The GOP Base's Manufactured Convictions
Over the weekend, Sidney Blumenthal noted that “Hours after Trump declared his wish to kill Cheney, the Wall Street Journal editorial board, his reliable excuse maker for the executive collaborator class, published an editorial stating, ‘We don’t buy the fascism fears, and we doubt Democrats really do either.’ Trump is hellbent to break through any ‘sane-washing’ of the media smoothing over his viciousness and vulgarity. His call for an elaborate execution of a pre-eminent political opponent, a conservative Republican of the most partisan pedigree, is his definitive and final answer to those who quibble about his intentions and his unmooring from all traditional politics. His fascist-themed freakshow in Madison Square Garden followed by his firing squad fantasy are an augury of a second administration. His closing act has overwhelmed any media reflex for euphemism and both-siderism. He contemptuously stomps on every effort at normalization. Time and again, day after day, event after event, Trump insists on posing as the salient question of the election, certainly about the candidate himself: are you crazier today than you were four years ago?… [F]ormer staffers speculate about the hazy fine line between Trump’s infantilism and his dementia. There is no responsible person left around Trump. He has learned the lesson, sealed by January 6, not to trust the ‘normies.’”
If there was just one post we put up last week that I would wish DWT readers would take a look at, it was The Banality Of Evil In Red Hats— 2016-'24: How The Republican Party Base Became The Trump Cult, although Blumenthal made the point far more elegantly:
Trump’s night in the Garden on 27 October was early Hitler in style, not middle Hitler. The bellowing obscenities, racist sneers and violent threats were more reminiscent of the Munich beer hall phase of Hitler rousing the street gangs of Brownshirts than the Nuremberg rallies of disciplined ranks of storm troopers massed before his reviewing stand.
“An immense wave of eccentric barbarism … A primitive fairground brutality,” wrote the great German novelist Thomas Mann in 1930 about the Nazi rallies he observed. “This fantastic state of mind, of a humanity that has outrun its ideas, is matched by a political scene in the grotesque style … hallelujahs and bell-ringing and dervish-like repetition of monotonous catchwords, until everybody foams at the mouth. Fanaticism turns into a means of salvation, enthusiasm into epileptic ecstasy, politics becomes an opiate for the masses, a proletarian eschatology; and reason veils her face.”
“A quarter-of-an-hour before the opening time I walked through the chief hall of the Hofbräuhaus on the Platz in Munich and my heart was nearly bursting with joy,” wrote Hitler in Mein Kampf.
“The love in that room,” said Trump after his rally at Madison Square Garden. “It was breathtaking. It was like a love fest, an absolute love fest.”
Trump’s festival at the Garden was a fascist foreshadowing masquerading as a farce. As a screwball flying circus, it was a version of the Marx Brothers’ Night at the Opera. Everything was turned upside down in a pandemonium. Trump’s comedians, however, were no Groucho. It would have been better for Trump if his speakers had been equipped like the mute Harpo with a honking horn.
Trump’s master race of misfits found an authentic voice in the comic relief of Tony Hinchcliffe, who amid his slurs about Black people (“We carved watermelons together”), Latinos, Jews and Palestinians, said, “There’s literally a floating island of garbage in the middle of the ocean right now. Yeah, I think it’s called Puerto Rico.”
Hinchcliffe is the host of a podcast aptly called Kill Tony. With a dubious laugh line, as if on cue, the stage swiveled. Triumph of the Will turned into West Side Story. His performance fatally died like the character Tony in West Side Story, only this Tony died by suicide.
Life is all right in America
If you’re all white in America
With his assent, Trump’s night at the Garden was orchestrated by a malevolent crew of eternally stunted pranksters and gangsters who took control of his campaign’s closing argument. They were brought together principally by Trump’s son Don Jr, a pitiable figure who engages in abominable displays to gain his father’s approbation, and who has become central to the organization of the entourage floating around the campaign.
“Poor Don, he really got the brunt of everything,” said Ivanka. Abandoned and abused, he was shipped off to Czechoslovakia after the divorce of his parents to be raised during the summers by his mother’s grandparents – “the most memorable time in my life”, he said. He learned to speak fluent Czech. Back home, his new stepfather tried to choke him. His college roommates at the University of Pennsylvania recalled Trump coming to visit and smashing Don Jr in the face in front of his friends, knocking him to the ground. When Trump was invited to give a formal speech at Penn, Don Jr refused to attend. He wouldn’t speak with his brutal father for years. He drank heavily, “a fall-down drunk”, said a college friend. His first wife, Vanessa, once said to him, “You’re the one with the retarded father.” Now, Don Jr does anything he can to win Trump’s distracted attention and alienated affection. On the podium, he called out to his dad as “the king of New York.”
