Original Article

Deep stories, nostalgia narratives,

and fake news: Storytelling
in the Trump era
Francesca Polletta* and Jessica Callahan
Department of Sociology, University of California, Irvine, 4183 Social Science Plaza
A, Irvine, CA 92697, USA.
E-mail: [email protected]

Abstract Characterizing Trump supporters either as ‘‘duped’’ by Fox News or as

speaking from their lived experience misses the fact that both are true. We draw on
scholarship on narrative and on the media to trace the ways in which elite-produced
stories simultaneously reflect and forge a political common sense. We argue that
narrative’s allusiveness (the fact that stories work by calling up other stories) helps to
explain why stories produced by media elites come to feel as if they reflect people’s
experience. The fact that people often share stories as a way of building collective
identity, for its part, helps to explain why stories’ plausibility may be relatively
unimportant to those people. Both features of storytelling are intrinsic to the form, but
their political effects have been sharpened by two significant changes in the media
landscape: the rise of right-wing media outlets and the profusion of user-shared digital
news. We trace these developments as a way to make sense of Trump’s electoral
support.
American Journal of Cultural Sociology (2017). doi:10.1057/s41290-017-0037-7
Keywords: politics; narrative; media; public opinion

After spending five years with Louisianan Tea Partiers, sociologist Arlie
Hochschild was convinced that the appeal of modern conservatism owed to
a ‘‘deep story’’ that many Americans believed described their lives. In that
story, hardworking citizens were struggling to get by while being bilked in
taxes by a grasping federal government. They were told to feel sorry for the
parade of claimants who were cutting in line for the American Dream and
scorned as ‘‘white trash’’ and ‘‘rednecks’’ if they did not. It was a story that
traded in feelings more than confirmable facts, yet when Hochschild told it

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Polletta and Callahan

to her interviewees, they recognized it. ‘‘You’ve read my mind,’’ said one (2016,
p. 145). ‘‘I live your analogy,’’ said another (p. 145).
Donald Trump voiced that story when he not only refused to empathize with
immigrants and poor people, but cast white working men as the victims of
liberals’ misplaced sympathies. He suggested a different ending to the story
when he promised to ‘‘Make America Great Again.’’ For Hochschild’s
interviewees and many like them, Trump seemed to be on their side.
This explanation for Trump’s appeal is a plausible one, though it only partly
explains an electoral victory that owed also to the continuing power of the
abortion issue, Russian interference in the election, ill-timed statements by the
FBI director, and a failure on Clinton’s part to mobilize the Obama coalition of
millennials and minorities. But the explanation is also partial insofar as it fails
to account for where the deep story came from and why it seemed to make
sense. Hochschild herself suggested that the deep story corresponded to her
interviewees’ experience. ‘‘[F]or the white, Christian, older, right-leaning
Louisianans I came to know, the deep story was a response to a real squeeze’’
(p. 140; our emphasis). Their economic prospects were being diminished by
automation and outsourcing at the same time as they saw immigrants and
refugees ‘‘sailing past the Statue of Liberty into a diminishing supply of good
jobs’’ (p. 143). Hochschild rejected the alternative explanation, namely that the
beliefs of the modern right could be pinned on Fox News or well-funded idea
entrepreneurs like the Koch brothers. ‘‘[D]uping – and the presumption of
gullibility – is too simple an idea’’ (p. 14), she asserted.
We agree. But there is some analytical ground between the extremes of being
‘‘duped’’ by Fox News and speaking from one’s experience. And in fact, many
elements of the deep story should not have made sense in terms of the
experiences of Hochschild’s respondents or Trump supporters. Many of
Hoschild’s respondents, like most Americans, had either been the beneficiaries
of federal programs or had friends or relatives who had been. Few had lost out
on jobs and opportunities to immigrants or people of color. They said that
liberals treated them as backward, racist rednecks, but they seemed to know
very few liberals. And one would have had to spend a lot of time reading liberal
media to find references to ‘‘rednecks’’ or ‘‘white trash.’’
Without denying that people’s opinions have some basis in their experience,
we need a better understanding of how people integrate information that comes
from diverse sources. Trump’s supporters watched TV and listened to the radio;
they read, commented on, and shared online stories; and they talked to friends
and co-workers. How was a story of middle-class whites pushed aside by a
parade of minority groups, abandoned by the government, and treated with
disdain by liberals made real?
To begin to answer that question, we draw on what scholars know about
storytelling in the media, in online communication, and in offline conversation.
We argue that people’s political common sense is shaped by their experience but

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 Deep stories, nostalgia narratives, and fake news: Storytelling in the Trump era

it is also shaped by stories they read and hear on TV, stories told by friends and
acquaintances, stories that substitute memory for history, stories that make the
experience of others seem as if it is their own, and stories whose truth is
relatively unimportant to their value. We explore these types and sites of
storytelling as they help to account for Trump’s electoral support.

