There’s a scene common to a lot of blockbuster-type movies that finds one character in a make-or-break moment asking another character, “Do you trust me?” The most famous of these scenes is probably from the film Aladdin, during which the title character says the line twice to Princess Jasmine, once in his regular street clothes and then again disguised as a prince. Hearing it the second time is how Jasmine realizes the suitor who has mysteriously appeared on her balcony inviting her on a magic carpet ride is the same street thief who only a few days earlier asked for both her hand and her trust before leaping with her from the top of a tower to a surprisingly soft landing below to escape some sword-wielding palace guards.
This line appears so often in films that my daughter and I have taken to calling it out every time a character says it. (I wish I had started cataloguing all these moments, but TRUST ME, it’s said a lot.) Sometimes the line is earned after characters who don’t initially trust one another spend the film’s running time building trust. Most often, though, it involves an ostensibly untrustworthy character joining another character on a risky or reckless adventure that culminates after a short period of time in a do-or-die moment, leading the potentially untrustworthy character to say “Do you trust me?” to which the other character responds, “Look, I barely know you, you’ve made some pretty questionable decisions so far, you seem kind of shady, you won’t tell me what your plans are, and the fact you have to ask me if I trust you makes you seem pretty untrustworthy, so until I know a little more about you and what you’re up to, I’m afraid the answer is ‘No.’” “Yes. I trust you.”
If only it was that easy! Just think what the implications would be for politics. Inflation’s up, Putin’s in Ukraine, COVID cases rising, Congress can’t get anything passed, only for this guy to ride in and utter the magic words: “Do you trust me?”
Boom! Problems (theoretically) solved! Or a candidate’s in a tight race for the U.S. Senate with a lot of skeptical undecided voters out there, so he cuts a thirty-second TV ad telling citizens he’s on their side and he’s got a lot of great ideas for the state but he’s going to need their help on Election Day to make his plan work, so…
I made that commercial up but that is a picture of the front-runner in Tuesday’s Pennsylvania Democratic senate primary. If you believe the polls (heck, even if you believe the polls are off by quite a bit) then it’s pretty clear enough Democratic voters in Pennsylvania trust Lieutenant Governor John Fetterman to make him the runaway favorite in that election.
Fetterman does not resemble your typical politician. Born to poor teenage parents, Fetterman was raised in middle class comfort after his father made partner at a successful insurance company. By his own account, Fetterman “sleepwalked” through his young adulthood. After a friend died in a car accident, though, he devoted himself to helping others, first volunteering for Big Brothers Big Sisters of America and later for an AmeriCorps program in Pittsburgh for students pursuing their GEDs. During this time, Fetterman grew to understand how much a person’s fortune in life depended on the circumstances of his or her birth. Fetterman went on to receive a Master’s in Public Policy from Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government before volunteering again for AmeriCorps in Braddock, Pennsylvania, a majority-Black suburb of Pittsburgh hammered by the collapse of the steel industry. He became that town’s mayor in 2006 and then Pennsylvania’s Lt. Governor in 2019.
Fetterman’s policy positions are best described as populist/progressive. He’s pro-union, wants to boost the minimum wage, and supports a Bernie Sanders-style “Medicare for all” health care system. He also backs progressive climate change legislation, criminal justice reform, marijuana legalization, and LGBTQ rights, and isn’t afraid to back the Black Lives Matter movement or to defend immigrants (his wife moved to the United States from Brazil.) Positions that might raise a red flag for progressives—he’s ready to crack down on the problem of violent crime and does not want to prohibit fracking—are balanced with progressive remedies.
More than anything else, though, Fetterman does not look like the sort of person who ends up serving in the Senate. He’s 6’9” and big enough to have lost 150 pounds. He lives with his family in a refurbished auto mechanic’s shop. His gait, the lines on his face, and his tone of voice all ring working class, as do his many tattoos and wardrobe. See him on the campaign trail or meeting with Joe Biden and you’ll probably find him wearing a hoodie and gym shorts.
Fetterman faces two opponents in the primary, State Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta of Philadelphia and Rep. Conor Lamb of suburban Pittsburgh. Lamb, a former Marine Corps Judge Advocate, won several congressional campaigns in a Pittsburgh area swing district over the past four years. His home style skews moderate, which is the sort of profile many Democratic consultants believe is necessary to adopt in order to win toss-up races in purple states like Pennsylvania. Lamb looks like what most people expect a politician to look like, too, but by all accounts, he’s getting trounced by Fetterman, whose command of this race has been effortless.
