Political irony: How trolling undermines US democracy

Robert Gulotty & Zhaotian Luo

US Vice President JD Vance recently mused that if Watergate happened today, it would be a 12-hour news story. Was he boasting that President Donald Trump’s administration can survive scandals that would once have brought down a presidency, or was this a jab at a media establishment that is too weak to make any allegation stick? Either way, Vance inadvertently identified one of democracy’s deepest vulnerabilities: when every accusation can be dismissed as a partisan witch hunt, and when every unstatesmanlike comment is explained away as “just trolling,” democratic oversight begins to break down.

In new research, we build on a generation of scholarship on democratic backsliding to show that democracy’s last line of defence is not the opposition, but the incumbent’s own supporters. It is they who must ultimately defend democracy, since everyone else already opposes the person in power.

Hungary’s recent election is a case in point. Former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán lost not simply because his opponents turned out in force, but because many of his own voters abandoned him, delivering victory to Péter Magyar’s Tisza party and ending his illiberal rule. The same is true of the United States. To protect American democracy, enough voters from within Trump’s MAGA coalition must be willing to abandon a president they prefer to preserve a system they value.

But that is a tall order, given that those voters do not directly observe democratic backsliding. Instead, they see investigations, indictments, alarmed experts, and congressional hearings. From their perspective, it can be hard to distinguish a president under siege by a hostile press from one who is genuinely undermining democracy.

This blind spot is precisely what makes Trump’s penchant for trolling so consequential. His carnival-barker style, ironic register, and perpetual wink may seem like personal quirks, but they create the very ambiguity that makes democratic oversight so difficult. In our analytic framework, a politician can always take what we call the disciplined path: acting in ways that leave little room for ambiguity and forgoing the short-term advantages that come from keeping everyone guessing.

Trump, however, does the opposite, leaving it to his audience to decide whether he is serious. This tactic dates to his first presidential run, when he dismissed his crude remarks in the infamous Access Hollywood tape as “locker room talk,” and it persists today when he threatens to annihilate Iran, only for his aides to assure the public that his words should not be taken literally. The point of the performance is to demonstrate, time and again, that Trump’s critics deliberately mistake innocuous behaviour for serious misconduct and therefore cannot be trusted when they sound the alarm.

Every time this performance succeeds, the critic’s job becomes harder. A conscientious overseer — a news editor, a prosecutor, a watchdog — knows that warnings lose their force when issued too often. So, responsible critics raise the evidentiary bar, refrain from pursuing ambiguous cases, and sound the alarm only when the evidence is strongest. Restraint is meant to ensure that when they do warn the public, people will listen. Yet restraint is no solution, because voters are not simply evaluating the president. They are also judging those sounding the alarm. In our model, every criticism shapes voters’ judgments of both the incumbent’s conduct and the critics’ motives.

The confluence of fake news and relentless trolling compounds this problem. Caution means fewer alarms, but fewer alarms from responsible critics also mean that any warning the public does hear is more likely to come from a partisan opponent out for blood, and thus more likely to look like part of a witch hunt. Restraint — the very quality that should make criticism credible — ends up discrediting it, turning the critics’ own professionalism against them.

American politics did not always work this way. In July 1973, at the height of the Watergate scandal, only 17% of Americans told pollsters that the press was “just out to get” President Richard Nixon. As the evidence mounted, Nixon lost the support of many of his own voters and ultimately resigned rather than face impeachment. That is how democratic oversight should work: voters trust that alarms are warranted, and politicians take pains to avoid even the appearance of misconduct instead of hiding behind ambiguity.

When voters no longer punish such ambiguity, politicians have every incentive to exploit it. An incumbent intent on subverting democracy can cloak questionable conduct in irony, daring critics to take it seriously and risk making fools of themselves.

Vance is therefore right that Watergate would now burn out in half a day, but not for the reason he thinks. It is not that the press is too weak or too biased. It is that a politician who deliberately cultivates ambiguity as a governing style can change the meaning of criticism, casting legitimate warnings as partisan hysteria.

That does not mean that voters should believe every accusation, or that the press should shout louder. Rather, the lesson is that the carnival act is not merely a personality trait, but a political strategy. The Washington Post’s slogan famously warns that “democracy dies in darkness.” Our research points to something even more troubling: when oversight itself becomes contested, democracy can die in the spotlight.