Stories and Storytelling

Define a story as an account of events in the order in which they occurred so as

to make a point (we use the terms ‘‘story’’ and ‘‘narrative’’ interchangeably).
Stories have characters that are human or human-like in their traits or
perceptions, and they have events that follow along the lines of generic plots
(Polletta, 2006). We focus on two additional features. Stories are allusive
(Polletta, 2006). In other words, if all stories make a normative point, the point
is rarely explicit (we do not often say, ‘‘and the moral of the story is….’’). If the
story is good, events and their dénouement seem themselves to provide the
moral. In reality, however, we glean a story’s point by reference to stories we
have heard before. We hear a story of a little guy going up against a big guy, and
we recognize them as David and Goliath. We hope David will win and, if he
does, we take the message that cleverness can triumph over brute force. Stories’
persuasive power lies in their ability to call up other compelling stories.
Again, if the story is good, we assume that it tenders a ‘‘larger’’ point. We
assume that the particulars recounted are not idiosyncratic but rather reflect a
more general pattern. This makes it easy for political entrepreneurs to obscure
the connection between the anecdote and the larger phenomenon. For example,
activists seeking to reform the laws around torts litigation in the 1990s
circulated stories of outrageously frivolous lawsuits and the pushover juries who
awarded millions to these fake victims. Readers will remember the story of the
woman who dropped her McDonald’s cup of coffee on her lap and won an
award of $3 million, or the story of the woman who won $1 million after a CAT
scan caused her to lose her psychic powers. The stories were either exaggerated
or untrue. The woman who sued McDonald’s, for example, did not just burn
her leg: She suffered third-degree burns that left permanent scarring over 16
percent of her body and rendered her disabled for the next two years.
McDonald’s had received over seven hundred complaints about its scalding
coffee over the previous decade, but refused to cover the woman’s medical
costs. And the punitive damages the woman was awarded were later reduced to
one-fifth of the original amount (Haltom and McCann, 2004). But the
exaggerated stories gained wide publicity, and were told and retold in
newspapers, magazines, television talk shows, sit-coms, and movies (Haltom
and McCann, 2004). The allusiveness of the stories meant that tort reform
activists did not have to make the case that Americans’ litigiousness was driving

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up the cost of medical malpractice (which it was not). They did not even have to
prove that Americans were more litigious than they had been (which they were
not). The outrageousness of the stories was enough to confirm the larger point:
if not all stories were quite so outrageous, there must have been many more of
them.
Stories’ allusiveness makes it easy to muddy the line not only between little
stories (the frivolous lawsuits) and big stories (the hobbling of American
business by burgeoning litigation) but also between history and memory. Maly
et al (2012) refer in this vein to ‘‘nostalgia narratives,’’ which build collective
identity by way of a selective version of one’s personal past. In the nostalgia
narrative, history is elided with memory: an earlier era has the warm glow of
childhood remembrance. To continue with the example of tort reform, the
stories that were told about Americans’ litigiousness were probably also
persuasive because they were heard against childhood memories of adventures
in the playground and roaming the streets on bicycles until nighttime –
memories of unconstrained fun that reflected the fact that they were memories
of childhood more than of a pre-litigious era.
Finally, if stories’ power comes from their allusiveness, then the most
powerful stories may not even need to be told. They can simply be referred to,
often by way of their protagonist. For example, to refer to the ‘‘welfare queen’’
calls up a story, or stories, of women on welfare taking advantage of the system
to live in the lap of luxury. References to ‘‘anchor babies,’’ ‘‘climate change
deniers,’’ and ‘‘K Street lobbyists’’ work similarly (Polletta, 2015). Audiences
know the story without having to hear it fully recounted. Indeed, audiences may
have the pleasurable sensation of being in the loop since they know the
referenced story and know that others may not know it (Polletta, 2006). In the
case of the tort stories, then, the McDonald’s story could be told in shorthand,
with its point so clear as to not even require its telling.
The second feature of storytelling we highlight is that it is a social activity. We
miss that if we think of stories as texts, governed by norms of content. But
stories are governed also by norms of performance. There are genres, not only of
story, but also of storytelling. In some genres, the accuracy of the events
recounted may be important. But in others, the emphasis instead may be on the
sincerity of the teller (as in the storytelling that takes place in refugee hearings),
and in still others, on the teller’s ability to hew to an expected storyline (as in
storytelling that takes place in self-help groups; Polletta et al, 2011). Storytelling
in everyday conversation often is about building status, bonds, and a sense of
collective identity (De Fina, 2003). Thus, to share a story of an absurdly
frivolous lawsuit was to signal that one recognized the problem and that one
was decidedly not among those people who believed in coddling self-proclaimed
victims. The belief that people should be legally prevented from suing followed
from the group identification rather than preceded it.