What accounts for Fetterman’s success? A big part of it is that he’s found that political sweet spot at the intersection of progressivism and populism that a lot of people on the left have been trying to get to for decades. That’s the liberal dream: Find the language that can convince populists, working-class Americans, and moderates that progressive policies really are the best ways to address their concerns. Many Democrats ranging from Elizabeth Warren to Amy Klobuchar try to do that but can’t quite get there. Fetterman comes by all that naturally; it doesn’t seem like he needs to consult with pollsters to figure out what to say or how to say it. He’s just on the same wavelength with a lot of Pennsylvania voters.
But let’s be honest here: Fetterman’s success is also directly connected to his appearance. You don’t see a politician like John Fetterman and forget him, and once you do see him, you can’t help but assume this guy is a living/breathing real-deal working-class American. When he appears at a campaign event wearing a heavy-duty work jacket, its Carhartt logo isn’t just announcing where Fetterman bought it. It’s asking those in attendance “Do you trust me?” And for a lot of people who might otherwise be skeptical of politicians, the answer is yes.
Is trust in politics really that easy to come by? I don’t think it should be, which is one of the reasons I’ve yet to warm up to Fetterman. Part of me thinks it’s dumb I feel that way because I can ignore Fetterman’s “costuming” and look at his record and platform and see he’s on the right side of a lot of issues. I can absolutely get behind that. And I really try not to judge people based on their appearance or the kind of clothes they wear, so whatever Fetterman is wearing is immaterial to me.
But that’s where I get hung up on Fetterman. Because I don’t like judging books by their covers or politicians by their attire, politicians who go out of their way to get people to form an opinion about them based on some aspect of their outward appearance (or, alternately, some sort of habit or hobby that conveniently connects them to the people or makes them seem more down-to-earth) have always struck me as kind of sketchy. It doesn’t signal authenticity or belongingness to me, but instead comes across as an attempt at deception. Why don’t these sort of politicians want us looking deeper than their wardrobe? What are they hiding? What bandwagon are they jumping on? What argument are they trying to short-circuit? Yes, it could be said Conor Lamb is “in costume” as well (“default standard young professional”) but his costume is a political norm that deflects attention from itself. Fetterman, on the other hand, really stands out. I can’t recall a national politician ever dressing down the way he does.
But enough about Fetterman and his sartorial choices. I mean to write today about political trust, which in the United States is in high demand but pretty hard to come by, especially these days. Ever since that time we chucked a bunch of tea into Boston Harbor (and even before that, I’d say) Americans really haven’t trusted their government a whole lot. It’s kind of in our DNA. But the level of trust Americans have in their government today is close to an all-time low (and if not technically “all-time,” then at least since pollsters started asking that question.)
Sorry if that graph is kind of hard to see. It’s from the Pew Research Center and measures trust in government over time. The most recent data point we have is from one year ago, when only about 1/4 of all Americans believed they could trust the government in Washington to do what is right either “just about always” (2%) or “most of the time” (22%). That’s about average for the past fifteen years.
I might quibble with the way Pew measures “trust” (why ask respondents if they trust Washington to “do the right thing” rather than if they trust Washington to “act in America’s best interests” or “respond to the concerns of everyday Americans” or “manage the affairs of the government” or “deal with the most important issues facing the country” or “do what they said they were going to do” or “act morally” or “wield power responsibly”?) Ultimately, I’m not sure the question is actually measuring the concept they set out to measure, especially since the results of their survey seem to hew pretty closely to the ups and downs of the American economy as set against a backdrop of deindustrialization/automation and widening inequality. It seems what Pew is really measuring is “trust [in the government’s ability to facilitate prosperity.]” That’s an important component of political trust, but there’s a lot more to it than that.
Additionally, what Pew is measuring is trust in the system (“Washington”) as a whole. People’s views of the system shape their views of individual politicians, but individual politicians tend to do better on measurements of trust than the system as a whole. There are all kinds of reasons for this. Individual politicians are partisans and can almost always at least bank on the trust of partisans who may otherwise think the system can’t be trusted because of the perceived negative influence the opposite party has on the system. Additionally, individual politicians represent local areas and can champion/speak the language of local concerns in ways other politicians who populate “the system” don’t, which allows local politicians to build trust with their constituents. (It’s long been observed voters tend to have negative views of Congress but positive views of their personal members of Congress, which helps explain why 90%+ of the legislators who compose our “dysfunctional” Congress are re-elected in every election.) In fact, the more a political figure can associate themselves with a “locality”—a state, a city, a school—the more likely they are to be trusted. That’s true of the media, too: When it’s included in surveys, the most trusted news source in the United States is local news. The more direct the connection and the more time that someone can devote to directly addressing the concerns of others, the better chance they will have at building trust among those people.
According to congressional scholar Richard F. Fenno Jr., trust is a constituent’s belief that a politician “is what he says he is and will do what he says he will do.” Fenno found that politicians can earn trust by proving they are qualified for office (both in terms of competence and honesty), identifying with their constituents, and empathizing with constituents. Again, for many people, that trust will be conditioned by their partisan preferences, but for independents in a general election or partisans sifting through a primary field, it can be difficult to figure out if a candidate is trustworthy. If a voter has the time, they can check a candidate’s resume or review their record. That’s probably the best method for determining trustworthiness.
