2024 is not 2016 [View all]

[EarlG]

Back in 2016 Skinner and I attended the Democratic National Convention on behalf of DU, and, as you'll understand if you've ever been to one of these things, I came home with a truckload of political signs and memorabilia.

One of those signs has remained lodged in my memory ever since. It's this one:



I absolutely understand why Clinton went with this slogan. At the time, Trump was doing his "America is over" bit, and flirting with the dangerous and divisive themes that have since become his trademark. Meanwhile the Clinton campaign determined that pushing a positive, optimistic approach was the best way to counter him. This made total sense.

Remember: In 2016, Democrats had been in the White House for eight years already. Clinton was running for a third straight Democratic term, facing an electorate that was interested in change. In that position, you can't campaign on, "Everything is terrible, so vote us back in to fix it!" Clinton couldn't run the equivalent of Obama's "Hope and Change" campaign from 2008 -- the only option was to push the positives and highlight Trump's negatives.

This is tough to do after your party has already been in power for eight years. Yet even with that disadvantage -- oh, and not to mention the fact that this would require people voting for the FIRST WOMAN PRESIDENT EVER -- she still won the popular vote and just got squeezed out in the electoral college. Trump's negatives were so high that he needed Russian interference and dirty tricks to shove him over the finish line.

So in that context: Back to the sign. In 2016, "Love trumps hate" was a simple three word slogan that got the Clinton campaign's message across and sneaked in Trump's name for bonus points. It made sense.

But here's the thing. After Trump won and time passed, I noticed that there was another way to read the slogan. If you're the kind of person who can take or leave apostrophes, the sign also suggests "Love Trump's Hate."

Go on. Love it. You know you want to.



In other words, while it was overtly an optimistic slogan, the signs also passed off a subliminal order to the Trump-curious. It's okay to love Trump's hate.

In 2016 Democrats played the game of politics as we thought it was supposed to be played, but we were naive. it didn't occur to us that love might not trump hate, and we didn't understand how many people would love Trump's hate.

But there's nothing subliminal about the 2024 election. This time, the entire country knows exactly what we're in for. Trump knows it too -- he knows that if he loses it's all over, which is why he's got nowhere to go but further into crazy town in search of more crazies who might vote for him.

So here's why 2024 is not like 2016.

Imagine if prior to voting in 2016, people could see into the future and find out what Trump's presidency would look like. They'd see all the terrible things Trump did, like his Covid response, and his impeachments, his SCOTUS overturning Roe vs. Wade, and January 6.

Given that the nation solidly rejected Trump in favor of Biden after four years, it seems logical that having that hindsight in 2016 would have meant Trump never getting elected in the first place.

Well, that's exactly the hindsight that everyone has this year, because these things already happened, and we saw them happen. In 2016 Trump ran a, "Give me a chance, what do you have to lose?" campaign, which just squeaked across the finish line. America tried it, didn't like it, and put stop to it in 2020.

So in 2024 there are no more what-ifs. We've already seen what can happen, and Trump is not sugar-coating it -- every day he campaigns, he's telling us all to our faces that this time around it will be even worse if he gets back in.

Here's the usual disclaimer to state that this post is not to say that Trump can't win. All I'm suggesting is that it's easy to forget how the political landscape has changed since 2016, and how much history has been created in such a short space of time. Trump and MAGA are on the wrong side of that history, and I expect the Biden campaign will put a great deal of effort in the coming months into not just showing people what Trump is planning to do, but also tying it in to what he already did.

It seems to me that Trump peaked in 2016 and it's been downhill for him ever since, with his whole life for the last eight years just involving him repeatedly screwing himself over with his own words and actions. I'm hoping that 2024 will be a continuation of this trend.