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 Deep stories, nostalgia narratives, and fake news: Storytelling in the Trump era

As in the 1990s litigation reform, we can see in Donald Trump’s victory the
promotion of stories by political entrepreneurs, stories’ allusive power, and their
capacity to build collective identity. But the effects of these storytelling
dynamics were heightened by two important changes in the media landscape:
the growth of an industry of conservative political commentators and the spread
of user-shared digital information. We turn first to the rise of conservative
commentary, taking up the proliferation of user-shared digital stories later in
the article.

Right-Wing Opinion Media

In the 1990s, tort stories appeared in newspapers, magazines, and network TV

news and talk shows. The blogosphere was in its infancy, there were fewer than
half the number of talk radio shows that there are today, and, for half the
decade, Fox News did not even exist. In 2012, by contrast, more Americans
relied on cable channels for information about elections than on network news
(Berry and Sobieraj, 2014, p. 73). Four months before the November 2016
election, two-thirds of Trump’s support came from people who said that Fox
News was their most-trusted source of news (Bump, 2016).
Behind the growth of conservative opinion media lie legal and economic
changes as much as cultural ones (Berry and Sobieraj, 2014). Deregulation that
began in the 1970s and accelerated under Reagan led to the concentration of
media ownership, the centralization and reduction of newsgathering, and the
integration of news and entertainment. The new emphasis was on news as a
commodity. The Fairness Doctrine, which required ‘‘balanced programming,’’
was eliminated in 1987 and ‘‘personal attack’’ and ‘‘political editorial’’
corollaries were removed in 2000. In combination with the dramatic growth
of cable stations, the stage was set for hybrid news/entertainment programming
targeted to niche audiences. Whereas networks had sought to recruit a broad
audience by presenting the least objectionable content possible, there was now
incentive to produce provocative, indeed, deliberately objectionable content.
Before Donald Trump won the Republican nomination, many conservative
commentators were critical of the nationalist populism that Trump promoted.
Still, long before the election, one could hear all the elements of the deep story in
conservative media. Commentators railed against a government that helped the
undeserving while leaving the deserving to fend for themselves. They described
widespread practices of reverse racism, in which qualified white men were
routinely passed over for positions they should have won. They treated Barack
Obama as of dubious origin, and as in cahoots with liberals, intellectuals,
environmentalists, feminists, George Soros, and the United Nations, all bent on
chipping away at American freedoms. They characterized the mainstream media
as firmly controlled by liberals, and as disdainful of their audiences. ‘‘Generally

