There’s a third possibility. Due to willful civic ignorance or ruthless partisan media gatekeeping or both, Americans don’t follow campaigns as closely as they did years ago and therefore aren’t as likely to encounter embarrassing episodes like Dukakis’ tank ride. That may seem counterintuitive, since online media creates many more pathways for information to reach the average voter, but you know how modern news consumption works in practice. Voters will find the pathways that reliably deliver information they want to hear and close off ones that don’t, potentially sealing themselves off from “optics” that are unflattering to the side they favor.
The Dukakis tank ride occurred when America still had a monoculture. Voters couldn’t avoid it. Now, in 2025, most people’s political reality is largely—although not completely—bespoke.
On Friday night I found myself wondering just how bespoke the average swing voter’s reality might be as I watched a video of a half-naked woman dancing in a giant champagne glass showing off her legs.
It was a political video, I swear.
The gilded age.
The clip was shot at Mar-a-Lago. The champagne glass and the woman inside it were part of the decor for an opulent Halloween party hosted by the president, the theme of which was The Great Gatsby. It was just what you’d imagine—black tie, women dressed as flappers, burlesque dancers in feathered costumes entertaining guests. Donald Trump and his staff wanted an atmosphere of decadent Roaring Twenties excess and, to give credit where it’s due, they appear to have nailed it.
As fate would have it, the festivities began a few hours before funding for SNAP benefits, a.k.a. food stamps, ran out for around 40 million people due to the government shutdown. The next day, photos and videos from Trump’s gala circulated online alongside news stories about desperate federal workers running out of ways to pay bills without any income.
This is what we call bad optics, and thousands of liberals on social media (including some whose names you know) took advantage. The president had stumbled into a situation that seemed to reveal something insightful about his persona, namely, that his populism is an inch deep. On the brink of a serious crisis for the lower class, Trump was so untroubled by the thought of “the forgotten man” suddenly having to scrounge for food that he went ahead with a big shindig with his high-society cronies.
His supporters will reply that it’s not his fault that Democrats turned off the tap on SNAP or that the money happened to run out on Halloween, and that’s true. But this isn’t the first time the president has prioritized creature comforts for himself and his aides in the middle of an affordability crisis for voters—which, in case you need reminding, he was elected to solve.
The new White House addition is a glaring example. Early last month, a poll found that a near-majority of Americans said groceries are harder to afford now than they were a year ago. Even among Republicans, more said that food had become less affordable under Trump than more affordable. The president responded to those concerns by announcing … he would build a shiny new ballroom on the White House grounds, excitedly displaying drawings of the palatial space to reporters.
That’s not all. He’s occasionally interrupted the usual parade of threats and grievances on Truth Social with loving footage of the White House’s new 24-karat gold fixtures. And on Friday, the same day as his Gatsby party, he posted two dozen photos on social media of his latest passion project, renovating the bathroom in the White House’s Lincoln bedroom. Gone was the dated art deco styling that had been there for decades, he wanted “the forgotten man” to know; the new bathroom featured gold faucets and statuary marble, “very appropriate for the time of Abraham Lincoln.”
Which isn’t true, needless to say, but when your understanding of history is more fantasy than reality, it makes sense. Nationalists view classical and neoclassical architecture as a symbol of Western greatness and the decline of the style in America as evidence that our country is no longer “great.” Go figure that when Trump imagines a figure of Lincoln’s historic stature using the restroom, he can only picture him squatting on a marble toilet.
His White House makeover was predictable if you’ve ever seen photos of the president’s residence at Trump Tower, which is Saddam-lite in its tacky nouveau-riche fondness for gilt and columns. And it would be unexceptionable in an economic environment like the one during his first term before the pandemic. But it’s strange to see him flaunt his taste for the finer things as Americans struggle, particularly at a moment when government dysfunction is the source of that struggle for some.