I don’t know what’s worse about Trump, the lies or the truth. Over the weekend, the NY Times published examples of both— Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Says Trump Will Seek to Remove Fluoride From Drinking Water and then Peter Baker’s Trump’s Wild Claims, Conspiracies and Falsehoods Redefine Presidential Bounds. “Throughout his life, Donald J. Trump has bent the truth to serve his needs, never more so than on the campaign trail to win back the White House.” Are “falsehoods” and “bent the truth” better than ‘lies”and “lied?” Baker says rewrites history. George Orwell spoke a lot about that in 1984… he had a whole branch of government set up to do just that.
“Trump,” wrote Baker, “spouted one statement after another that was fanciful, misleading, distorted or wildly false. He rewrote history. He claimed accomplishments that he did not accomplish. He cited statistics at odds with the record. He described things that did not happen and denied things that did. Public appearances by Trump throughout this year’s campaign have been an Alice-in-Wonderland trip through the political looking glass, a journey into an alternate reality often belied by actual reality. At its most fundamental, it boils down to this: America was paradise on earth when he was in charge, and now it’s a dystopian hellscape. Nuance, subtlety, precision and ambiguity play no role in the version that Trump promotes with relentless repetition. And it is a version that has found traction with tens of millions of supporters.”
Though, apparently, not as many Iowans as we all thought until Saturday night. And perhaps not as many North Carolinians have been taken in either.
Baker reminded his readers that “Trump’s four years in power were a nonstop treadmill for fact-checkers trying to catch up with the latest. His four years since leaving arguably have posed an even bigger challenge as he descended further into conspiracy theories, particularly around election integrity. Since leaving the White House, Trump for the first time has been held accountable in court for deception. He was convicted of 34 felonies for falsifying business records to cover up hush money to an adult film actor. He was found liable in a civil lawsuit for lying to banks about the value of his properties. He was found liable in separate lawsuits for lying about a woman who accused him of sexually assaulting her. None of that, however, has moved his base of supporters, many of whom accept his argument that the indictments and impeachments and lawsuits and judgments and conviction are part of a wide-ranging plot by partisan Democrats, the ‘deep state’ and a supposedly corrupt news media who are out to get him.”
According to Gallup, 41% of Americans find Trump “honest and trustworthy,” higher than the 38% who trusted Señor T in 2016, when he was judged to be more honest and more trustworthy than Hillary. “But dishonesty,” wrote Baker, “is not necessarily punished politically in the way it once was. Since Trump’s arrival on the presidential stage nine years ago, he has spun so many falsehoods so intensely that he has forced others to deal with what an aide once called ‘alternative facts.’ While his adversaries sputter with indignation, his allies accept his assertions and amplify them in the national conversation. ‘No one in American politics has ever lied on this scale,’ said Bill Adair, a Duke University professor and author of Beyond The Big Lie, published this fall. ‘His impact is not just in the volume and repetition of lies that he tells but also in the way that he has affected the culture of the Republican Party. He has made it more acceptable to lie, and that’s clear when you listen to debate on the House floor and you hear his lies get repeated, or you watch Fox and you hear his lies get repeated.’”
For generations, Trump has propelled himself to success in business and politics through an endless string of fabrications. He has lied about his net worth, about the height of his buildings, about the ratings of his reality television show, about the origins of America’s first Black president, about the legitimacy of the 2020 election, about migrants eating pet cats and dogs, even about whether he has visited Gaza.
This was not political at first. It was a modus operandi from the early days when he took over his father’s real estate business. His origin story itself is suffused in mythology. He likes to say that he got his start as a developer with just a $1 million loan from his father, but in fact, his father’s empire provided about $413 million when all the payments are adjusted for inflation, according to a 2018 investigation by the New York Times.
Even when the facts about his own family were inconvenient, he simply switched them. He used to say that his grandfather came from Sweden when in fact he came from Germany. He has said that his father came from Germany when in fact he was born in the Bronx.
…Trump likewise exaggerated his own fortune, lobbying the journalists at Forbes magazine to inflate his worth in order to get a better ranking on its richest people list. He even pretended to be someone else, inventing a fake public relations person alternately named John Barron or John Miller so he could call reporters and praise “Mr. Trump” or make false claims.
In his first memoir, The Art of the Deal, Trump explained this away as “truthful hyperbole,” a phrase that resonates to this day. But Tony Schwartz, his ghostwriter, said he himself came up with that language as he struggled with how to write a book that he knew was full of dubious assertions.