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speaking, they look down on the folks, they think you are dumb,’’ said Bill
O’Reilly, whose nightly audience exceeded three million (Spargo, 2017). And
they mourned an America that had moved unalterably away from its white
Christian roots. Radio host Michael Savage told his audience of 5 million
(Byers, 2014): ‘‘In the past people would come over and become Americans.
Now they come over and they want you to become them. They want you to
speak Spanish. They want you to act Muslim’’ (quoted in Berry and Sobieraj,
2014, p. 126).
Commentators rarely told the deep story in full. Just as stories of people
making outrageous legal claims could be assumed to be representative of a
larger problem of litigiousness, a problem that involved perhaps less ridiculous,
but no less unethical, breaches of the social contract, small stories worked
similarly here. Stories about the siting of a mosque in Lower Manhattan, the
fact that the Obamas’ holiday card (yet again) failed to mention Christmas, and
a California teacher who banned the practice of saying God Bless You after
someone sneezed could all be read in terms of a larger story about liberals’
attack on Christianity. A story about a fatal school bus crash involving an
undocumented immigrant driver made the case for the dangers of illegal
immigration. Stories’ occlusion of the relationship between the particular and
the general made them effective in communicating a larger message.
Storytelling by conservative commentators was allusive in other ways. As
Ellison (2014) shows in his analysis of conservative TV and radio programs in
the 2010s, commentators drew on a mythic story of America’s past, in which a
nation forged in freedom was imperiled by those who would betray the
founders’ commitment to individual liberty: variously, intellectuals, govern-
ment, media, and left-wing movements. The tone was apocalyptic, with the
battle portrayed as one between radical good and evil (Smith, 2005). The host
and audience manned the bulwarks of freedom. Hosts regularly called on
listeners as characters in this mythic story. ‘‘You must choose to stand for the
truth against the forces of chaos,’’ Glenn Beck told his more than eight million
listeners (Ellison, 2014, p. 98).
Audience members also figured in stories about their own lives. Beck began a
monologue against Al Gore’s environmentalism by saying ‘‘You’re all working
hard right now to raise your kids right and it seems like everything is stacked
against you…Now you’ve got the former vice president of the United States –
and a Nobel Prize winner – looking your kids in the eye and telling them, you
know what, you know things that your dad and mom don’t’’ (Berry and
Sobieraj, 2014, p. 48). Commentators often referred to a period before the
tumult of the 1960s as one in which America was truer to its promise. It was a
world that audience members may have remembered, since the median Fox
viewer was 68 years old, but a world that they experienced as children. History
was filtered through the rosy lens of memory.

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 Deep stories, nostalgia narratives, and fake news: Storytelling in the Trump era

Finally, conservative commentators used catch phrases that worked

metonymically both to reference a story and, at the same time, to signal that
audience members were in the know because they caught the reference. Phrases
like ‘‘the liberal media,’’ ‘‘Fannie and Freddie,’’ ‘‘the establishment elites,’’ ‘‘class
warfare,’’ the ‘‘ACLU,’’ and ‘‘political correctness’’ were often ‘‘strung together
in long associative chains that conceal[ed] much of their richness to the
uninitiated’’ (Ellison, 2014, p. 100; see also Norton, 2011).
Audiences undoubtedly did not accept all the claims made by right-wing
commentators. Still, research has shown that conservative media has effects.
Fox News viewers, net of their partisan preferences, were more likely to believe
that health care reform would create death panels (Meirick, 2013), doubt the
existence of climate change (Feldman et al, 2012), and believe that American
Muslims wanted to establish Shari’a law in the United States (Serwer, 2011).

Experience and Interpretation

Did Fox and the broader industry of conservative commentary really have this
much power? If shows like The O’Reilly Factor and The Sean Hannity Show
were popular, their viewership was dwarfed by that of the network news, which
reached 24 million viewers a night (Pew, 2016). Moreover, conservative opinion
shows did not do any newsgathering; they were devoted solely to ‘‘news
analysis.’’ So presumably people were exposed to other sources of news (Ellison,
2014). In addition, people talked to one another. Both of these should have
provided the material for audiences to assess conservative commentators’
assertions critically.
However, features of conservative commentary may have diminished the
critical power of other news sources as well as that of personal conversation.
As Ellison (2014) shows, political commentators adopted a pedagogical role
in instructing their audiences how to interpret mainstream news (see also
Jamieson and Cappella, 2008). The beginning of each programming hour
was usually devoted to a news story taken from the mainstream news. The
host either read the story or played an audio clip and then interpreted the
story, sometimes providing a line-by-line reading. The interpretation
supported the larger narrative by exposing, variously, the threat liberals
posed to Americans’ fundamental freedoms, President Obama’s questionable
allegiances, or the countless inroads being made on the nation’s Christian
character.
This feature of conservative political commentary may explain why a
perception of liberals’ disdain was so central to the deep story that motivated
Hochschild’s interviewees and, we argue, many Trump supporters. If conser-
vatives did know liberals, it was unlikely that those liberals were calling them
rednecks or racists. And if conservatives read or watched mainstream news, they

