Who would have dreamed just a short time ago that soon-to-be-former President Trump and Stacey Abrams would turn out to be so much like each other?
Both are so wholly invested in ego enhancement and in playing on grievance in much the same way. Both appear to have egos as big as Grand Central Station, to live for the cheers of enraptured supporters, and to look on the absence of praise and/or adulation as something perhaps worse than death. Hence Trump’s initial rejection of the very idea that he could have and did lose the election for president and the much too long wait before he accepted reality. And hence the refusal of Abrams ever to admit she had lost the election in 2018 to Brian Kemp, her opponent, by a 58,000 vote margin.
Where Trump simply refused to concede, Abrams, two years ago, actually claimed she had won and went on a moral “victory tour” of the nation, telling all who would hear her that she had been cheated. She never could say how, of course. Instead of vote fraud, which can be disproven, she claimed she was the victim of “voter suppression,” a far more vague concept. But where Trump’s complaints had been mocked, hers had been spread far and wide and enhanced by the media until she became a Democratic rock star and partly a martyr, a combination of Wonder Woman flying and smashing through obstacles and Joan of Arc tied to the stake.
The blend of the two would prove irresistible, as was shown in a spread in the Washington Post weekend magazine in May 2020, perhaps to enhance Abrams’s chances of being Joe Biden’s vice president. It begins with her entrance into a conference held for black women in downtown Atlanta this year:
“Pandemonium ensues as she walks to the far left of the stage, like a runway supermodel, stops on a dime, poses, tilts her head slightly and smiles. Camera flashes explode. She next pivots and walks slowly to the center of the stage, freezes there and repeats the pose … Abrams is summoning her inner actress, and … enjoying the moment.”
In Trump’s similar case, the Post’s reaction was somewhat less enthusiastic. The response of his crowds being played as more ugly and menacing. Trump’s assumption that he was qualified to be president by his career as a mogul and TV reality show personality is on a par with that of Abrams, who spent a mere 12 years in the lower house of the Georgia legislature.
“What Trump is doing, especially in his tweets, is irresponsible & conspiratorial,” Guy Benson has tweeted. “It is also true that Abrams lost GA by more votes than Biden’s margin in GA+AZ+WI, never conceded, and has been rewarded handsomely by many in her tribe.”
Tribes reward those among them who tell them things that aren’t true to which they want to listen, which has been the procedure and talent of both Abrams and Trump.
