Why Trump Feels Bad for Biden

MAGA weaponizes entitlement as empathy, and vice versa.

Images: left public domain; right Gage Skidmore, CC

During his unsurprisingly unhinged press conference at his Mar-A-Lago club yesterday, gibbering Republican presidential nominee and crook Donald Trump took time out from boasting about crowd sizes and pushing his usual bigotry to express solidarity with an unexpected sufferer—Democratic president Joe Biden.

Biden, of course, dropped out of the race a couple of weeks ago to endorse his Vice-President, Kamala Harris. Trump has responded in large part by attacking Harris on Biden’s behalf. In his Mar-A-Lago speech, he first reminisced about the 2020 primary, in which Harris challenged Biden on his (racist) record of opposition to school bussing to integrate schools. Trump called Harris’ criticisms “nasty” (his usual epithet for women who challenge him).

Trump then insisted that some nebulous “they” went and “took the presidency away” from Biden. Trump also accused “them” of saying that Biden couldn’t win. “I don’t know that that’s true necessarily,” Trump said—perhaps the first time on record he’s ever admitted that an opponent might have defeated him in an election. He concluded “whether he could have or couldn’t have, he had the right to run”—and then implied that if Biden had not stepped down, he would have been removed using the 25^th Amendment (this is, of course, a lie.)

Obviously, Trump is motivated by self-interest here. He believes that Biden would have been an easier opponent, and he’s resentful that the Democrats switched to Harris. He also seems to believe (incorrectly) that there is some core of Biden dead-enders who are enraged by Harris’ ascension, and who will stay home or vote for Trump out of spite.

There probably are not 1000 Biden partisans in the country who are angry enough at Harris not to vote for her, and if those people exist, seeing Trump trying to appeal to them would probably turn them out just to vote against him.

The fact that Trump’s tactics here are so clunky, though, reveals the mechanism of the MAGA mindset more clearly than when he the orange bile belcher is (marginally) more plausible and skillful. So it’s worth explicating Trump’s approach here at a bit more length. And that approach has two parts—entitlement and empathy.

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What Trump and Biden Are Entitled To

In her groundbreaking book Entitled: How Male Privilege Hurts Women, feminist philosopher Kate Manne explains that misogyny (and by implication other bigotries) are not really built on dehumanization or hatred of women. Instead, misogyny manifests as the belief that certain human beings (men) are entitled to the service, the bodies, the lives, and the deference of other humans (women.) As Manne writes:

It is not hard, upon reflection, to recognize the obvious fact that a woman is fully human. The real challenge may be in recognizing that she is fully a human being, and not just a human giver of love, sex, and moral succor. She is allowed to be her own person, and to be with other people.

Trump’s discussion of Biden exhibits precisely this kind of misogynist weaponization of entitlement. Biden, Trump says, “had the right to run”—he was entitled to run. Harris, a Black woman, stepped out of what Trump sees as her rightful subordinate place to take away Biden’s rights and property, his God-given white male privilege to be the Democratic nominee and run against (or lose) to Donald Trump.

Biden’s entitlement here also conceals, or stands in for, Trump’s entitlement. Trump says that Biden has the right to run, but Trump also means that Trump had the right to run against Biden. Harris and the feminized, racialized Democratic party that she represents, stole Biden’s prerogative. But she (and they) also stole Trump’s prerogative to run against the poor-polling white man of his choosing.

Trump and the GOP have spent years—longer than Biden’s presidency—spreading lies about Biden and his family. They had a whole campaign built on anti-Biden smears. And now, after all that effort, Biden is not the nominee. Trump feels aggrieved; he feels hard done by. It’s not fair that he put in all that effort and told all those lies for nothing. It’s not fair that the polls are turning against him. Biden was robbed, and all the more so because Trump was robbed even more. Trump was, in his own estimation, entitled to better.

So Much Himpathy

Why, though, should other people—like voters—care that Trump (and Biden) have been hard done by? What’s it to Joe Schmo (or Joe the Plumber) if Harris replaces Biden?

Trump is hoping that voters will care because of empathy—or more specifically, to use Kate Manne’s term, because of “himpathy.” Manne defines himpathy in her book Down Girl:The Logic of Misogyny as the “excessive sympathy” shown towards male perpetrators of sexual violence at the expense of their victims. She also suggests, though, that himpathy is generalizable to cover the excessive sympathy shown toward powerful men—especially towards rich white men—in a variety of circumstances and situations.

As a cultural default, Manne argues, we are all urged to put ourselves in the place of white men with great power. We’re supposed to himpathize with Thomas Jefferson and George Washington, rather than with the people they enslaved. We’re supposed to himpathize with Harry Potter, the chosen one, rather than with Hermione, even if Hermione is a better wizard and a better person. And so forth.

Trump, in decrying Biden’s dispossession, is trying to activate this kind of himpathy. Biden—the old white patriarch—is the kind of guy you root for in old movies. Kamala Harris fits into the “scheming woman” slot; she’s the ambitious femme fatale overthrowing the hierarchy and bringing ruin and revolution. Trump urges you to sympathize with Biden, and then to sympathize with Trump himself, as the one who truly understands the injustice perpetrated against old white guys. Himpathy is sympathy for entitlement. It’s the emotion of horror and outrage you feel when the righteous hierarchies are out of whack, and the rich white guys don’t get everything they deserve.

Biden Is All Of Us

Again, weaponizing himpathy and entitlement works extraordinarily poorly in this situation—first because Biden endorsed Harris; second because Democrats don’t look to Trump to tell them how to feel about their own candidates; and last because Trump is even more obviously insincere than usual. The whole thing is ludicrous.

Trump’s signature move doesn’t work in this context. But its failure makes it clearer than usual that it is his signature move. Trump is always claiming that the more powerful have been wronged by interlopers. Think of the citizens whose jobs are being taken by immigrants, he says. Think of how cis women are being pushed out of sports by trans women. Think of how white men can’t get into colleges or can’t get jobs because of those nefarious women and Black people.

And on and on. It’s all the same story; nasty people are coming for the poor, wronged, powerful entitled kingdom of the virtuous. Trump sympathizes with those who are entitled. Feel along with him, and you too will have the lovely, swoon-y, sense of being simultaneously powerful and aggrieved.

Trump has the one move, the one idea, and the one message. It doesn’t work always. But it works often enough to have made him president once. And yes, America is bigoted enough, hateful enough, and sufficiently soaked in sentimental self-pity for the powerful that it could work, and make him president, again.