The link between smoking and Trump

Why do people choose to smoke in the face of overwhelming medical evidence that it causes cancer, heart disease and generally shortens life?

Not just older people who’ve smoked all their lives and find it hard to quit. Why have many young people chosen to start smoking in the face of such evidence?

The clue is in the question: choice.

It is a defiant and liberating act of self will, to elect to do something in spite of the advice of others.

According to the World Health Organisation, smoking in Western countries is most prevalent among those on low incomes. And when questioned a significant proportion (63%) of new young smokers (under 25 years) expressed no regrets about their smoking and no desire to quit. The research data from 2008 revealed that the people who make the choice to start smoking are generally less educated than those who do not.

But don’t misunderstand. These people are perfectly well-versed in the health risks of smoking. It has been 55 years since the US Surgeon General first published the landmark report on smoking and health. Campaign research shows penetration of the “Smoking kills” message at near 100% among all relevant audiences. Yet nearly 15% of Americans persist with the habit (the percentage is eerily similar in the UK) and of course the overwhelming majority began smoking in the decades since that 1964 report. 

They apparently don’t care.

Given the demographics, perhaps these people choose to reject the medical arguments in the knowledge that this is one of the few choices they may be able to make freely, over the course of a lifetime of restricted opportunity.

They may not be smart, rich or upwardly mobile. But they’re still free.

When you know you’re going to spend your whole life being told what to do by people who are cleverer than you, people with degrees, people who claim to know best what’s right for you, maybe it means a lot to thumb your nose at them, even if it costs you money (you were never going to die rich anyhow).

Recent market research aimed at informing future public health campaigns has revealed the emergence of a “siege mentality” among some smokers. Moves to stigmatise smoking, banning it from workplaces and public spaces, cements the resolve of a hard core of defiant “never-quitters”.

The artist, David Hockney may not fit the demographic of the lumpen, lower class smoker. But here is what he wrote in The Guardian newspaper, just prior to the ban: “On July 1st 2007, the most grotesque piece of social engineering will begin in England: the ban on smoking in enclosed public spaces, imposed easily by a political and media elite.”

The sense that a liberal elite within politics and the media are conspiring to restrict our choices and re-engineer our societies brings me to one Donald John Trump and his successful campaign to become 45th President of the United States.

Laying aside charges of Russian interference in the 2016 election, there is no doubt that Trump succeeded in mobilising far more voter support than mainstream politicians from either the Republican or Democratic parties imagined.

According to fivethirtyeight’s aggregation of all polls, Trump’s current approval among American voters stands at 42.5%. This approval rating of around 40% seems stubbornly resistant to change: it’s risen very slightly in the wake of Trump’s racist tweets about four Democrat Congresswomen. It dipped during the shutdown over border wall funding. It fluctuates from the high thirties to the low forties and appears largely independent of rational arguments or reactions to shifting circumstances.

The reliance of Trump on a base of blue collar workers on incomes below $30,000 was established by Pew’s research into 2016 voting patterns. We know that Trump voters are often non-college educated. 

The more outraged the liberal commentators become at Trump’s antics, the more his base relishes the consternation they have caused. Tired of metropolitan elites setting the socio-political agenda, small town Americans from across the rust belt are now feeling their voices heard, and yes, their prejudices aired, from Trump’s “bully pulpit” in Washington DC.

So what that his tax breaks favour the super rich and his trade strategy may be fatally flawed? These people were never going to die rich anyway.

When you have limited expectations for self-improvement in your life, maybe it feels good to blow smoke in the face of educated liberal elites, doctors, teachers and Harvard professors.

If you’re in the business of creating campaigns, be they anti-smoking or on behalf of the Democratic party in 2020, this is what you’re up against.

If you demonise the people you want to convert, condemning them as “deplorables” you will intensify the siege mentality and fuel their antagonistic impulses.

You have to give them a better way to assert their freedoms than by inhaling carcinogens or cheering for the ill-mannered oaf who’s pouring ketchup on the caviar and generally ruining the ambience at the global top table.

You have to give them more value, not less. You have to give them real positive choices.