‘They’ turns political rivals into villains

“They” are an appealing punching bag for those who feel dispossessed, said Karl Simms, a linguist and senior lecturer in the University of Liverpool’s Department of English, who has analysed Trump’s verbal habits.

By pointing to a nebulous entity, he said, Trump scores relatability points among fans distressed by hardships they see as unfair – while absolving them and himself of responsibility for any missteps.

For listeners, he said, that allows “their imaginations to run away from them, without any kind of check on that”.

Us-versus-them narratives are nothing new in American politics. Among the chief offenders, according to historians: the Red Scare perpetuator, Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, and four-time Alabama governor George Wallace, whose brand was bashing the civil rights movement. Both harped on what sociologists refer to as “the other”. Both alluded to complicit powers-that-be.

“Trump, however, has taken it to a new level,” said political analyst Jonathan Alter, who has written books on four US presidents, most recently Trump. Neither McCarthy nor Wallace, he said, framed “Democrats” as an existential threat.

“Suggesting that the entire other party is evil,” Alter said, “is an astonishing development.”

As Trump’s courtroom battles intensified, so has his team’s jabbing at “they”, noticed Omar Garcia-Ponce, an associate professor of political science and international relations at George Washington University in the nation’s capital.

“‘They’,” he said, “are whoever people think are threatening America’s greatness.”

While both campaigns have amped up the vitriol, Democrats have painted a “more concrete enemy”, Garcia-Ponce said. Vice President Kamala Harris and her team have laser-focused criticism on Trump and his running mate, Senator JD Vance (R-Ohio). Not since Hillary Clinton aimed her infamous “basket of deplorables” zinger toward Trump’s base, he said, has a Democratic nominee openly swiped at Republican voters. (Clinton later said she regretted her phrasing.)

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Trump alleging that “they’re coming after you” turns political rivals into mortal villains, said Jon Krosnick, director of the Political Psychology Research Group at Stanford University. And if his followers believe “Democrats” are trying to kill him?

“The stage is well set for a public uprising,” Krosnick said, pointing to the mob of Trump supporters who stormed the US Capitol on January 6, 2021.

Rioters trying to stop Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s victory erected a makeshift noose and gallows that day on the West Front of the Capitol. Some yelled, “Hang Mike Pence!” The chaos had no impact on Trump’s tone.

“I didn’t lose,” he told podcaster Joe Rogan last week, “but they say I lost.”

Relentlessly deploying “they” weakens the collective ability to tolerate – let alone celebrate – differences, said Laura McHale, a leadership psychologist in Hong Kong who has studied the politics of pronouns.

“They” are the enemy, she said. “They” could be prosecutors, lawyers, poll workers, librarians, teachers, journalists, immigrants or a next-door neighbour with a Harris-Walz sign.

“It’s like the Montagues and the Capulets,” McHale said, referencing the Shakespearean feud that doomed Romeo and Juliet.

After a drumbeat of ‘they’, doubts arise

As election day nears, Trump surrogates have doubled down on “they” in speeches reaching hundreds of millions. To Vance, “they” are darkly powerful yet consistently incompetent.

“They couldn’t beat him at the ballot box, so they tried to bankrupt him,” he told a late-August crowd in Asheboro, North Carolina. “They failed at that, so they tried to impeach him. They failed at that, so they tried to put him in prison, and they even tried to kill him.” (Vance, too, was talking about “Democrats”, Leavitt said.)

Trump adviser Stephen Miller echoed that cadence.

“They tried to jail him,” he proclaimed at Sunday’s Madison Square Garden rally. “They tried to bankrupt him. They tried to imprison him, and they even tried to take his life.”

They even tried to take his life. Despite loving Trump, 29-year-old Curt Hunka had initially doubted such claims.

“Lone psycho” had popped into his mind, he said, after a 20-year-old nursing home worker climbed onto a roof overlooking a July rally in western Pennsylvania and opened fire.

The shooter, Thomas Matthew Crooks, had been registered as a Republican and lived with his parents. Probably mentally ill, Hunka had guessed. He didn’t agree with Vance’s assessment that President Joe Biden’s rhetoric had “directly led” to the attack.

“You’ve got to blame the individual,” the gun seller told The Post at the time.

