Object Permanence

 I found myself wondering the other night whether the economic chaos of the past week had started to eat into Donald Trump's approval ratings yet. So I clicked over to the polling aggregator site FiveThirtyEight to check the latest updates from the national polls. My stomach fell out of me, as soon as I did so. The website was no longer there. 

I googled around and learned that this was no temporary disruption to its service. The site had in fact been permanently closed. 

ABC—which, let us recall, is owned by Disney—had a number of ostensible business justifications for this choice. Supposedly, the site had never actually made a lot of money. It was costing more to maintain than it was taking in. 

But something about this just doesn't seem quite credible. If this were really a financial decision, then surely there were ways to downsize the operation without eliminating one of the nation's precious few—if not only—major polling aggregators. Like, couldn't they have kept just one data scientist on staff to update the page? 

The decision to eliminate the site therefore feels like something much more sinister. It feels like yet another insidious case of "anticipatory obedience" on the part of Disney and other mega-corporations in the face of Trump's power-grabs. It is just too convenient otherwise that the moment Trump starts to drop in the polls, the nation's one big polling aggregator goes dark...

Of course, it doesn't actually help Trump in any way to have public opinion polling suddenly become inaccessible. People's actual underlying feelings and beliefs about him will not change as a result. People will still hate him and disapprove of him just as much one way or the other—even if the polling aggregators are not there to reveal this fact in a chart. 

But Trump has always struggled with the concept of object permanence. During the pandemic, he often seemed to believe that if people could not see rising infection rates—that meant they were not there. And perhaps he feels the same way about approval polls.

Disney seems to be banking on this pre-toddler aspect of Trump's brain. If no one is monitoring the decline of his approval ratings, then it is no longer happening, so far as he is concerned. So, maybe he will not go after them. He can't shoot the messenger anymore, if there is no more messenger. 

It would seem that, in order to appease Trump, you must feed his delusion that he is unconditionally popular and beloved. What can you do, though, if this just objectively ceases to be the case? The only answer is to stop reporting on his approval ratings. Let Trump conjure a different, more satisfying version of public opinion in his own mind, and never report on any facts that might get in the way of it. 

As Brecht once ironically put it, in speaking of the anti-democratic methods of the East German regime: when the people turn against the government, the government can always "dissolve the people, and elect a new one." That seems to be Trump's approach.