US Politics

One of the most bizarre aspects of the United States presidential election has been how difficult it’s been to determine the truth — particularly due to Republican Donald Trump’s candidacy — and if the truth even matters.

White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci walks back to the West Wing of the White House in July 2017. His advice to take Trump symbolically, not literally, likely puzzled Canadian policymakers.
(AP Photo/Pablo Martinez Monsivais)

As former Trump advisor Anthony Scaramucci once noted about the former president: “Don’t take him literally, take him symbolically.” This advice wasn’t very helpful.

The difficulty in determining what is true is symptomatic of the high levels of uncertainty that Canadian policymakers are confronted with regularly in their dealings with their American counterparts.

Voters in the most powerful nation on Earth — and Canada’s neighbour and largest trading partner — are choosing between two starkly different choices on the ballot, and Canada must be attentive and adaptive across a number of policy areas.

Three-part process

Scenario planning provides an effective way to address such high levels of uncertainty. The method can generate difficult and radically different descriptions of the future by way of challenging participants, requiring imaginative interventions and overcoming stability and optimism biases.

At the MacEachen Institute for Public Policy and Governance at Dalhousie University, our team used this method extensively throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, including with members of the tourism industry in early 2021. The method proved to be an effective tool for these organizations in planning for the 2021 tourism season in light of the uncertainty posed by COVID-19.

There are typically three parts to the approach, divided by sessions. The first session establishes the goals the participants wish to achieve in light of their unique challenges and timelines. Goals vary but usually address some aspect of the medium-term success of the organization. Timelines can be anything from a few months down the road to decades from now.

Motivating factors

The group then discusses drivers, which are highly impactful forces beyond their immediate control that will shape the scenarios. Two drivers are selected, often based on supply-and-demand concepts.

During the second session, participants describe four scenarios based on the two drivers, answering questions that include:

What does this scenario look like?
How would we arrive at this scenario?
What are the underlying causes of the scenario?
What are the critical failures and opportunities in this scenario?

Finally, the group names the scenario. The four scenarios are deliberately intended to be different and extreme in order to push people beyond their comfort zones.

At the third session, participants establish how they’re going to judge policies and operational changes knowing that any one of the four scenarios could materialize.

Trade, economy

In terms of scenario planning for the Canada-U.S. relationship, Canadian policymakers could consider U.S. trade policies as the first driver (liberal trade policies vs. protectionist policies) and the state of the American economy as the second driver (it either booms or it sinks into a deep recession).

Policymakers can use a two-by-two matrix to discuss potential strategies in light of the possible scenarios posed by the U.S economy and trade policies.
(MacEachen Institute for Public Policy and Governance)

Organized as a two-by-two matrix, policymakers can explore four plausible future scenarios: either liberal or protectionist trade policies, during either an economic boom or a recession.

Within these four scenarios, policymakers can develop criteria by which to evaluate Canadian policies knowing that any one of these four scenarios could materialize.

There are important things to consider at the design stage.

To start, it can be time-consuming to organize and execute the sessions. You can run remarkably simple and helpful sessions in a day, or extremely involved ones over several months.

The number of participants is flexible. Usually it involves a small to medium-sized group, but individuals can use the two-by-two matrix to think through problems over lunch.

Who’s there matters. We tend to invite people who represent different parts of an organization or sector. That provides legitimacy to the process and satisfies a sense of fair play, and this approach can also help participants accept the conclusions and communicate them broadly.

At the same time, having representatives from each part of the organization can lead to turf wars. It can serve to reinforce existing institutional arrangements rather than challenge, change and in some cases abolish them. Bringing in guest speakers to share best practices from other jurisdictions can help to discuss difficult issues.

The Ambassador Bridge, spanning the Detroit River between Windsor and Detroit, in December 2021. The trade and economic relationship between the U.S. and Canada provides lots of material for scenario planning for Canadian policymakers.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Fred Thornhill

Embracing diversity

Scenario planning exercises also favour elite groups — experts, company executives and clever high flyers who are skilled at imaginative thinking. Turning to these elite groups can be at odds with equity, diversity, inclusion and accessibility principles.

Diverse sources of information can challenge participants to think differently and also help participants to understand the impacts of scenarios to different communities.

Participants also need to be able to speak frankly. Values may differ, and attempts by participants to avoid saying anything controversial can crowd out more nuanced thoughts.

Generally, egalitarian dynamics lead to consensus-seeking solutions. But this doesn’t always result in more radical transformations. In some respects, the four possible scenarios compel participants to consider quite different views, which can be helpful.

Diverse participants in scenario planning sessions can challenge people to think differently.
(Shutterstock)

All of this makes discussing how to judge new programs at the third session more challenging and important.

One way to address these challenges is to have a broad way to discuss and evaluate each strategy. Typically, we examine different parts of the strategy — how an organization gathers information, sets standards and changes behaviour internally — and different criteria by which to judge the strategies (efficiency, fairness and accountability and stability and learning).

An experienced moderator with some professional distance from the group can help to keep the conversation on time, on subject and challenge participants when conventional wisdom starts to creep in.

Public agencies are premised on a command-and-control dynamic, but policymakers increasingly need tools and skills that allow them to anticipate, address and communicate risks over which they have limited control.