Four months later, though, Hunka was less sure what to make of the violence that erupted less than a half-mile from his family’s firearm showroom in Butler, Pennsylvania. More than other politicians, he trusted Trump.

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It was baffling to him that the FBI still hasn’t unearthed a motive for Crooks, who sharpshooters killed on the scene. Yes, investigators told the public that motives are notoriously tricky to pin down, but Trump and a chorus of online sleuths soon drowned them out.

Then a mere nine weeks after bullets flew at the Butler Farm Show grounds, another rifle-toting man had inched within 450 metres of Trump at the former president’s golf course in West Palm Beach, Florida.

Neither investigation has identified a single co-conspirator, but now Hunka thought it sounded reasonable when Miller thundered, “they came after his life”.

To Hunka, “they” means the political establishment. Trump rolled in nine years ago to smash up that club of Washington careerists, Hunka said. “They” never got over it, he said. “They” want to stop him.

Would “they” try to kill him?

“Honest to God,” Hunka said, “I don’t know what the government is capable of any more.”

‘They’ are not pushing her to vote

Sometimes, “they” are more spelled out. Like in a 30-second Trump spot slamming Harris’s support of access to gender-affirming care for prisoners: “Kamala’s agenda is they/them – not you!” Or during the last presidential debate, when Trump mischaracterised Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio.

“They’re eating the dogs,” he said. “They’re eating the cats. They’re eating – they’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

Local officials repeatedly debunked those accusations, and the city manager reiterated that Haitians settled legally in Springfield. Yet 53-year-old Philomene Philostin worried that no amount of fact-checking would curb the rage blasting her community of nearly 60,000.

“I’ve never seen anything like it,” said the convenience store manager, who moved to the United States from Haiti three decades ago.

Springfield recorded 33 bomb threats in the six days following Trump’s remarks – all hoaxes, Ohio’s governor reported. Elementary schools were evacuated. Friends started making plans to move to nearby Columbus, she said, hoping to escape a harrowing spotlight.

Personally, she refused to budge. She paid taxes. She went to church. She loved to sing and had built her own recording studio. She laughed at the idea that anyone she knew was snacking on pets.

“Trump is playing into fears,” Philostin said. Fears like the racist theory she’d seen on the internet that some shadowy elites are enabling a flow of obedient, Democrat-supporting foreigners.

“Our elections are bad,” Trump had said in the debate, “and a lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote.”

“They” are not pushing her to vote, Philostin insisted. As a US citizen, she would decide her own ballot.

“I am the one,” she said, “telling people to vote, vote, vote.”

Are ‘they’ heroes or corrupt?

Up in north-eastern Wisconsin, Dennis Statz mulled his evolving view of the good guys.

As a boy, the owner of the White Lace Inn bed-and-breakfast in Sturgeon Bay rooted for television actors playing FBI agents. Those were the heroes.

“I don’t want to say they were godlike,” he said, “but I had a ton of respect for them.”

That admiration stayed with him as his brown hair turned grey. Then Trump scrambled his perception. To Statz, 70, the investigations into the former president seemed perplexingly excessive. A right-leaning independent, he’d long derided the federal government as too bloated.

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“And all it has done,” he said, “is get bigger and bigger.”

He’d been disturbed to learn in February that a New York judge had ordered Trump to pay more than $US350 million ($530 million), plus interest, as a punishment for inflating the value of his assets to secure lower interest rates and insurance costs. (Trump’s attorneys have denied those charges and are fighting the judgment.)

Did Trump fudge his numbers? Statz couldn’t be sure.

When the bed-and-breakfast proprietor bought his Victorian mansion in 1982, he’d sure hoped for the highest-possible appraisal – while praying for the lowest-possible tax assessment. Didn’t every savvy businessman, he wondered, angle for those sorts of conflicting goals?

“Do I think Trump is being politically persecuted? I absolutely do,” Statz said. “They wouldn’t be pursuing some of that stuff if it wasn’t him.”

Who is “they” to him?

“A few years ago, I never would have said this,” he said, “but the term deep state has taken on significant meaning to me.”

He is sad to lose faith in symbols of American pride. Maybe corruption infected the younger generations of leadership. Maybe the heroes of yesteryear are concocting phony charges, he said, or whatever forms of sabotage Trump is implying.

The Washington Post

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