But a lot of voters want something more. They long for proof that a candidate is authentic, not fake, the real deal, that they are who they appear to be and that their beliefs and positions aren’t an act but derived from a core immutable self that can’t change unless they somehow become a completely different person, which is nearly impossible since we are all the product of life experiences that have permanently shaped who we are. Or they want to see themselves in the candidate, be able to judge the candidate’s habits and beliefs as authentic, see that politician as genuinely “one of us” so that they know he or she isn’t some outsider trying to fool us in the pursuit of personal power but someone who instinctively knows what matters to us.
This seems to be a big part of John Fetterman’s appeal. He’s not acting, or at least he doesn’t appear to be. He is who he is, and who he is is someone a lot of Pennsylvania voters can identify with and trust.
But again, should it be that easy? Should we really assume it’s that easy: Slap on a Carhartt jacket and gain instant validation with working-class Pennsylvania voters? Could anyone do that? Could you or I do that? Does the performance—whether real or staged—really matter more than what John Fetterman stands for? And doesn’t assuming that’s all it takes to win over working-class voters actually demean working-class voters? Surely they see more in Fetterman than these presumably superficial traits.
In politics, trying to locate trust in the signifiers of authenticity is like trying to find someone in a hall of mirrors: Every image looks very real but nearly none of it is, so that even when you do see the source of all the reflections around you, you immediately doubt its reality. The most deceptive images—the ones that really fool us—are the most plausibly realistic ones. That can really mess with us. Reach out and touch it and not only does the mirror shatter, but so does our trust in the political world and quite possibly our trust in our own judgment.
It’s better to remember politics is, by nature, performative. Every politician steps onto the public stage and plays the part as they believe the role demands. (There is no better example of this right now that Ukraine’s actor-turned-president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who is playing the role of wartime leader very well.) If a politician is lucky, the times make them a natural for the role and it isn’t a stretch for them to connect their personal lives to their public ambitions. If that happens, they get the added benefit of being judged “authentic” and gain whatever amount of trust that comes with that. Maybe that’s what’s happened with Fetterman: He just happens to be the politician for these times.
But in trying to figure out whether or not we should trust John Fetterman, we shouldn’t get all twisted up trying to determine what is authentic or inauthentic or authentically authentic or inauthentically authentic (and on and on) about him. He has a resume and a record we can work off of. That’s a good place to start, and those things have a sort of permanence that the elements of public performance lack.
So do you trust him?
Well let me ask you this: Are there sword-wielding goons chasing after you? If not, you’ve probably got some time to sort it all out.
Signals and Noise
Here’s a question worth asking every Republican (particularly Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri): Which of the following two images represents a greater threat to the future of this country:
or
That’s how messed up the GOP is right now: They think Mickey Mouse is a bigger public enemy and more deserving of public scrutiny than an actual insurrection. To quote Joe Biden, “They’re going to storm Cinderella’s castle before this is over.” (Whoa, Joe made a funny!)
Here’s a member of Republican House leadership—someone who is supposedly not a lunatic like Marjorie Taylor Greene—blending QAnon conspiracy theories about child sex trafficking rings with the GOP’s xenophobic outrage over the southern border to attack Joe Biden over the current baby formula shortage.
I’m so tired of articles like this one by Salena Zito for the Washington Examiner. Yes, Doug Mastriano is the MAGAest of Republican candidates on the ballot for Pennsylvania governor. But Republican voters will still support deranged Republican candidates over Democratic candidates every day of the week. (Lesser of two evils, right?) In
post-Trump America, let’s quit assuming Republican voters are going to come to their senses and come to our rescue.“Just once, I’d love to see a Republican candidate stand up in a primary and say, ‘I am a moderate, establishment squish. I stand for absolutely nothing.’ It would be refreshingly honest at least. But nobody says that. And by the way, they all pledge their love for Donald Trump. ‘I love Donald Trump,’ ‘No, no. I love Donald Trump more.’ ‘No, no, no. I have Donald Trump tattooed on my rear end.’”—Teddy “Cancun” Cruz
And then (this really happened) a guy in the audience asked to see Cruz’s ass tattoo, to which Cruz replied, “I like you, but not that much.” Um, sorry Tedward, but that is well within your going rate.