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would be unlikely to encounter such characterizations. But right-wing

commentators told conservatives that liberals saw them as racist rednecks and
commentators provided the evidence for that claim in the quotes from liberal
figures and the press they featured. Viewers and listeners likely felt that they had
been exposed to the mainstream media and had learned for themselves how to
expose its biases and outright deceptions.
Conservative media commentary may also have substituted for conversation
with real people. Americans generally are reluctant to talk about politics
(Conover et al, 2002), but research suggests this is especially true of
conservatives (Mutz, 2006). When Berry and Sobieraj (2014) asked consumers
of conservative and liberal opinion media how they felt about talking about
politics, every single conservative respondent said without prompting that they
feared being called a racist. Liberals worried about being bullied, Berry and
Sobieraj report, but they did not worry about being shut down in the way that
conservatives did. In this context, conservative commentators offered their
audiences not information but an experience of being in conversation with
people who accepted their views. The fans interviewed by Berry and Sobieraj
felt that they had a personal relationship with Sean Hannity, Michael Savage,
Glenn Beck, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh (and Rachel Maddow on the left).
One fan contrasted Walter Conkrite, who was ‘‘reporting to his audience’’ with
new hosts like Maddow and O’Reilly, who ‘‘are all talking to their audience…
they are having a conversation, even though obviously it’s one way, it’s
conversational and it’s not a presentation. They’re talking to me.’’ ‘‘They’re
talking to you?’’ the interviewers asked. ‘‘Yeah’’ (p. 133).
Hannity, Limbaugh, and the others cultivated that relationship. They
encouraged fans to call into their shows; members of BillOReilly.com were
rewarded with ‘‘backstage conversations’’ in which O’Reilly took questions;
Limbaugh’s fans were given access to ‘‘Rush’s super-secret e-mail address’’ (p.
134); they hosted websites and group events. Hosts routinely contrasted their
audiences to others who were stupid or naı̈ve, especially the consumers of
mainstream media.
If Berry and Sobieraj are right, the line between elite-produced opinion and
the everyday conversations by way of which audiences assess elite-produced
opinion had become less clear well before the election. Audiences felt that they
were in conversation with conservative personalities. Indeed, they felt that
Hannity, Limbaugh, and the rest were friends. This was the parasocial
identification that media scholars have identified as an important condition
for the persuasiveness of media messages (Moyer-Gusé et al, 2011). The
brilliance of commentators’ mise-en-scene (Alexander, 2004), in this respect,
was that it seemed like conversation with friends – but friends who were witty,
informed, engaged, and operated within expected formats (Norton, 2011).

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Sharing Stories

When Katherine Cramer (2016a, b) asked people in rural Wisconsin – people

who overwhelmingly voted for Trump – where they got their news, their answer
was usually, ‘‘each other.’’ Cramer found among these residents the same sense
of cultural insult that Hochschild did, the same experience of being ignored by
distant government bureaucrats who were more concerned with racial minori-
ties and elites. Like Hochschild, however, Cramer was reluctant to attribute her
interviewees’ views to the conservative opinion industry. ‘‘Conservative media
gets input into these groups,’’ she explained, ‘‘but it’s not because everybody is
watching Fox News or is devoted to this or that talk radio host. It’s that one or
two of the people in the group come with something they’ve heard, and it gets
passed around’’ (in Guo, 2016). This is an important point. Even if the fans of
conservative commentary felt that Limbaugh, O’Reilly, and Hannity were akin
to friends, they undoubtedly also talked about what they heard on conservative
media with other friends, and they undoubtedly also assessed what they heard
against their own experience.
However, both dynamics are complicated. As scholars of public opinion have
shown, where people have little information about the issue in question, they
often interpret their own experience in terms of what they have heard in the
media. So for example, people who consume more media tend to feel more at
risk of becoming the victim of crime (Roche et al, 2016), and people who have
strong feelings about the issue of climate change – whether for or against – tend
to interpret their personal experience of global warming in line with their
partisan beliefs (Myers et al, 2013). In other words, personal experience does
not determine people’s opinion separate from what they hear from partisan
media.
Sociological accounts have revealed another dynamic: that people’s sense of
personal experience may encompass experiences that are not their own. This is
what Jacomijne Prins and colleagues found when they listened to groups of
young adults of Moroccan descent in the Netherlands telling stories of
discrimination they had encountered (Prins et al, 2013). Certain stories were
common: being passed over for a job or seeing old ladies clutch their purses
when they walked by. Over and over again, though, narrators used the personal
pronouns ‘‘we’’ or ‘‘you’’ in relating such accounts. The implication was that the
personal story was a collective one. Sometimes narrators recounted events using
the term ‘‘we,’’ but the events were not ones they had actually experienced. It
was if the narrator was saying that this could have happened to me, since I am a
member of the group and it happened to another member of the group.
Similarly, when Eduardo Bonilla-Silva and his colleagues interviewed white
Americans in the early 2000s, almost a third spontaneously used what the
authors call the ‘‘I did not get that job because of a black man story line.’’ One