…In transforming himself from a celebrity builder into a presidential candidate in 2016, Trump revised his past. He claimed to have presciently warned the country about Osama bin Laden before the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and to have opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq, neither of which was true. He falsely claimed to hold the record for the most appearances on the cover of Time magazine, although the real record-holder remains Nixon
When attention turned to Russia, which was trying to intervene in the election on his behalf, Mr. Trump went from boasting that he knew President Vladimir Putin to denying that he ever met him. He said he had no business in Russia even though one of his fixers was secretly reaching out to Putin’s staff as part of an effort to build a Trump Tower in Moscow.
His administration began with a dispute about truth as he insisted that his inaugural crowd size was bigger than Obama’s had been and claimed that he actually won the 2016 popular vote, which he had actually lost by three million, because of phantom illegal votes. He asserted incorrectly that the United States was on the verge of war with North Korea when he came into office and that the American military had run out of all ammunition.
Every day he seemed to be throwing out “facts” that were not. He complained about the U.S. trade deficit with Canada, even though the United States had a trade surplus with its neighbor. He declared that the United States had never won a case at the World Trade Organization until he came along, even though it had won 90 percent of its cases.
He claimed credit for passing a veterans benefit law that was actually signed by Obama and said he was defending protections for pre-existing conditions while supporting a lawsuit that would have thrown out those protections. He complained when the pandemic hit that Obama had left him with no ventilators when in fact there was 16,660 in the stockpile.
…By the time Trump left office, his self-described summary of his record was stronger on superlatives than precision. He had built the greatest economy in history, he was the most popular Republican president in history, he did more for Black Americans than any president except possibly Abraham Lincoln, he passed the largest tax cut in history, Mexico was paying for the border wall and China was paying the tariffs he imposed.
None of that was true either. The economy was good but not the best ever. Multiple Republican presidents were more popular among Republicans at their peak than Trump was. Any number of presidents had a stronger claim to helping Black Americans than he did, such as Lyndon Johnson, who signed landmark civil rights, voting and fair housing legislation. Johnson also passed a bigger tax cut as a share of the economy than Trump did, as did Harry Truman, Ronald Reagan and Obama. Mexico never paid for the wall. Consumers paid the tariffs in the form of increased prices.
The fact-checkers at the Washington Post tabulated it all, cataloging 30,573 false or misleading statement over the course of his four-year presidency. That comes to an average of 21 every day he was in office.
By the time Trump left office, he had finally come up with a lie that was so profound, so consequential that it drove a cleavage through American society. Americans might not have cared all that much whether he told the truth about his businesses or his policies; many wrote that off as so much bluster. But now they were forced to take sides on the biggest lie of all, his insistence that he won the 2020 election.
No evidence ever emerged suggesting fraud or wrongdoing on a level that would have changed the outcome in a single state, much less flip the multiple states that would have been required to tilt the Electoral College in his direction. But Trump said it happened and he said it so often and so intensely that elected officials, political candidates, civic leaders, party figures and even everyday citizens were compelled to declare: Did they believe in the system or did they believe Trump?
That schism has come to define the country in the past four years and is at the heart of the election wrapping up on Tuesday. The outcome may be reasonably read as a verdict on Trump’s version of reality. If he wins, he will take it as vindication and has promised to use the next four years seeking “retribution” against those who refused to go along with his false claim. If he loses, his opponents will see it as validation of democracy even as they brace for what will surely be another claim of a stolen election and many Americans may not trust the result.
The question many analysts debate is whether Trump knows that his account of the 2020 outcome is false or has convinced himself because he simply cannot accept the idea of defeat. Investigations and interviews have made clear that Trump was told repeatedly that the fraud claims were untrue— not just by his opponents but by his own advisers and appointees. Yet he kept broadcasting them anyway.
…Whether he truly believes he won four years ago or not, he has persuaded many Americans. A full 33 percent of registered voters, including 66 percent of Trump supporters, agree with his false claims that Biden did not legitimately win in 2020, according to an ABC News/Ipsos poll last month.
Personally, I’m more interested whether Trump’s followers believe the Big Lie rather than how he processes it in his own sick, decrepit mind, because for millions of MAGAts, that Big Lie appears to be more than just a claim about the election; it’s actually become a pillar of their shallow identities and belief systems. Trump’s narrative gives them a clear, simple emotionally charged story, one that shields them from the psychological discomfort of doubt and offers a sense of belonging within an embattled, grievance-laden community. Mistrust in— and even hatred for— mainstream institutions and constant affirmation in social media echo chambers only reinforce their commitment. The power of the Big Lie lies in how it taps into core psychological needs: clarity, purpose and identity— all of which, we have to admit even if grudgingly, Trump has masterfully exploited, creating a belief that has become almost impervious to truth.
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