Words Are Not Durable

The shelf life of political messaging

Words, in politics, are not durable. They’re just words. This may seem intuitive, and perhaps elementary, but it is constantly baffling how many people take things at face value. What a political actor–politician or otherwise–says on Monday is merely a function of what serves them on Monday. In mere hours the incentives may have shifted, and the words (and actions!) will shift with them. This is the mechanics of how things work.

We too often treat political statements, social media, appearances etc. as commitments, or at least evidence of intent, and then feel betrayed when reality takes an unexpected turn. But reality was never in the words, it was in the mechanics. The incentive structure is beneath the words, and it is always in motion.

I was a “surrogate” for Never Back Down during the DeSantis presidential campaign. In January 2024, the campaign wiped all of the events on their calendar. Publicly and privately we were told that DeSantis was not dropping out of the race. Hours later, DeSantis withdrew.

At the moment we were given those assurances, they may have been true, or they may have been lies. What’s important is that at the moment the equilibrium shifted, the words were meaningless.

This is a distinction that many political consumers fail to understand: the difference between messaging and data. Everything that a public figure, be it an influencer or politician, communicates to anyone outside of their innermost circle is messaging. It serves a purpose at the moment of delivery, a signal calibrated to present conditions–or at least the conditions when it was crafted.

Even private communication is suspect. When someone tells you someone isn’t running, that statement exists in a context. Who benefits from you believing it? What does it cost them to say it? Who might you tell? The moment you hear it, you are part of the incentive structure, not outside of it. If you don’t consider this in your internal analysis, you’re not thinking critically enough or being skeptical enough of the messaging.

We see this directly with the current positioning of the GOP. Marco Rubio has publicly cast himself as a Vance loyalist, endorsing him as the natural successor to Trump. That may be genuine, and it may reflect the strategic reality of the moment. But if Vance stumbles, or if the midterms reshape the field, or if Trump’s magnetism wanes, or if his own star power grows too bright, those words will not bind him. They will dissolve like every other political statement issued under certain conditions that no longer apply. Rubio is a serious and talented politician who has survived multiple political cycles. Loyalty is a posture until it becomes costly, and then things may change.

Look back to last summer. Tucker Carlson publicly feuded with Trump over the Iran strikes in what looked like a definitive rupture. Trump called him “Kooky Tucker” and told him to get a network TV show again so people would listen to him. Within weeks, Tucker was back at the White House. The words, on both sides, meant what they meant at the time, which is to say they meant almost nothing durable. They were just representative of a momentary equilibrium, and the equilibrium shifted.

You should read politics the same way that an intelligence analyst reads signals, not the way a journalist reads quotes. Statements, tweets, money etc. are data points and not conclusions. You must weigh them against the context of incentives, timing, audience, trend, the flap of a butterfly’s wings. The person who told you something may believe it completely and still be wrong about what they’ll do when circumstances change, because maybe they don’t know yet what they’ll do. The person who told you something may have been told a lie by someone else, knowing they would spread it.

The great error of political media consumption is treating words as load-bearing. They’re really more like the weather. The load-bearing structures are incentives, coalitions, money, and time. If you want to predict what happens next, stop listening to what people say in the moment and start looking at what it costs someone to say something, or why they might not say something else.

Everything exists in context, and that is subject to change at all times. Anyone who tells you otherwise is just messaging. Including, possibly, me.