Remember “herd immunity” – a concept most of us discovered during the Covid pandemic? It’s what happens when a pathogen becomes so ubiquitous that the population has acquired resistance. After the momentous defeat of Donald Trump in last week’s US midterm elections, there is the intriguing and cheering possibility that citizens are developing herd immunity to smear campaigns.
Conor McGregor, of all people, can help us understand what is going on. If this seems absurd, think of Trump’s manic Truth Social post on Saturday: “I am pleased to announce that the Great Dana White, a violent Fighter and Warrior, has been offered the job of Press Secretary of the United States. I have requested that he bring with him assistants, even though some are not from our Country, of Islam Makhachev, Khabib Nurmagomedov, Justin Gaethje, Daniel Cormier, Amanda Nunes, and Kayla Harris [sic].”
Dana White is the president and chief executive of the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) – and the man who made McGregor a multimillionaire. His putative “assistants” are UFC fighters.
This offer (later explained away by Trump as a joke) can be seen merely as evidence of Trump’s ongoing loss of marbles. But it also tells us something quite profound about the nature of last week’s political earthquake.
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To grasp it, we need to think about what made McGregor a cultural phenomenon in the US. It was not just his ability to batter other blokes for entertainment – lots of men can do that – but also his mastery of trash talk, the art of no-holds-barred insult.
If you can stomach it, watch the film of the same Dana White presiding over a pre-fight press conference in 2018 with McGregor and Nurmagomedov. McGregor alleges that Nurmagomedov “s**t his jocks” on the bus, calls him a rat, a weasel, a “little fan boy bitch” and a “mad backwards c**t”, promises to “stomp on his head as he’s unconscious” and tells him “you’re going to be wrestling my knuckle out of your orbital bone”.
Trash talk has been around forever, though it has suffered a sad decline from Muhammad Ali’s witty rhymed taunts to McGregor’s braying crudity. But it jumped species with Trump. UFC is his political hinterland – his idea of the most dignified way to celebrate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence was to stage a UFC event on the South Lawn of the White House.
Trump learned from and politicised UFC’s style of hyped-up, free-form vituperation. He sold his shows with name-calling: racist and misogynist invective on the large scale, playground taunting on the smaller scale of individual opponents.
Why is this relevant to last week’s elections? Because the Republican campaign was the largest exercise in trash talk in human history. Essentially, Elon Musk and other billionaire allies of Trump put over a billion dollars into a rolling and prolonged version of a McGregor prefight press conference. They placed a huge bet on the vilest forms of vitriol.
[ Trump says he was ‘too tough’ on immigrants as he floats amnesty dealOpens in new window ]
They smeared Amy Acton in Ohio as a lifelong liar about her survival of childhood sexual abuse, Troy Jackson in Maine as a “freak” who has “two kids with his cousin”, and the Michigan senatorial candidate Abdul El-Sayed as a jihadist terrorist. Trump’s consigliere (and now incoming chief of staff) Stephen Miller called James Talarico in Texas the Democrats’ “first transgender Senate candidate” who is “clearly transitioning into a female”. Trump himself called Annie Andrews, the paediatrician running for the Senate in South Carolina, “Tranny Annie” and “a mutiliser.”
The psychosexual politics of all of this – the projection on to others of abusive and deviant sexuality and the weird obsession with transsexuality – is for another day, though a lot of PhD theses on The Queering of Donald Trump are surely coming. What concerns us at the moment is that this was hyperscale trash talk – and that it didn’t work.
Acton, Jackson, El-Sayed, Talarico and Andrews all won their races. This is what makes the moment so significant: the best-funded smear campaign in history was a complete failure. It went down quicker and more humiliatingly than McGregor in his recent fights.
It failed, I think, for two related reasons. One is the very success of Trump and Musk in debasing public discourse. If you saturate politics and public life with lies, vulgarity and foul badmouthing, these things become normalised. They function as a constant background noise. When politics is already in the gutter, it’s hard to go lower.
The other cause of failure lies in the nature of trash talk itself. It is ritualised. Even McGregor’s worst obscenities are understood as part of the game. He’s throwing shapes. Sane people will find those shapes repellent, fans will find them mightily entertaining. But no one believes they have any truth content. The more extreme the insults become, the further they drift from the audience’s ideas of reality.
[ Donald Trump takes credit for a stock market rally that welcomed his defeatOpens in new window ]
This is what happened last week. The people who were disgusted by Musk and Trump’s UFC politics were motivated to go out and vote against them. But even the people who enjoy this sort of verbal sadism didn’t think it was real. When you borrow this style of ritualised malignity from extreme sport, it brings with it the idea that it is all performance. Which is fine when voters are not being reminded of reality every time they go to the supermarket and the gas station.
All of which makes it fascinating that Trump’s response to his defeat is to double down on the very UFC culture that has failed him so catastrophically. His fever dream is that everything will be okay if he just keeps terrorising immigrants and has White conduct official press conferences like McGregor’s pre-fight tirades.
He probably should go all the way and make McGregor himself his spokesman. In the Arkham Asylum of Trump’s moribund administration, why not have Crumlin’s second most famous superstar in his Joker outfit calling the Democrats who control Congress “mad backwards c**ts” and threatening to stomp on their unconscious heads. The worst presidency in US history would go out, not with a whimper but in a torrent of trash talk.
