There is one question about Donald Trump that I’m asked above all others, as someone whose professional life is devoted to studying voter behavior and, in particular, what drives Republicans. Here is a man who remains the front-runner for the presidency despite facing dozens of felony charges, a jury verdict as soon as next week, and the lingering frustration of voters — including Republicans — over the Jan. 6 insurrection at the Capitol. Why doesn’t any of it affect his standing in the polls?
My answer starts with a story about how Oprah Winfrey once saw Mr. Trump.
During the presidential election year of 2000, she sent him a warm, handwritten letter that ended with her floating a political partnership between two of America’s most famous names.
“Too bad we’re not running for office. What a team!” she wrote.
A Trump-Oprah (or Oprah-Trump) ticket obviously never came to be, and in the intervening decades the two went in very opposite directions politically. Ms. Winfrey elevated and endorsed Senator Barack Obama for the presidency; Mr. Trump built a political following around false allegations and conspiracy theories about Mr. Obama’s birth.
By the time Mr. Trump was President Trump, Ms. Winfrey considered becoming Mr. Trump’s rival rather than his running mate. She called up Senator Mitt Romney to discuss ideas about taking on Mr. Trump in some fashion.
Yet Ms. Winfrey may have been on to something back when she thought voters might be drawn to her and Mr. Trump. In our Times Opinion focus group this month, when I interviewed a dozen women who voted for Mr. Trump in 2020 and asked them who else they’d like to see run for president, the first responses from one Republican and one independent were emphatic: Oprah! Oprah!
“She’s smart. She knows how to run a business,” one of our focus group participants said about Ms. Winfrey. “She’s not a pushover.”
Sound familiar? Supporters of Mr. Trump have been saying as much about him since he came down his golden escalator nine years ago.
I doubt Ms. Winfrey and Mr. Trump share much in the way of policy preferences, values, or opinions these days. But the notion of a “Trump-Oprah” voter is a strong reminder of the power of celebrity to shape public opinion. Policy considerations, ideological positioning, and partisan cues all warp around the gravitational pull of megastardom in America.
The criminal allegations, the trials, Jan. 6 — why does none of it seem to affect Mr. Trump’s standing? Each week seems to bring something that, were it any other candidate, would horrify and disqualify. This week it is a video with a faux “unified Reich” headline, next week could be a jury handing down a guilty verdict in a criminal case; both could easily fail to move the polls.
I believe that nearly a decade since his first campaign, Mr. Trump retains the sort of shield that only celebrity can provide. It is too easy to forget that before Trump the politician came Trump the businessman, the entertainer, the tabloid fixture. After all, though he is now a former president and current front-runner to retake the White House, it was really not that long ago that Mr. Trump was seen as an American success story, a businessman with the track record and charisma to rise to become a celebrity, appearing in movies like “Home Alone 2,” the hit television series “The Apprentice” and Macy’s ads along with the likes of Taylor Swift and Martha Stewart.
The allure of success is powerful. In our own lives, success can take many forms — financial gain, professional accolades, a happy family. But for many, especially younger Americans today, fame and influence are an aspiration or an indicator of success. There’s a reason brands seek out celebrity spokespeople to endorse products; we perhaps unconsciously assume that because someone is famous, they must be worth listening to.
Ms. Winfrey, Ms. Swift, Ms. Stewart and, yes, even Mr. Trump have long cultivated a type of aspirational celebrity that confers a number of benefits that traditional politicians do not enjoy. Considered by many to be wealthy, successful, influential and entertaining, their success in one arena confers a halo effect that makes people assume they must be talented in all arenas.
Many of these celebrities have had their own trials (in some cases, literal trials) and triumphs play out in extremely public fashion, cultivating a base of fans that are invested in their success at a personal level. As people develop “parasocial relationships” with major celebrities, believing themselves to feel they in some way personally know the very famous person they see on their screen, the emotional connection between celebrity and their public is fundamentally different from that of politician and voter.
In the wake of Mr. Trump’s initial triumph in the 2016 Republican primaries and subsequent winning of the White House, there was plenty of discussion about the role his celebrity played in insulating him from criticism from his rivals. Attempts to portray him as bad at business often failed to stick because they ran so counter to his TV–cultivated brand as mogul extraordinaire. Even worse, attempts to portray him as an abrasive bully backfired because they reinforced the brand he’d already created.
By the time of his 2020 re-election campaign, the image of Trump-as-celebrity had been upstaged by the reality of Trump-as-president. Assessments of Mr. Trump’s performance were less a function of branding and more a function of voters’ lives in the moment. With voters weary from the disruption of Covid-19, Mr. Trump was merely tied with Mr. Biden on who would handle the economy best as they headed into Election Day.
Yet as time has passed and the contrast between Trump and Biden has grown starker, voters view Mr. Trump’s presidency more fondly in hindsight. Today, voters in key swing states prefer Donald Trump to Joe Biden on the economy by a 20-point margin. Most voters aren’t necessarily basing those views on a close look at the two men’s records or policy stands or on granular details about economic performance over the last eight years. Rather, they think of Mr. Trump as a success story, a celebrity business mogul-turned-president who presided over low interest rates and low inflation. Voters aren’t dwelling on his past bankruptcies, his taxes, the mixed economic record in office. The perception of Trump as a driver of economic success is resurgent.
Much as in 2016, Mr. Trump’s scandals and public outbursts are similarly failing to dim his election prospects, at least in the short term. While this may be attributable in part to how voters feel about Mr. Biden, the incumbent’s weakness doesn’t fully explain the resilience of the Trump brand on handling the economy, missing that Trump likely has regained the shield his celebrity afforded to him during his initial run for the presidency.
As “The Apprentice” fades farther in the rear view mirror, it is a mistake to forget that Mr. Trump is a celebrity first and politician second. Nearly a decade later, he still isn’t affected by the same political laws of gravity that govern nearly every other political figure — including his Republican imitators and impostors. If Mr. Biden is to win in November, his team will need to get voters thinking about Mr. Trump as a politician once more. For now, Mr. Trump is still playing by Oprah rules.
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