Conor McGregor does not have much time for Donald Trump. In November, he was chased down by a reporter and asked of what he thought of the Republican presidential candidate. This was his response:
Donald Trump can shut his big, fat mouth. I don't give a fuck about Donald Trump.
While McGregor may not like Trump - perhaps because he is a rational human being - the two men have quite a lot in common.
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In the heyday of the print media, the purchasing of a single paper would give you a series of definite and collected facts, which would at the very least be true until the following day, in which that day's paper would either consolidate them or prove them to have been incorrect. That's no longer the case, and with new facts and arguments appearing on our timelines every second, it's incredibly bloody difficult to understand the nuances of exactly what's going on.
Hence the rise of the post-fact age: in the absence of facts, people find it easier to simply vote with emotion. Hence the result of Brexit: it was easier to be persuaded by the emotion stirred by people appealing to the idea of "taking back our borders" than check the exact figures on the £350 million promised to the NHS every week.
McGregor and Trump have tapped into this post-fact age: they have marketed themselves to the millions of people who live on social media, appealing to emotion by modelling themselves as an image of wish-fulfillment.
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Let's start with McGregor. Partly the reason he polarises opinion is because there has never quite been an Irish athlete like him before. Rarely, if ever, has Ireland ever produced a sportsman of such astonishing self-confidence, and Irish people of an elder generation will find McGregor's concept of Irishness rather odd:
I'm an Irish man. We don't give a fuck about feelings. We'll tell you the truth. People ask me a question about somebody, I tell them the truth.
Of course, there will be anecdotal contradictions, but on the whole, us Irish have not been historically known for our straight-talking and disregard for other's feelings. The important word there is historically.
McGregor's marketing genius has been to recognise the change here. Whereas Irish people were once brought up according to the social mores of an institution - namely the Catholic Church - that is no longer the case. Today, most people under 30 in Ireland were not raised by the stuffy, repressive and inward-looking rule of the Church.
Instead, young people in Ireland have a much more fluid view of life, caused by the combination of being inherently suspicious to large institutions and a much wider view of the world and the possibilities an individual can have in it.
In essence, Ireland today is filled with people divorced from the country which raised its politicians.
McGregor has marketed himself as the ideal symbol of the younger generation: a man who's hard work, staunch self-confidence and absolute refusal to be beholden to anybody or any larger body (ie the UFC). He has tapped into an excluded generation of Irish people, and become its image of success: an Irishman gaining international success through self-determination and a rejection of anybody who holds him back.
When asked why he is loved by his supporters, McGregor said that "they love me because I love myself".
How's he done it? It is partly through flying to Vegas, knocking a man out in 13 seconds and draping himself in the Irish tricolour. It has mainly been achieved, however, through the cultivation of an image of success fed to people on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. (Hence how bloody often mcGregor goes on about money).
The championing of self-determination has been vital for McGregor, the fulfilling of a promise to knock Jose Aldo out in the first round at UFC 194 a prime example.
Social media has been his main instrument, however. The most notorious example of this came earlier this year:
I have decided to retire young.
Thanks for the cheese.
Catch ya's later.— Conor McGregor (@TheNotoriousMMA) April 19, 2016
This became even more of the McGregor ideal, that a single tweet could send the UFC/'the company' into meltdown, with the number of retweets taken as an example of how the UFC are nothing without McGregor. If you wanted an indication of the depth of emotion this stirred in supporters, study its content: "I have decided to retire young" is fairly unspecific, and could refer to any time in the context couple of years, rather than with "immediate effect".
If you wanted an indication of the depth of emotion this stirred in supporters, study its content: "I have decided to retire young" is fairly unspecific, and could refer to any time in the context couple of years, rather than with "immediate effect".
Yet this is the power of social media: a direct line of communication with supporters without having to be filtered through a media institution. The use of social media offers powerful people an unprecedented power to project a certain image of themselves.
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Somebody said, oh, Trump's a great entertainer. That's a lot of bullshit, I'll tell you. We have a message, we have a message, and the message is we don't want to let other people take advantage of us.
Trump's rhetoric here is not unlike McGregor's above.
Like McGregor, Donald Trump has also tapped into a wide social anxiety in the U.S. He has identified American citizens left behind by Barack Obama's economy, but has done so in a far more pernicious and disgraceful way: by blaming immigration.
He has appealed to the emotions of voters with this vague idea that America should be made great again rather than to any level of rational thought. There seems to be no firm idea of when, exactly, America was great, but it appears to have been some time in the past. The only definite idea Trump seems to have is that America was better when everybody worked; a time when immigration laws were tighter.
America was of course founded by settlers from England, but this awkward truth is unimportant in the post-fact age. McGregor has tapped into the anxieties of a peripheral Irish generation, and Trump has tapped into those left behind by the Obama's economy, those distrustful of the idea of ObamaCare - essentially social welfare for those, who, in their minds, are unwilling to mind. During the race for the Republican nomination, Trump won 50% more votes than any other candidates among those earning less than $50,000.
Trump is using social media to cultivate an image of his own success: he uses the word Trump as being synonymous with success. Having appealed to his voter's anxieties, he is marketing himself as some kind of master deal-maker, the businessman who will cut a good deal for the traditional Americans who simply want to go to work:
Look at the trade deficit with China. Look at the Iran deal. I’ve made a fortune by making deals. I do that. I do that well. That’s what I do.
Trump uses social media to give his followers the image of a corrupt or "crooked" system, meaning the fact he tweets himself gives it an odd level of credibility:
Objective fact-checking proves that this idea that Trump is a success as nonsense: he has filed for bankruptcy FOUR TIMES.
But this does not matter when Trump can essentially publish himself: he could afford not to bother turning up to a couple of the Republican nominee debates. His social media followings are enormous: 10.3 million followers on Twitter and 2.1 million Instagram followers. Dan Pfieffer, Barack Obama's social media guru said during the republican nomination race that Trump is "way better at the internet than anyone else in the GOP which is partly why he is winning".
Like McGregor, Trump has found a huge base of supporters by appealing to their anxieties, and through social media, has been able to market himself as the spokesperson for that group of people.
McGregor is nowhere near as obnoxious as Trump, but that doesn't mean the two men have nothing in common.
See Also: Watch: Conor McGregor Had A Message For Nate Diaz On Conan O'Brien Show