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student explained his opposition to providing special opportunities to minorities

in college admissions:

I had a friend, he wasn’t – I don’t like him that much, I think it’s my
brother’s friend, a good friend of my brother’s, who didn’t get into law
school here, and he knows for a fact that other students less qualified than
him did. And that really – and he was considering a lawsuit against the
school. But for some reason, he didn’t. He had better grades, better LSAT,
better everything, and he…. Other people got in up above him (Bonilla-
Silva et al, 2004, p. 567).

Bonilla-Silva et al say that this formulation was common. The story was not
about the narrator himself or herself or even about close relatives or friends, but
rather about a distant acquaintance. Yet, the authors say, it was ‘‘narrated as a
personal experience’’ (2004, p. 567), presumably in the context of a conver-
sation about what the interviewee had experienced. Similar to Prins et al’s
Moroccan storytellers, the experience here was at the level of the group; it was
not ‘‘my’’ experience, but the experience of people ‘‘like me.’’
This suggests that the deep story may have been lodged not in directly lived
experience, but in the shared stories of the group. Sharing stories, for its part,
may have helped to constitute the group: to reinforce its values and to
demarcate its boundaries (De Fina, 2003). Recall once more the stories about
frivolous lawsuits. Exchanging stories of grasping Americans and the gullible
juries who helped them gave tellers and listeners a sense of common perspective.
They were not among those greedy litigants, even though the latter seemed to be
everywhere. So the stories exchanged in conversation may have political effect
by drawing lines between us and them. They reinforce collective identities, and
in particular, partisan identities.

Sharing Stories Digitally

There was a layer to conversational storytelling before the election that did not
exist at the time of the 1990s tort stories. Social media platforms allowed people
to share stories far more swiftly and widely, and to share stories from more
diverse sources. In 2016, six in ten Americans got news via social media such as
Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit (Pew, 2016). What counted as news, moreover,
was not always obvious. In the last three months of the election, ‘‘fake news’’
stories on Facebook were liked or shared more often than real news stories
(Davies, 2016).
Discussion of fake news has focused on why people believe such stories (see,
e.g., Sundar, 2016). But this discussion may miss the pleasure that comes from
reading and sharing surprising news, pleasure that may be more important than

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believing the story. An avid reader of conspiracy blogs explained after the
election, ‘‘It’s like a hockey game. Everyone’s got their goons. Their goons are
pushing our guys around, and it’s great to see our goons push back’’ (Tavernise,
2016).
The literature on rumors is useful here. Jean-Noel Kapferer argues that rumors
are a kind of conversational capital. The person sharing the rumor ‘‘provides
information that is scarce, exciting, and moving: he has at his disposal an object
of value to exchange. In return, he reaps the pleasure of pleasing others and of
being attentively listened to’’ (2013, p. 47). Whether the rumor is ‘‘true or not is of
little importance.’’ Or as Gary Alan Fine puts it, rumors are ‘‘too good to be false’’
(2007, p. 6). Sharing rumors also produces solidarity for the group. If rumors
reflect a distrust of social institutions, they also reflect trust in the rumor-sharer
(Fine, 2007). Again, sharers do not expect to have to assess the validity of the
story. Indeed, to not assess the validity of the story is a way to signal one’s
membership in and commitment to the group. As Kapferer writes, ‘‘to believe a
rumor is to manifest one’s allegiance to the group’s voice, i.e. to collective
opinion. Rumors provide a group with the opportunity to stand up and be
counted’’ (2013, p. 104). These dynamics may not be limited to a small core of the
truly committed. Scholars of conspiracy theories point out that believers tend to
range from the committed to the casual (Campion-Vincent, 2005).
In spreading outrageous stories – that Obama had banned the Pledge of
Allegiance in public schools, that candidate Trump was offering free one-way
tickets to Africa and Mexico to those who wanted to leave, that the leader of
ISIS had endorsed Clinton (Silverman, 2016) – people may have been seeking
less to persuade recipients (by way of the plausibility of the story) than to
strengthen their membership in the group (by way of their disinclination to
question the plausibility of the story). The use value of the story in reinforcing a
partisan political identity was more important than its truth value.

