"Classy" is the one adjective that has never been used to describe Donald Trump

That's his strength and his weakness

Today’s post is brought to you by Donald Trump’s Truth Social comment on Rob Reiner. But first, a quick obligatory plug for my and Abraham Newman’s book, Underground Empire (a fantastic last minute gift for your loved one who wants to understand what in the name of god is happening to the world), and musings on Irish politicians, fairy forts and tattoos that will seem at first to be completely irrelevant. I think that they add up into a backhanded theory of why no-one ever describes Trump as classy,* and why this is both a strength and a weakness for him.

First, the Irish politician and the fairy-fort. From way back in 2017.

Independent TD (HF - a TD is a member of the Irish ‘Dail’ or national parliament) Danny Healy-Rae has insisted a dip in a Kerry road which had been repaired before mysteriously reappearing is due to the presence of fairy forts.“There are numerous fairy forts in that area,” he said yesterday. “I know that they are linked. Anyone that tampered with them back over the years paid a high price and had bad luck.” Asked if he believed in fairies, the TD said the local belief – which he shared – was that “there was something in these places you shouldn’t touch”. These were “sacred places” and fairies were believed to inhabit them, he said. “I have a machine standing in the yard right now. And if someone told me to go out and knock a fairy fort or touch it, I would starve first,” said Mr Healy-Rae, who owns a plant hire company.

At first glance, this appears to be an absolutely mad thing for an astute politician to say in a modern country. And Ireland is a modern country. We save stories about fairies for casual experiments to discover what gullible American journalists will swallow, and occasional excursions into ‘Celtic mysticism.’ Danny Healy-Rae is a canny politician, as anyone who has spent time in Kerry will know. He spends a lot of time getting to know his constituents: he called in to my parents during the last election, even though he knew perfectly well that there were no votes to be had in that household. So why would Danny Healy-Rae want to say something that will surely lead a lot of people to laugh at him?

Second, tattoos. As the great sociologist, Diego Gambetta has observed, criminals in many Western societies have a striking enthusiasm for visible and offensive tattoos. He describes one prisoner who had “spit on my grave” tattooed on his forehead, and “I hate you Mum” on his left cheek. Why would criminals want to have tattoos that would prevent them from ever getting a regular job or being treated ordinarily by ordinary people?

Gambetta’s explanation is that such tattoos are examples of a particular style of strategic communication, which aims to win by dividing. As I will explain, the same is plausibly true both of Irish politicians warning about the dangers of fairy forts and Donald Trump’s entire political style. The problem is that politics isn’t just about communication, but about governing and making decisions that affect people’s lives.

As Gambetta argues, criminal tattoos can be understood in game theoretic terms as a costly signal. As I’ve written before, building on Gambetta’s arguments, trustworthiness is a big problem for criminals. As one wannabe criminal described the problem, in a delightfully vexed plea that I came across on the dark web when I was doing research on such matters:

I have been scammed more than twice now by assholes who say they’re legit when I say I want to purchase stolen credit cards. I want to do tons of business but I DO NOT want to be scammed. I wish there were people who were honest crooks. If anyone could help me out that would be awesome! I just want to buy one at first so I know the seller is legit and honest.

So how do you find honest crooks? Your strategy will vary, depending on which kind of honesty and reliability you are looking for. The scammer who will cheat you on credit cards may be different from the person who will turn you in to the cops.

As a very first step, if you want to find a genuine criminal to crime with, you might reasonably want to start with people who have offensive and visible tattoos. Precisely because they have taken a costly step that makes it unlikely they will reintegrate with ordinary society, they are going to be more reliable along some dimensions of trustworthiness (while possibly being wildly unreliable along others). That is Gambetta’s argument.

A whole class of signals aims to inform the truster that defection would be not so much unprofitable as impossible. This logic stresses the presence of constraints rather than benefits. If there are no ready-made constraints to display, there is still the option of designing some, of binding oneself in some way, of burning one’s bridges or tying one’s hands so that one’s partners know that one could not defect even if one wanted to. In terms of the basic trust game it amounts to persuading one’s partners that the option “cheat” just is not there, or is so infinitely costly thatit is not worth worrying about it.

Here, the logic is that of what game theorists call a ‘signaling game.’ Imagine (this is stylized) that you are trying to find the right people to do a criminal transaction with, and you know that there are two ‘types’ who you might encounter: narks who will turn you in, or ordinary decent criminals (ODCs) who will do business with you.

You might not be able to distinguish narks from ODCs on the basis of what they say - both types will swear blind that they are proper criminals. If you can’t distinguish the one from the other (which leads to what game theorists call a ‘pooling equilibrium’), you may decide that the transaction is just too risky. However, if it is much less expensive for ODCs (who are committed to the criminal life) to signal their type by irreversibly tattooing themselves than it is for narks, then the result may be a ‘separating equilibrium,’ in which you can easily distinguish ODCs from narks by their tats, and profitably do business with them.

Importantly, as per Gambetta’s argument, tattooing is an effective signal because it cuts off future options. After you get your tattoo, you are committed to staying as a denizen of the underworld, because you have cut off the option of reintegrating into the civilian economy.

This logic applies to politics too! Danny Healy-Rae’s publicly proclaimed belief in fairy forts can be understood as a costly signal to Kerry voters. Kerry is a rural and remote part of Ireland, which is often looked down upon by other Irish people. English people used to tell Irish jokes; Irish people used to tell much the same jokes as Kerry jokes.