The U.S. election and its aftermath in the weeks and months to come are a salient and consequential example. Scenario planning allows policymakers to challenge their assumptions and have difficult conversations in light of quickly changing events in order to seize opportunities and reduce vulnerabilities. More

Visual images often last in historical and popular memory. This is especially the case in presidential campaigns in the United States, which offer a vast mix of spectacle, surprise and drama.

An historian of political visual culture can no more predict which images are likely to last the test of time than we can know who will win. But we can explain why some historical images from presidential campaigns resonate.

This election season has produced the most media savvy and diverse campaign imagery of all time. Cable news, social media and artificial intelligence have created a whole new universe of image-based narratives.

In this rich visual landscape, here are three images likely to last the test of time.

1. Trump’s ‘fight!’ photo

The uncontroversial front-runner for defining image has to be Evan Vucci’s photograph of Donald Trump being led off the stage in Pennsylvania after surviving an assassination attempt in July.

Trump is surrounded by Secret Service agents after being shot at during a campaign rally on July 13.
AP Photo/Evan Vucci

Many people, including Trump, were quick to elevate the photograph to the iconic status of Joe Rosenthal’s photograph of troops raising the flag on Iwo Jima during the second world war.

Both are photographed from below and feature the national flag above Americans working against adversity to reach a common goal. Both fit squarely into the tradition of wartime photojournalism.

Both photographs enjoyed instantaneous popularity: Trump’s image went viral and the Iwo Jima image was featured on a US postage stamp before the war’s end.

US marines raise the American flag atop Mt Suribachi, Iwo Jima, Japan, in 1943.
AP Photo/Joe Rosenthal

But their greatest similarity resides in the cultural symbolism of the images.

Both accurately represent an historical moment; a specific point in time. But the point in time has been actively selected to fit a narrative. The narratives projected are deeply held mythologised symbols of aspirational patriotism.

Read more:
Elevation, colour – and the American flag. Here’s what makes Evan Vucci’s Trump photograph so powerful

Visual literacy prompts us to think about which images were discounted in the selection of these historically powerful two. Historical legacies and the national mythologies that fuel these lean toward images of success over pictures of wartime death and suffering.

This image of Trump fits all the criteria we would typically and probably unconsciously apply when assessing if an image is likely to have long-term significance.

The baseline characteristic of iconic images is a general bipartisan understanding of what an image “says”. Regardless of whether you agree with the message being conveyed, you understand its social context, why the image is provocative, dramatic or funny (or not), as well as its historical references.

However, contemporary images are not always so straightforward to read – and in a post-truth AI world, it is harder than ever to decipher the visual culture of politics.

2. Brat summer and coconut memes

Kamala Harris’s youth and vision for the future headlined her campaign’s creation of “Kamala HQ”. The strategy adopted the bright green branding and font of Charli XCX’s smash album Brat after the pop star posted on X: “kamala IS brat”.

Social media has been a critical tool in introducing Harris to voters, especially those of voting age for the first time in 2024. The campaign’s use of social media represented young people as engaged and respected decision makers.

Read more:
‘Kamala IS brat’: how the power of pop music has influenced 60 years of US elections

Voters have had more than a century to become accustomed to photojournalism. In contrast, a lot of social media representation has arisen from community activism over the past few years. Reporting from women’s marches this past weekend showed links to the visual culture of the protests that followed Trump’s 2016 election.

Arguably, the most historically significant of this “youth vote” image category are the internet memes of coconuts and coconut trees.

In a 2023 speech, Harris quoted her mother:

You think you just fell out of a coconut tree? You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.

This moment went viral during the 2024 election, and it was not long before people started signalling their support for Harris by adding a coconut emoji to their profile or comments.

The popularity of the coconut meme by Harris supporters indicates a rejection of the derogatory use of the term “coconut” against people of colour “acting white”.

The production and reception of memes by younger voters demonstrates a media literacy and sophistication that also requires continuous fact-checking.

This point was made in Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Harris, which urged her followers to do their own “reliability” checking of information in their feeds after Trump and other conservative figures shared AI-generated images of Swift and her fans allegedly supporting Trump.

3. The televised debate handshake

A key image from the debate between Harris and Trump came in the first few minutes, when Harris crossed the stage to offer her hand. It was the first debate handshake in eight years.

This was a bold action given Trump’s prowling movement on the 2016 debate stage against Democratic nominee, Hillary Clinton, and his well documented predilection for firm handshakes.

The handshake is representative of the campaign, which has been called “a referendum on gender”. It evoked the image of strong and confident leadership – a central theme as Harris spoke passionately about reproductive rights and abortion.

Televised presidential debates are one of the most keenly watched and analysed moments of the presidential election season. Image is everything.

Their importance is perhaps best indicated by Justin Sullivan’s photograph of President Joe Biden, mouth agape and looking frail beneath the word “presidential” during the June debate this year.

While they rarely lead to an outcome as extreme as a candidate exiting the race, as ended up happening with Biden, the images and soundbites they generate can resonate for decades.

Biden at the June 27 presidential debate.
Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

During the first ever nationally televised presidential debate in 1960, Republican candidate Richard Nixon was said to be unwell and refused to wear makeup. Compared to his opponent, Democratic nominee John F. Kennedy, he sweated profusely on stage, creating an image that was disastrous to his eventually unsuccessful campaign.

Between the staged and “gotcha” moments of every presidential campaign, debates provide a unique – and, in 2024, a singular – window into how the candidates relate to each other as humans across an ever-widening ideological divide. More