His deputies may lack his taste for all things gold-foil, but they’re not above accepting luxurious perks either while anxiety about the economy rises. On Friday FBI Director Kash Patel fired a longtime official at the bureau after news leaked that Patel had taken a jet operated by the department to attend an event with his musician girlfriend. A few weeks earlier, the Department of Homeland Security signed a contract to supply Secretary Kristi Noem with not one but two private jets for her travels.
All of which will feel like “dog bites man” news to anyone who follows politics with a modicum of curiosity. Trump’s flagrant, grotesque enrichment of himself and his family is the biggest scandal of a presidency that’s overflowing with Watergate-tier competition for that title; it seems ridiculous in that context to wonder whether throwing a ritzy Halloween bash might do better to inflame the public conscience.
But not everyone does follow politics, which explains the power of “optics.” It’s one thing to occasionally hear that the president cares more about lining his own pockets than about lining yours. It’s another to see photos and videos of him having a grand old time at a party you’d never be allowed to attend as the already high cost of living suddenly turns completely unaffordable for some 42 million SNAP recipients.
Will Trump’s gilded-age “optics” matter politically?
Fit for a king.
They won’t matter to MAGA. And that’s not just because cult leaders are infallible to their disciples.
They won’t matter because, despite the best efforts of people like Steve Bannon and Marjorie Taylor Greene, right-wing populism prioritizes dominating the left culturally, not redistributing wealth to the forgotten man. The average postliberal, I suspect, cares more about stopping Cracker Barrel from removing the old white farmer from its logo than about backstopping “welfare queens” in Washington, D.C.—or Youngstown, Ohio. “Any American who has been receiving $4200 dollars per year of free groceries and does NOT have at least 1 month of groceries stocked should never again receive SNAP, because wow, stop smoking crack,” Rep. Clay Higgins of Louisiana wrote last Thursday. I bet he’s closer to the average Trump voter’s thinking on matters like SNAP than Bannon is.
So, no, cultural populists don’t care about the “optics” of Trump’s party. Why would they? He’s owning the libs regularly by sending troops into left-wing cities, prosecuting right-wing hate objects like James Comey, and blowing up “drug trafficking” fishermen in the Caribbean. Who cares if he doesn’t genuflect before caring about the poor?
MAGA populists long ago made peace with the likelihood that the president doesn’t share as many of their beliefs as he claims. Religion is the supreme example: Trump barely even pretends to be a Christian, but he appointed three Supreme Court justices who helped overturn Roe v. Wade, has attacked Democrats for their militancy on transgender issues, and squeezed universities that created hostile environments for Jews and Christians on campus. His fans don’t hassle him for not attending church regularly because they judge him by his deeds.
The same is probably true for the “bad optics” of the Mar-a-Lago party. Does Trump care that millions of people are about to go hungry? Obviously not. He’s a sociopath and no one is under illusions about it. But he slapped tariffs on foreign countries to try to reshore manufacturing jobs and has insisted repeatedly that he won’t let the right’s deficit hawks gut entitlements, and that’s good enough. All the “optics” tell us is that he’s naturally callous and no more sincerely populist than any billionaire playboy could be. To whom is that news in 2025?
Beyond all of that, the ethos of this diseased movement is that Trump should be immune from all forms of accountability—legal, moral, political, and ultimately electoral if it comes to that. He behaves like a king in many ways and that’s just how his most devoted fans seem to want him to be treated. Well, in a monarchy, there’s nothing unusual about royals dining lavishly, in splendor, while their subjects try to scrape by. The king is an exalted figure and is entitled to conduct himself accordingly. Resenting the “optics” of that is like resenting a monarch for wearing a crown.
Trump is especially well-positioned to get the benefit of the doubt about his lifestyle by dint of his famous wealth and decades of celebrity. Joe Biden throwing a lavish party in the middle of a shutdown would have been so out of character, and so beyond his tier of income, that it would have felt to many like a deliberate “let them eat cake” rebuke to Americans. With Trump, though, a big bash with lightly clad women in attendance feels like par for the course. He’s not flaunting his wealth; this is just what Friday night at his house is like, or so I imagine many of his voters believe.