Enter Donald Trump

A deep story of economic loss and cultural insult was ‘‘lived,’’ as one of
Hochschild’s respondents put it, long before Donald Trump threw his hat in the
ring. But he certainly appealed to the deep story in campaigning. He told
allusive stories about an American Dream that was lost to America’s most
deserving and a federal government that had thrown in its lot with outsiders
(Trump, 2016a, b). He referred frequently to ‘‘the forgotten men and women of
our country. People who work hard but no longer have a voice’’ (Trump,
2016c, d); ‘‘the great majority’’ (recalling Nixon’s ‘‘silent majority’’). He
castigated his opponent and other ‘‘politicians [who] have heaped scorn and
disdain on these wonderful Americans’’ (Trump, 2016c).

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Many of the stories Trump told elided history, memory, and even myth. One
of his most popular on the campaign trail was ‘‘The Snake,’’ a blues song whose
lyrics he recited. The song was about a woman who nursed a snake back to
health and then was bitten by it. Trump instructed his audiences to catch the
allusions, saying ‘‘think of this in terms of terror,’’ ‘‘think of this in terms of the
people we are letting in by the thousands, especially from Syria’’; or saying, in
between the lines of the poem, ‘‘the border,’’ ‘‘the famous Trojan Horse;’’ and
then emphasizing, as if recounting an Aesop’s fable, the woman’s comeuppance
for her misplaced tenderheartedness (CNN, 2017).
Trump also traded on the collective identity-building functions of sharing
outrageous stories. When he tweeted conspiracy stories, he did not profess belief
in their truth. Rather, he often said something like, ‘‘A lot of people have said…’’
[that Bill Ayers wrote Obama’s Dreams of My Father (Tashman, 2016)], ‘‘Now
somebody told me…’’ [that Obama’s birth certificate listed him as Muslim
(Tashman, 2016)], ‘‘I’m hearing …’’ [that Antonin Scalia had been murdered
(Tashman, 2016)], or ‘‘many people are saying…’’ [that Hillary Clinton was
responsible for the execution of an Iranian scientist (Golshan, 2016)]. He cast
himself as sharing stories that others had shared with him, just as ordinary
people did. At the same time, he implied that the conspiracy stories were just the
tip of the iceberg, a metonym for liberals’ duplicity.
Conservative commentators, for their part, while initially critical of Trump’s
brand of nationalist populism (which was associated more with Breitbart News
than Fox News), shifted to supporting the candidate when he won the
Republican nomination (Johnson, 2017). Commentators too told allusive
stories of one candidate who was responsive to intellectuals, media elites, and
Wall Street simultaneously; and another who was trying to put middle-class
Americans at the front of the line for the American Dream. And they too
celebrated a style of talk that eschewed careful scripts and political correctness
in favor of blunt expressions of anger.

Conclusion

Donald Trump did not win the election because he told a single story that
knitted together Americans’ fears, hopes, and anxieties in a compelling way.
Rather, the stories he told, along with the arguments he made, slogans he
floated, and facts he claimed all drew on and reinforced already existing stories
of cultural loss that, we have argued, owed as much to what people heard about
on TV and radio, remembered from childhood, and perceived their group as
having experienced as it owed to what they directly experienced themselves.
Stories are always allusive, and storytelling’s capacity to build collective
identity makes it an enduring feature of politics. However, we have argued that
developments in the contemporary media landscape made these features of

