In 1998, David Mamet, the acclaimed playwright, published a short treatise, "Three Uses of the Knife," on “the nature and purpose of drama.” The book, based on lectures he delivered the previous year at Columbia University, is well regarded in the theatre world and among screenwriters for its philosophical approach to explaining what makes good drama. But Mamet’s book also offers some shrewd observations on politics and serves as a useful tool for understanding the rise, and potential fall, of Donald Trump.
On Wednesday evening, during the Republican Presidential debate on CNN, Trump was exposed as ignorant of basic policy details (he was a bystander during the foreign-policy exchanges), boorish (he refused to apologize to Columba Bush for saying that her background influenced Jeb’s allegedly permissive views on undocumented immigrants), and he seemed—no other way to put it—“low energy” as the debate dragged on into its third hour. (As my colleague Amy Davidson put it, “he seemed to be insulting people just to stay awake.”) Political observers then spent the day after the debate ruminating on whether we may be witnessing the beginning of Trump’s decline, and whether his fate will look similar to that of the five Republican candidates—Herman Cain, Rick Perry, Michele Bachmann, Newt Gingrich, and Rick Santorum—who all experienced similar polling surges in the 2012 G.O.P. Presidential contest, before Republican voters wised up and picked Mitt Romney.
Why did Trump’s support shoot up to an average of almost thirty-five per cent in national polls? The (boring) political-science answer is that Trump’s support was a function of his news coverage. His rise correlates perfectly with the amount of attention he received from the media. When voters, most of whom don’t pay close attention to politics, are asked to choose from a long list of names, a third mention the one that they’ve heard in the news most recently or most frequently.
But that explanation seems to leave a lot out. Why does the media cover Trump so much? Are voters, especially “the likely voters” who are often polled, really that passive and ignorant? Why did they express increasingly positive views of him, as measured by favorability ratings, as the summer of Trump rolled on? How did Trump seize our attention?
He did it by stepping onto the summer stage in a way that none of his rivals did. The other Republican candidates spent 2015 attending to the traditional business of the so-called invisible primary: hiring staff, studying up on policy, building political networks in Iowa and New Hampshire, wooing elected officials whose endorsements might make a difference, and—most of all—courting donors.
Most of the invisible primary is, well, invisible. Getting inside the rooms in New York and Miami and Dallas and Washington where the transactions of the invisible primary take place is nearly impossible. Sometimes good stories drip out, but they make for terrible TV. Meanwhile, much of the public portion of the invisible primary bores the media. Generally, the policy speeches and town-hall events in the early stages of the campaign are vague and uninteresting, as candidates resist taking firm and detailed positions on controversial topics for fear of opening themselves up to attacks later on.
But the political press demands drama. If it is not given a plot, it will create one. As Mamet argues, this is hardly unique to reporters. Humans are hardwired to turn mundane experiences into dramatic ones. “It is in our nature to dramatize,” he writes. “We dramatize the weather, the traffic, and other impersonal phenomena by employing exaggeration, ironic juxtaposition, inversion, projection, all the tools the dramatist uses to create, and the psychoanalyst uses to interpret, emotionally significant phenomena.”
A political campaign that is organized around a drama has an immediate advantage over one that is not. Mamet argues, and he’s right, that politics “sticks closer to traditional drama than does The Stage itself. A problem is stated, the play begins, the hero (candidate) offers herself as the protagonist who will find the solution, and the audience gives its attention.”
Which of the candidates has done that this year? Trump—and, to some extent, Bernie Sanders—has provided a plot and fared well. Trump has identified a clear problem to which many Republican voters respond: America doesn’t “win anymore.” And he has offered a simple solution that only he can provide: Trump “will make America great again.”
The fact that the problem and solution are laughably vague is a virtue. Hillary Clinton’s campaign has been forgettable exactly because she has insisted on promoting a myriad of highly specific solutions to very concrete problems before she has laid out the one big problem she wants to solve. (In fact, it’s not so different from how Barack Obama’s 2008 campaign of “hope and change” crushed Clinton’s campaign of policy white papers.) Mamet argues that a politician “who promises drama and then delivers only social concern” rarely excites the public. That’s why it’s “essential to the healthy political campaign that the issues be largely or perhaps totally symbolic—i.e. non-quantifiable.” He recites a long list of slogans from recent American history, to which Trump’s could easily be added: “Peace with Honor, Communists in the State Department, Supply Side Economics, Recapture the Dream, Bring Back the Pride.” The less detail, he argues, the more engaged the audience will be: “A loose abstraction allows audience members to project their own desires onto an essentially featureless goal.”
Trump realized all of this, and he has had a great first act. But Wednesday night’s debate suggested that he has no plan for a second act. First acts are famously easy to pull off. “It has often been remarked that anyone can write a good first act,” Mamet notes. “When the curtain goes up, we’ve got your attention. So we dramatists don’t have to do anything for a while. Later, either the plot will kick in or the audience will start yawning and eating popcorn.”
The struggle of the second act in a political campaign, as in any drama, is that the problem identified at the beginning—the one that seized our attention—must be translated into the more mundane tasks that propel the protagonist toward his or her goal. Won’t even the most committed Trump supporter start to wonder why this self-proclaimed savior hasn’t prepared himself to answer standard policy questions? Will Trump build a staff and campaign infrastructure in Iowa and New Hampshire to handle all the dull mechanics of finding voters and getting them to the polls? Again, Obama’s historic 2008 campaign is a good point of comparison: the vague promise of “hope and change” was married to an enormously sophisticated national operation that tended to the mechanics of winning the delegates needed to capture his party’s nomination.
Mamet illustrates second-act problems—and their solutions—by pointing to the real-life examples of political actors who actually changed history. The most ambitious and inspirational leaders are also the ones who, after articulating what seemed to be an impossibly lofty goal, soon found themselves mired in the tedious work required to realize it. “In the middle term the high-minded goal has devolved into what seem to be quotidian, mechanical, and ordinary drudgery,” Mamet writes. Trump seems more ill-prepared to bother with the ordinary drudgery of politics than anyone in the race.
Perhaps Trump can keep the first act going a little longer, but it is far more likely—and the debate made it seem obvious—that he hasn’t a clue how to move beyond the bluster and bromides that initially seized our attention. The curtain may come down soon.
