By Chris Satullo
I was driving up Route 13 along the Eastern Shore of Virginia recently when I was confronted with an unpleasant, familiar sight – a huge billboard of our 45th president, his face beaming upon the passing cars with that infuriating smirk. The image was adorned with garish, hagiographic touches and bore the message: Promises Made, Promises Kept.
A relic, it seemed, of the 2020 campaign – but not really a relic, because to most of the voters who live near this highway’s straight, flat path, the campaign is not really over. It’s a holy cause that burns bright, waiting for a chance to be refought and won – just like that other cause whose ignominious death in 1865 they’ve never accepted either.
A few hours later, when I got home, I was reading the latest issue of the New Yorker (stereotype alert!) over dinner. In a Talk of the Town item about Mike Pence’s presidential aspirations, he was quoted referring to “the failed agenda” of Joe Biden.
Now, here was a puzzle. The tenure of likely the most incompetent president in American history – and certainly one of the worst humans and biggest liars to hold the office – is summed up for many by the phrase Promises Kept. And yet, theearly days of a president who has fashioned one of the most consequential starts to a term in my lifetime already get dismissed matter-of-factly as “a failed agenda.”
Over my evening tea, I wondered, “How could this be? Am I nuts, or wasn’t Donald J. Trump the Tom Brady of broken promises? And isn’t Joe Biden risking his presidency by trying to deliver even on his most audacious promises?”
Now, I know America is a land where millions of partisans (of many stripes) look at the world through polarized lenses that distort reality. But this felt like a distortion field of galactic dimensions.
Time to check my own filters. I consulted the internet, searching for a reliable source that could tell me whether my sense of Trump’s and Biden’s records as promise-keepers itself was distorted.
Google seems to know me well, because the first link it threw up came from PolitiFact, a truth-weighing site whose meticulous, nonpartisan work I’ve trusted since I covered its creation in 2007. PolitiFact is not a case of one person tossing out idiosyncratic clickbait. It has a careful, team-based, deliberative process for deciding whether a political claim is true, sort of true, sort of false or worthy of its most famous label: Pants on Fire.
So, what does PolitiFact say about Donald Trump, promise-keeper?
This: Out of 100 top promises the site tracked, Trump kept 23. He broke 53. He got some version of half a loaf on the rest. (A few of PolitiFact’s “well, sort of” judgments seem very kind to Trump.)
Looking at PolitiFact’s list, I have to say about many of Trump’s broken promises: Thank God for that. For instance, Trump never built the Wall nor made Mexico pay for it. He didn’t bring back waterboarding. He never revoked Obamacare (just kept throwing marbles in its path). The U.S. Department of Education somehow still stands.
And some of those promises he did keep? They damaged the nation and the world, e.g. withdrawing from the Paris climate accords and imposing tariffs like a vengeful toddler (if you’re looking for reasons behind rising consumer prices, don’t forget that one).
Bottom line, though, in baseball a .230 average like Trump’s normally gets you a spot on the bench or in the minors – not the Hall of Fame.
Now, what about the duly elected incumbent, Mr. Biden, still only 10 months and change into his term? PolitiFact’s score on his early days: 12 promises kept, 1 compromised, 3 stalled, 42 actively in the works and the rest too soon to rate.
In case that went by too fast, let me underline it: So far, not a single (insert Delaware Joe’s allegedly favorite word beginning with F here) broken promise from POTUS 46.
Yet, somehow, in the mind of millions, Donald Trump = Promise Keeper. And Joe Biden = Lying Failure. How, again, can this be?
Well, we all know one reason. The mass of Trump voters gets their information about both men from an armada of propaganda sources, of which Fox News is the gleaming Battlestar. Fox feeds the all-too-human confirmation bias of its audience with a relentless diet of lies, telling them what they want to hear via flashy, multicolor graphics and the fervent snark and Doomsday rhetoric of its nighttime hosts. This daily bombardment rewires people’s brains, and not in a good way.
But there’s more to it than that. And that more explains why a huge majority of Republicans (many of them well-educated and successful) still yearn for their Orange God to be restored to his throne.
You see, to them, Donald J. Trump has kept, every day, with every tweet, his single biggest promise, the one they’ve clutched closest to their hearts:
He reassures them that they are the real Americans and that the Others, the coastal types (New Yorker readers?) whose smug superiority and contempt they’d resented every day of their lives, are not. Neither are all those dark-skinned people whom the Others were always catering to and oohing and aaahing about.
Not only that: Every single day, Trump has mocked, appalled and annoyed the ever-loving shit out of those self-righteous Others, making them splutter with apoplectic frustration.
It’s delicious, watching Trump just own all those people who for so many years have looked down at the real Americans, frowning upon their F-150s and Jet-Skis, their love of hunting and their piety, mocking their trips to Appleby’s and Dollywood, their love of NASCAR and Travis Tritt, their McMansions and double-wides, their unreflective but neighborly American-ness.
He is their revenge – and they love him for it with full hearts.
Part of me doesn’t totally begrudge them that – because the self-righteous snobbery of the left can be a bit much to take. But what a price these Americans pay for their titanic love of their narcissistic bad boy.
All the broken promises, the lies, the poisoning of our civic waters with nastiness, the penchant for keeping only the promises that feed the wallets of his pals from Mar-a-Lago, no matter how badly that might screw the people who cheer him at his rallies.
What a price indeed – a price some have paid all the way to the ICU, the ventilator and death.
Even so, despite the trail of lies and betrayals, the 700,000 dead, they love him and pine for his return. And if, somehow, somehow, he’s still alive and passably sentient come 2024, they will rally to his side, cheering him on as their once and future king.
God help us. Because we cannot seem to help ourselves.
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Chris Satullo, a civic engagement consultant, is a former editorial page editor/columnist at The Philadelphia Inquirer, and a former vice president/news at WHYY public media in Philadelphia