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 Deep stories, nostalgia narratives, and fake news: Storytelling in the Trump era

storytelling even more important in the 2016 election. The growth of an industry
of conservative commentary made denser the ‘‘echo chamber’’ (Jamiesen and
Cappella, 2008) of stories told, retold, referenced, and alluded to. Conservative
media commentators often styled a personal relationship with the viewer or
listener, in which allusive stories reinforced the bond between speaker and
audience. The growth of user-shared digital ‘‘news’’ stories also worked to
reinforce bonds of political partisanship. However, here, what was important was
a style of storytelling. By sharing, liking, and commenting on outrageous stories –
and by determinedly not questioning their factual accuracy – people signaled that
they were savvy, scrappy, and clearly on one side of the partisan divide.
To conclude, then, we return to the people in Hochschild’s account: the
white, Christian, conservative, middle-aged men and women who subscribed to
the deep story. If they had not seen their own wages or economic prospects
diminish, then they had seen evidence of decline around them. As Hochschild
argues, broad economic shifts lowered their expectations of what they or their
children could realistically achieve. At the same time, they also listened to Rush
Limbaugh and watched Sean Hannity, and heard about the scourges of
multiculturalism and political correctness. They heard that affirmative action
was destroying our meritocracy, that there was a war on Christmas, and that the
liberals who were running the country thought they were stupid.
These facts were often distant from their own experiences in the sense that they
had probably never lost a job in competition with a black candidate, and still
received cards wishing them a Merry Christmas. But they could find evidence to
corroborate these claims in their own lives. A friend of a friend was passed over
for a job, she said, in favor of a less qualified black person. Someone they knew at
City Hall was instructed by her supervisor to take down the nativity scene she had
erected. They themselves had been required to participate in a ‘‘diversity’’ course
at work, or had seen a co-worker chastised for telling a racy joke. The small
stories added up to the larger story, and direct experiences meshed with the
experiences of others in a way that made them all seem personal.
The people who believed in the deep story and who voted for Donald Trump
heard compelling stories on conservative media, but they also heard a style of
talk that was engaging. It involved a raucous repudiation of political
correctness. It was in-your-face and unapologetic, variously playful, wry, or
angry. By joining in – by using the style of talk and by sharing the outrageous
stories – people signaled who they were and who they were not. And by using
those forms of storytelling himself, Donald Trump signaled that he was part of
the group too. On the other side were all those who hewed to the liberal,
oversensitive, arrogant status quo.
This interpretation is speculative, of course. But it does have the virtue of
drawing connections between what people assume to be true about the way the
world works, what they learn from TV, radio, and the blogosphere, what they
hear in conversations with friends, and what they directly experience. We miss

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Polletta and Callahan

these connections when we see the options only as people being duped by Fox
News or speaking from their lived experience. We miss the fact that people
often interpret outrageous stories as evidence of a broader phenomenon; that
stories about the way the world used to be often conflate history and nostalgia;
that people’s relationship to media commentators affects what they take from
the stories they hear; and that stories may have political impact less by
persuading than by reminding people which side they are on.

Acknowledgements

Our thanks to the editors, two anonymous reviews, Edwin Amenta, Colin
Bernatsky, Tania DoCarmo, Shela Duong, and Kelly Ward for their valuable
advice on revising the article. Polletta also thanks her fellow members of the
Successful Societies Program of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Study for
helping her to develop some of the ideas in the article.

About the Authors

Francesca Polletta is a professor of sociology at the University of California,

Irvine, and a senior fellow in the Successful Societies Program of the Canadian
Institute for Advanced Study. She is the author of Freedom Is an Endless
Meeting: Democracy in American Social Movements (Univ. Chicago, 2002), It
Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics (Univ. Chicago, 2006),
and editor, with Jeff Goodwin and James M. Jasper, of Passionate Politics:
Emotions and Social Movements (Univ. Chicago, 2001). She studies social
movements, institutional experiments in democracy, and culture in politics, and
is completing a manuscript on the role of invented relationships in moral
decision making.

Jessica Callahan is a graduate student at the University of California, Irvine. She

studies culture, gender and family, and social movements. She is currently
researching multiracial family relationships by investigating white foster
parents’ strategies for raising children of color within the potentially temporary,
potentially permanent setting of foster-to-adopt homes. She is a Eugene Cota-
Robles Fellow at UCI, and a Podlich Fellow through UCI’s Center for the Study
of Democracy.

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