When Healy-Rae professes the fairy faith in public, he knows that he is likely to be treated with scorn (as he was) by sophisticated Dublin commentators. But that is what he wants! He is making a costly signal, losing the respect of some so as to win the loyalty of others. He actively welcomes the contempt of the commentariat because this will secure his reputation in the eyes of rural voters; it is what makes his signal costly and effective. Healy-Rae’s constituents can trust that he will not go native in Dublin and come to look down on them, as other representatives might.

From this somewhat functionalist perspective, the fairy faith and tattoos are much the same thing. In both cases, the particulars of the signal are irrelevant. Nobody cares whether Danny Healy-Rae really believes in fairies, any more than they were interested in whether Gambetta’s tattooed prisoner had a profound and lasting hatred for his mum. Commitment, not content, is what matters.

So this gets us, in a very roundabout way (I’m Irish, and a commitment to lengthy and genial narrative indirection is my costly signaling device) to Donald Trump and Rob Reiner. I don’t think that I need to belabor the many ways in which Trump’s style of communication is the Danny Healy-Rae Fairy Fort Strategy played on a much grander scale. So much of Trump - his contempt for niceties; his love of burgers and delight in gaudy decorations; even his verbal incontinence - is a commitment to all the things that college educated elites and wannabes absolutely hate. And this contempt, as others have commented, generates a kind of self-perpetuating feedback loop that game theorists might characterize as type separation. The more that decadent elites like myself sneer, say, at Trump’s penchant for putting marble everywhere, the more straightforward it is for Trump to signal that he is on the side of all the people who don’t like decadent elites. Like a bizarro-world FDR, he welcomes our hatred.

Equally, there are serious drawbacks to Trump’s approach. Trump is visibly not a strategic thinker in the game theoretic sense of the word. He is incapable of modulating his signaling as circumstances suggest.

This likely marks an important difference between him and the likes of Danny Healy-Rae. Another of Healy-Rae’s communicative antics was to propose the introduction of a “drinking license.”

The Kerry TD said the closure of pubs in rural areas had “left the social fabric in smithereens” and the community trapped and isolated. He told Tánaiste [HF - deputy prime minister] Simon Coveney in the Dáil: “I’m asking you to provide a permit for the people who are only travelling on local rural class three roads so they can have their two pints and drive home on those roads. “If they stray beyond those roads then nail them, but give them a chance to live and give them a chance to try it. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” But dismissing his call, the Tánaiste said Mr Healy-Rae seemed to be making the case that the way to keep pubs open is to allow people to drink and drive.

However, Healy-Rae almost certainly did not mean this as a serious policy proposal. It was total guff, purpose-designed to get a rise out of the likes of Simon Coveney. In the unlikely event that Healy-Rae ever became a member of the Irish government, he would not, actually, press for people in rural areas to be allowed to drink and drive home, because this would likely alienate many of his voters (drunk driving licenses would very quickly come to have visible downsides).

As president, Donald Trump would and has pressed for policies that are even more strategically short-sighted than drunk driving licenses. Unlike the canny Healy-Rae, there is no discernible difference between what Trump signals and who he is. There is a famous Mario Cuomo dictum that a politician should campaign in poetry and govern in prose. Donald Trump both campaigns and governs in the language of shitposts. His great tragedy is that this is all that he is capable of doing.

Trump is mostly uninterested in the content of policy; the signal and the dismay of his adversaries are what he cares about. That is great for sticking it to the man; not so great for moments where policy actually matters. And for many, and likely most people, policy does count when politicians are in government.

This finally gets us to Trump’s attack on the late Rob Reiner. It was mean-spirited, shitty, and almost certainly politically counterproductive. It didn’t obviously win Trump friends, and likely stirred up opposition, making it that little bit cheaper for unhappy members of his coalition to come out against him.

But such attacks are very much who Donald Trump is. He is the kind of person who will, almost inevitably, say things like that, even when it cuts against self-interest. He is incapable of being classy in public - of showing generosity to those who oppose him or who he feels have injured him. That can be a great advantage in winning over voters who feel screwed over by the prevailing compromises of politics, and don’t want someone who will make nice with the powers that be. Trump is absolutely committed to the bit. He is the type of politician who won’t deviate, because he simply can’t deviate.

Hence, Trump is reliably trustworthy to his constituents, in a very particular sense that is impossible for ordinarily strategic politicians to emulate. He will never suck up to the traditional power elite. As long as that is what you mostly care about, Trump has the advantage.

Equally, when he actually comes to power, this strength is liable to turn into weakness. You can be absolutely sure that Donald Trump will never become a narc for the traditional power elite - both native disposition and the larger system of social resentments that shape his understanding of America rule that out.

Still, you wouldn’t want ever to trust him to deal with you fairly if his interests pointed in the other direction, any more than you would any other heavily tattooed criminal. When his decisions shape your day-to-day life, that becomes a problem for you, and perhaps, increasingly for him, as it becomes more salient to voters.

* To a Substacker’s first approximation. I’m not going to spend hours in Google searches trawling for disconfirming evidence, only to be trumped by some obsessive who finds the one shining example buried deep in an archived Truth Social posting.