Weekend Reading: Lessons in Trust — What Trump & SVB Teach the Harris Campaign

By: Stephen J. Scott , Founder & CEO of Starling

This piece first appeared in Starling Insights' newsletter on August 11, 2024. If you are interested in receiving our thrice-weekly newsletter, among many other benefits, please consider signing up as a Member of Starling Insights.?

I’ll huff and I’ll puff...

In the long ago of 2015 — back when politics were refreshingly tedious — I was asked to prognosticate about the unlikely candidacy of a former reality TV show personality. Could it be possible, as the polls suggested, that the Republican Party might actually nominate a puffed-up B-league pop-entertainment clown as its candidate for President of the United States?

"To understand Trump’s performance in the polls,”?I wrote, "we need to better understand how he is tapping into the electorate’s crumbling trust in 'the Establishment’.” The U.S., I argued, was suffering from a “trust crisis,” as faith in the core institutions of our capitalist democracy was crumbling.?

"Trump is symptomatic of this trust crisis,” I argued, "And he knows how to play our loss of trust to his personal gain, carefully and consistently portraying himself as an ‘outsider,' not tainted with the sins of the Establishment candidates.” Indeed, the Trump campaign was?consciously?built around the claim that “the people trust me.”?

For most people, what was perhaps most astonishing about Trump’s 2016 electoral victory was not so much that he had won, but that ’the Establishment’ had so clearly and so irrevocably?lost. Trust matters.

… and I’ll blow your house down!

Something very similar happened at SVB last year: faith in an institution vanished, and the institution itself vanished along with it. But there is key difference between the demise of the Clinton candidacy and the demise of SVB — speed.?

Watching the Clinton-Establishment crumble into defeat was like watching a slow-motion train-wreck that played out over the long months of the 2016 campaign. By contrast, SVB lost 85% of its depositor base and collapsed within the space of a weekend.

Banking sector regulators are rightly wringing their hands about a world in which a trusted Silicon Valley investor can send a Tweet warning about a bank at lunch on Friday and see that bank disappear before Sunday brunch. Many are now pointing to the ‘danger’ posed by social media, which can stir public sentiment so quickly, and to such devastating effect.

But this misses the larger point. Public sentiment isn’t so quickly stirred because of social media but, rather, because it has become entirely unmoored and perpetually up for grabs. Without faith in institutions to create some coherent constancy, just about anyone yelling ‘Fire!’ in a crowded room can trigger a stampede for the exits.?

We saw this in Washington on January 6, 2021 when a defeated and enraged Trump sputtered something akin to “who will rid me of this meddlesome priest.” And we’ve seen it in the UK in the last week, when the tragic death of children triggered a false narrative about a murderous Muslim asylum seeker, spawning violent protests across the country.?

When trust is lost, so is?social stability. “The fight for trust is the battle that defines our age,” Sir Keir Starmer said quite rightly in his?first speech after winning the keys to Number 10 Downing Street last month.

Putting a pot to boil

On both sides of the Atlantic, people are disappointed, disillusioned, and dismayed. The toxic diet of depression and anxiety that has been our daily fare for a decade has left us bug-eyed and jittery. We need a good nap.

Trump’s successful 2016 play-book was to stoke the anger of his base and he’s sticking with that game plan today. Biden, meanwhile, had sought to motivate his own base by stoking their fears of democracy giving way to a would-be dictator. But?a decade of this emotional tug-of-war has left us?exhausted. These negative emotive strategies have lost their appeal.

And in a world grown weary of ceaseless political vitriol, the Harris campaign has perhaps stumbled into remarkable good fortune by giving us something we clearly needed:?a good laugh.

Trump’s once unlikely 2016 electoral victory reminded us of the importance of trust, and SVB instructed us in the speed with which collapse can follow where trust is absent. Both lessons are on display in the startling northward trajectory the Harris campaign has achieved,?seemingly overnight, and in the Trump campaign’s consequent stumbling?disorientation.

Trump is rattled by the speed with which popular sentiment has shifted, despite his own REGULAR USE of odd capitalizations to stir popular sentiment himself with a steady stream of social media effluence. Once the beneficiary of distrust in the Establishment, he now finds himself a victim of the same forces that once propelled him. "I think we're the opposite of?weird. They’re weird," he felt compelled to insist last weekend. It’s hard to take a guy seriously when his campaign rhetoric is reduced to ‘nah-nah-nah-boo-boo.’?

And while Trump continues to huff and puff, Harris has put a pot to boil at the bottom of the chimney. We know how that story ended.