Demagogue for President—Again (with Jennifer Mercieca)

The Founders, small-d democracy, and why the GOP is stuck with Trump.

The United States was ordained and established by high-minded men who were champions of democracy. That’s a compelling origin story, one we love to tell ourselves, but for the pesky fact that it’s not true.

The Founders were not small-d democrats. To Jefferson, Madison, & Co, Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness did not extend to universal suffrage. They didn’t want every citizen to vote. To the contrary, a government of the people, by the people, and for the people scared the bejesus out of them.

“In the Founding era, that was viewed as very dangerous,” says Jennifer Mercieca, a professor of rhetoric, the author of Demagogue for President: The Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump, and my guest on today’s PREVAIL podcast. “Citizen participation was viewed as chaotic and destabilizing. And the whole point of the Constitution was to create a stable system of government, so the people in their opinions were too dangerous.”

The prospect of every Tom, Dick, and Harry—to say nothing of every Nancy, Leticia, and Nimrata—actively participating in the franchise filled the likes of James Madison with dread. “Now, it was radical for them at the time to create a republic,” Mercieca says— but the Founders had no intention of going all the way. In his concept of ideal government, Madison used the metaphor of a pyramid. “The power is at the top of the pyramid; the people are the base, which is the necessary foundation of the pyramid,” she explains, “but that power is actually as far away from the top and the bottom as possible.”

There are booby traps in the Founding documents that work against universal voting rights. For example, senators were elected indirectly, by state legislatures, until the ratification of the Seventeenth Amendment in 1913. More famously, the Founders devised the Electoral College; this ugly vestige of the slavery era—basically a popular-vote self-destruct button—would come back to bite us in the ass in both 2000 and 2016. When John Roberts and his fellow SCOTUS reactionaries overturn laws designed to protect and expand voting rights, they really are being originalists.

When the nation was founded, women could not vote. Black people could not vote. Native Americans could not vote. Poor people could not vote. Young people could not vote. Most people, in short, could not vote. To participate in government, one had to be a propertied white man over the age of 21. The Founders would have abhorred Barack Obama, Hakeem Jeffries, Nancy Pelosi, Kamala Harris, Nikki Haley, Tim Scott, AOC, and Liz Cheney. In their eyes, the type of person who should hold power was rich, Anglo-Saxon, Protestant, male, and happy to look the other way regarding slavery. In other words, the Founders’ idea of a paradigmatic citizen was someone like Donald Trump.

At the same time, Donald Trump is exactly the sort of populist, power-hungry, tyrannical leader the Founders most feared: a demagogue. They knew that such a leader had the potential to huff and puff and blow down the house that is the American experiment.

In Greek, demagogue “literally translates to ‘a leader of the people,’” Merceica says. It has come to mean something more specific—and more nefarious. “One way of understanding the demagogue is that they are a mis-leader of the people. And so, that’s the way that we use the word today. And it tends to be—if you look it up in the dictionary—someone who uses polarizing propaganda for their own political gain.” (Mercieca writes with great effect about the various rhetorical techniques Trump uses to achieve this result in her book.)

“The other way of understanding it is that the demagogue is the person who justly or heroically leads the people against the other parts of the state which are viewed as corrupt,” Mercieca continues. “One thing that I think is very clear is that Trump’s followers see him as a heroic demagogue. And he of course cultivated this heroic image. So, they see him as someone who is defending their interests against the other parts of the state which they believe are absolutely corrupt and corrupted and irredeemable. And they need someone who’s going to fight for them. And he’s told them he’s their guy.” In short, MAGA believes Trump is a heroic demagogue. The rest of the world knows, with scientific certainty, that he’s the bad variety.

Trump’s demagogical status explains his hold over the GOP. For some time now, the Republican Party has not been much interested in the business of governance. (Cut to Marjorie Taylor Greene sharing Hunter Biden porn pictures on the House floor.) Their big ideas—Criminalize abortion! Lift any and all restrictions on assault rifle ownership! Lower taxes for billionaires even more! Cut funding for Social Security and Medicare! Bully the LGBTQ community!—are cruel, stupid, and unpopular. No one is winning a general election trumpeting those shit policies.

The only way the Republicans can take the White House in 2025 is if they put a demagogue on the top of the ticket and hope the hoi polloi are so ensorcelled by his well-crafted rhetoric that they vote for him despite his abject awfulness. This, I submit, is why the Senate Republicans did not vote to impeach Trump in January 2020; they knew the milquetoast Mike Pence could not win the general election. Pence is many things, a lot of them undesirable, but one thing he ain’t is a demagogue.

And so the GOP will ride or die with Trump, their “unaccountable leader.” They have no other option. There are—thank heaven—no other demagogues in the Republican field. Chris Christie is not a demagogue. Nikki Haley is not a demagogue. Tim Scott is not a demagogue. Given enough power, Casey DeSantis might make a nice demagogue in the Evita model, but her big lug of a husband is so far from being a demagogue that she won’t ever get the chance. The GOP electorate wants a demagogue. And Trump is the only one available.

“I think that [with] the Republican Party today,” Mercieca says, “Republican leadership knows that without a frontman, they have nothing.”

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LISTEN TO THE PODCAST

S5 E20: SEASON FINALE: Rhetorical Questions (with Jennifer Mercieca)

In the Season Five Finale of the PREVAIL podcast, Greg Olear talks to Jennifer Mercieca, a professor of rhetoric at Texas A&M and the author of “Demagogue for President: the Rhetorical Genius of Donald Trump,” about myths of the Founders, rhetoric as a field of study, rhetorical devices Trump uses, how fascists learn from each other, the power of nostalgia, conservative rhetoric, “search vs. research,” and what’s going on in Texas. Plus: indictment #3.

Follow Jen:
https://twitter.com/jenmercieca

Visit her website:
https://www.jennifermercieca.com/

Order the book:
https://www.amazon.com/Demagogue-President-Rhetorical-Genius-Donald/dp/1623499062

SEASON FINALE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to Dar Golan, for the great music used in various fake ads. Thanks to Stephanie Koff and Chunk for the help with the comic bits. Thanks to Kanai Williams, Molly Hawkey, Kimberley Johnson, and Allison Gill at MSW Media for their help getting the show together and promoting it. And thanks to you, Dear Listener, for your support!

Season 6 of the PREVAIL podcast kicks off on Friday, August 25.