of the so-called Silent Majority.
In the case of Nixon, the “Silent Majority” tag was never totally accurate, but it made some degree of sense. Richard Nixon was, for better or worse, a boring presidential candidate. He was simultaneously experienced, having served six years in Congress and eight years as Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president before serving four years as president leading up to the 1972 election, and relatively young—while Nixon is frequently juxtaposed with John F. Kennedy’s youthfulness from their 1960 debates, Nixon was just 47 during those debates and was just 59 when he ran for re-election, just three years older than Kamala Harris, hyped by establishment Democrats as a nod to the next generation, when she was elected vice president. Nixon was a competent but not especially charismatic public speaker. He was raised poor but was objectively intelligent and hard-working, later graduating third in his class from the Duke University School of Law.
If this sounds like a fairly glowing perspective on Richard Nixon, it may be because I have spent the last five years thinking every single day about Donald Trump. Trump is frequently compared to Nixon, but the similarities are minimal. They are both Republicans who were elected president. Nixon had been a full-time politician since his early thirties; Trump didn’t become a full-time politician until he was 69 years old. Nixon was, by the standards of politics, middle-aged; Trump is the oldest person ever inaugurated as president (a record that will soon be broken). Nixon was a nerdy lawyer who was more qualified to craft policy than to be an inspirational figure; Trump speaks in vague generalities and seems happiest when speaking before large gatherings of his most ardent supporters. Nixon rose from poverty to become very successful; Trump was born into extreme wealth. From a purely biographical standpoint, Nixon is much closer to Joe Biden, if not an exact match (Biden is a generation older than Nixon was and his background was more comfortably middle-class than Nixon’s, even if it tilts far more towards the 37th president than the 45th).
Most people who rise to the level of Presidential runner-up have lost before, or at the very least faced some sort of major adversity. The same ambition that it requires to believe you are capable of being president also requires you to expose yourself to a potentially hostile public. Hillary Clinton had squandered a large polling lead in the build-up to the 2008 Democratic primaries. Mitt Romney lost his first election, for U.S. Senator from Massachusetts, by over 17 percentage points. John McCain lost a bitter primary fight in 2000 against George W. Bush for the Republican presidential nomination. John Kerry lost his first election, for U.S. Representative. Al Gore ran an unsuccessful presidential campaign in 1988.
Had Joe Biden lost in the 2020 presidential election, he would join this group, and he would fit. In 1988 and 2008, his presidential campaigns disappeared as quickly as they arrived. The nature of the 2020 election, inherently delayed by COVID-19, might have delayed his concession beyond when Hillary Clinton had conceded in 2016 (one of the more outlandish of Donald Trump’s many 2020 campaign lies was that Democrats never conceded; Clinton conceded the next morning). But if the dust had settled with Trump appearing to have won the Electoral College with the same margin of victory as in 2016 and with a five million vote edge in the popular vote, as it appears has happened with Biden, there is no question in my mind that Biden would have conceded.
Donald Trump has never run for public office and not won, because 2016 was the first time he ran for public office in any sort of serious way. In 2016, after Ted Cruz won the Republican Iowa caucuses, Trump alleged fraud. After the 2016 general election, which even his opponent freely acknowledged Trump had won, Trump insisted that massive fraud had happened and that Hillary Clinton’s admittedly meaningless consolation prize of a popular vote victory was the result of that. What Trump is doing now should not be a surprise to anyone who has followed his political life so far.
There is a relatively magnanimous way that Donald Trump could be going about not conceding to Joe Biden. “Joe Biden is being reported as the narrow winner in several key swing states. It is clear that both Vice President Biden and I received historic numbers of votes, and with this unprecedented volume, the risk of error is even greater. Recounting the votes is imperative to assure that the electoral process adheres to the will of the American people, and whether I win or Vice President Biden wins, all Americans deserve to know the system worked as designed.” But Trump jumped straight to baseless conspiracies about Republicans votes being dumped and Republican poll watchers being excluded from polling locations. Given that Republicans gained seats in the House of Representatives and will likely retain control of the Senate, vote-fixing from Democrats would have been shockingly incompetent. And while I am not usually one to dismiss accusations against the Democratic Party of being incompetent, that seems unlikely here.
But as much as Donald Trump lies, I don’t think he’s lying when he says he believes there was massive voter fraud and that he is the rightful winner of the 2020 presidential election. I believe he’s extremely wrong, but that’s a different matter. Donald Trump exists in an echo chamber. He has been surrounded by yes-men his entire life. He has never worked for anybody other than himself or his father. Despite living his entire life in the same deep-blue enclave of America as Pauline Kael did when she only knew one Nixon voter in 1972, he has never associated with those people. There is a reason he constantly called in to Fox News, whose viewership is overwhelmingly already on his side and whose personalities would never fight back against him even if they disagreed with him. There is a reason he held his first super-spreader rally of the pandemic era (you know, the one that killed Herman Cain) not in a competitive swing state but in blood-red Oklahoma. Donald Trump truly believes that he is overwhelmingly popular because he ignores anyone who might say otherwise. This is a guy who insists to this day that he was a superstar high school baseball player who was scouted by MLB teams but turned down the pros because he could make more money in business, despite unearthed (admittedly incomplete) box scores revealing he had a .138 batting average while playing first base in what was not exactly a hotbed of MLB-caliber talent. And this is a completely irrelevant thing about which to lie!
I am quite certain that if I played my dad one-on-one in basketball, or if I played him in Trivial Pursuit, today, I would beat him. But my lifetime record against him in either of these endeavors is very low, because when I was in middle school, he would routinely school me in both games. He wasn’t a demonstrative jerk about asserting his dominance, but he never let me win. And that built character. I was determined to improve. My dad is not and never was an all-world basketball or trivia player, but he was better than I was, and I wanted to be better than he was, and I knew that I would have to work to get there. Donald Trump has avoided challenges his entire life.
He was able to expand upon his wealth because he was born with so much of it that he could afford to take chances and incur losses that would destroy 99% of us. The second he started to face even minor adversity, losing an Iowa caucus that he was never expected to win given that his brand was considered more appealing to big business conservatives than social conservatives, he complained that the game wasn’t fair. And he keeps doing it. And he’s never going to stop. Because for the first time in his life, Donald Trump is being held accountable for something. And he isn’t ready for that.