In the end, MAGA devotees wouldn’t care if Trump lit sheets of food stamps on fire and then used them to light his donors’ cigars.
But swing voters might.
The iceberg.
There aren’t as many of those in 2025 as there were in 1988, when George H.W. Bush beat Michael Dukakis by nearly 8 points in the popular vote, but there are certainly enough to swing a national election in a country where a 1.5-point margin over a famously lackluster Democrat is considered some sort of impressive win. And there’s lots of evidence that swing voters are angry at Trump about the economy, and getting angrier.
That starts with his job approval, which today reached a second-term low in the RealClearPolitics average. A new Washington Post poll published this weekend saw his disapproval reach 59 percent, his worst number since the post-insurrection period in January 2021. Among independents specifically, his approval stands at 30-69. To put that in perspective, the Post’s Paul Kane notes, Biden’s approval following last year’s debate meltdown was 28-60.
There’s no mystery as to what’s driving it. It’s the shutdown, for which the president and his party are taking more blame from voters than Democrats are. If that surprises you because it was Democrats, not Republicans, who triggered a shutdown by rejecting a clean funding bill, remember that many Americans don’t follow politics closely enough to grasp niceties like that. All they know is that Trump’s party controls the government and the government is closed now. It must be his fault!
But discontent about the shutdown is merely the part of the iceberg that’s visible above the water. There’s a bigger piece below that’s related to the state of the economy.
The economy is supposed to be Trump’s bread and butter, the issue that convinced voters last year to forgive a failed coup attempt in his first term, but he’s floundering on it as the cost of living rises. One polling tracker finds him at -18 on the issue in net approval, his worst number on the economy in nearly five years of being president. The Post’s data was even grimmer, pegging him at 37-62.
In that survey, 52 percent said the economy had gotten worse under his leadership versus 27 percent who said it had gotten better. CNN asked a similar question and got a bleaker number: 61 percent believe the president’s economic policies have made things worse. I assume that’s a reaction to his tariffs, which turned out to be the single most unpopular issue in eight tested by the Post. Trump scored a 33-65 rating on his trade policy.
But it’s not just tariffs. Inflation is eating him alive too, with 59 percent in the Post survey saying he deserves a “great deal” or “good deal” of blame for its continued rise. Notably, a new NBC News poll found that “65 percent said Trump had fallen short of looking out for the middle class, and 66 percent expressed the same sentiment for the handling of inflation and the cost of living.”
Most surprisingly, a Gallup survey published last month asked Americans which party would do a better job of keeping the country prosperous and saw Democrats with a 47-43 lead. Only once since 2012 had Republicans trailed on that question and only then by a single point. As recently as two years ago, the GOP led by 14.
Regular readers know that I belong to the “LOL nothing matters” school of despair about politics during the Trump era, but I’ve always carved out an exception for the economy. Last November’s result proved that Americans will vote with their wallets even if they know that doing so will inflict a sustained constitutional crisis on the United States. Nothing can rouse our slumbering citizenry to anger—except things getting more expensive at the supermarket.
In an environment like that, and at the risk of sounding optimistic, the “optics” of the president building himself a new ballroom or throwing a gala celebration of 1920s excess featuring girls in champagne glasses plausibly could have teeth with swing voters. (According to another Post poll, those who oppose tearing down the East Wing to build the ballroom outnumber those who support it, two to one.) I don’t wager anymore on the good sense of Americans or on any law of political gravity applying to Donald Trump, but if any failure will bring him down, flaunting his indifference to the fact that he hasn’t kept his promise to bring back the economy of 2019 is it.
We were given the choice last year between more expensive meat and fascism. We chose fascism, and now we will have more expensive meat. People won’t suffer that lightly.