Former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper just published a book explaining how he spent his time in office keeping Don Trump from doing unlawful and dangerous things. As Tom Nichols explains at The Atlantic, rather than save it for a book deal, it would have been nice to know all this was going on at the time, Mark! (Same for Tillerson, Mattis, and Bolton.) And then former John McCain campaign advisor Steve Schmidt finally had it up to here after Meghan McCain called him a pedo and spilled the beans on McCain, most notably that he used his office to benefit special interest groups and was having an affair with one of their lobbyists. Schmidt was so disillusioned with McCain that by the end of the campaign he couldn’t bring himself to vote for him. Yet he still tried to convince millions of other people to vote for the guy! Even though he was working for free! At least Schmidt didn’t save all that for a book deal…
Whoa: The January 6 panel has subpoenaed House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and four other Republican congressmen.
From the Washington Post, by Catherine Rampell: “These GOP Politicians Aren’t Pro-Life. They’re Pro-Forced Birth” (“This distinction is about more than semantics. These officials have drawn a clear line, as evidenced by policies they’ve adopted in conjunction with their opposition to Roe. GOP-led states are making choices, today, that increase the chances of unplanned pregnancies and, therefore, demand for abortions; their choices also limit access to health care and other critical programs for new moms, endangering the lives and welfare of mothers and their children.”)
Is Chuck Schumer blowing it? Tim Miller at The Bulwark thinks so.
One issue Miller brings up is Schumer’s show vote on abortion this week, which not only failed to get 50 votes in the Senate but failed to even win over every Democrat. The bill would have legalized abortion at any point during a pregnancy, a position only about 25% of Americans support. But Schumer probably could have won over a couple Republicans by simply voting to codify Roe. Instead, he gave Republicans an opportunity to look reasonable on the issue. Maybe there’s some long-term strategy involved here, but Democrats need to think more pragmatically on this issue if Roe is overturned because if they don’t find an advantageous middle ground on abortion, whatever concession Republicans make (i.e., an exception for rape and incest) will look reasonable by comparison and Democrats will have squandered the opportunity to restore abortion rights in the United States for at least a generation.
The other issue Miller brings up is Biden’s Build Back Better agenda. Why hasn’t Schumer written a bill Joe Manchin can get behind? I think it’s because Manchin wants to write the bill himself. But maybe he’s not all that interested in writing it. So maybe Schumer should just write a bill Manchin should theoretically be able to get behind, bring it to the floor, and get Manchin to vote yes/no on it? Will he rebel because he feels he’s getting steamrolled? But isn’t he already basically in rebellion? Manchin’s a hard nut to crack; he’s a bridge-builder who isn’t very good at building bridges. Just get to yes! Washington will be so much better off whenever he’s gone.
Charles Gaba and Andrew Stokes have been crunching numbers and found that COVID deaths in the “reddest tenth” of counties in the United States (measured by support for Don Trump in the 2020 election) were 3X higher than in the “bluest tenth” of counties. But when you look at “excess” deaths—the number of deaths beyond what is normally expected in any given year—the number of deaths in the reddest tenth were 21X(!) higher than in the bluest tenth of counties.
From Roll Call, by Walter Shapiro: “The Worst Pandemic in a Century Has Outlasted Our Attention Span”
Because Congress can’t get its act together, COVID vaccines may need to be rationed.
The Minnesota Republican Party has selected a doctor who has questioned the safety of COVID vaccines as its nominee for governor in the 2022 elections.
We finally have evidence of that wide-scale voter fraud Republicans keep saying is rampant in Philadelphia: “GOP ward leaders voted to oust one of their own Saturday, hours after [a Philadelphia Inquirer] story highlighted his role in diverting dozens of mail ballots for Republican voters in South Philadelphia to a P.O. box under his control, raising concerns of a potential ‘ballot harvesting’ scheme.”
The New York Times has a reality check on Putin’s “special operation” in Ukraine: While Putin’s armies failed to capture Kyiv and have often proven ineffective on the battlefield, they are close to capturing a big portion of eastern and southern Ukraine. After all the suffering Ukraine has experienced, it is likely they will want those territories back. Putin is certain to cling to them. That suggests the war will turn into a drawn-out conflict, one that may enable Putin to mass his forces for a bigger assault or one that may find him bogged down by an insurrection in those areas. (Zack Beauchamp at Vox largely agrees with this assessment but concludes Putin is still flailing.)
It’s a week late, but worth reading. From historian Heather Cox Richardson, on the origins of Mothers’ Day: “I told this story here two years ago, but I want to repeat it tonight, as the reality of women’s lives is being erased in favor of an image of women as mothers….If you google the history of Mother’s Day, the internet will tell you that Mother’s Day began in 1908 when Anna Jarvis decided to honor her mother. But ‘Mothers’ Day’—with the apostrophe not in the singular spot, but in the plural—actually started in the 1870s, when the sheer enormity of the death caused by the Civil War and the Franco-Prussian War convinced American women that women must take control of politics from the men who had permitted such carnage. Mothers’ Day was not designed to encourage people to be nice to their mothers. It was part of women’s effort to gain power to change modern society.”