At The Heart Of Trumpism— As With All Authoritarian Movements— Is A Raging River Of Disinformation

Anne Applebaum has a good understanding of how authoritarian regimes have used disinformation to grab power. Yesterday she watched clips of Trump’s MAGA rally near Dayton and tweeted about Trump’s disinformation campaign against the American people. It goes beyond Trump’s continuous unsubstantiated claims, gaslighting, attacks on the media as “fake news” and promotion of baseless conspiracy theories to discredit political opponents and shape public perception. His rhetoric undermines trust in democratic institutions and even erodes the foundations of objective truth itself! The MAGA movement in general promotes lies and conspiracy theories to advance its agenda and is barely distinguishable from QAnon’s allegations that a secret cabal of Satanic pedophiles controls the world and that Señor T is waging a secret war against. This kind of spreading of disinformation poses significant challenges to democracy, as it undermines trust in institutions, fuels polarization and threatens the integrity of public discourse. Sometimes it sounds like a mishmash of Goebbels, Stalin and Orwell’s 1984.

Goebbels

I hope all DWT regulars have read 1984 and take it seriously as an accurate depiction of a totalitarian regime that manipulates reality, suppresses dissent and uses propaganda to maintain power. The Trump-like Big Brother and “the Party” employ tactics beyond just disinformation, like Newspeak, Thought Police and constant surveillance to control the thoughts and behaviors of citizens. The manipulation of language and historical records serves to maintain the Party's authority and erase dissenting voices. 

Long before Trump came down that escalator, Hitler/Goebbels and Stalin's regime engaged in historical revisionism, altering records, suppressing opposition and censoring information to fit the regimes’ narrative. And long before them, Egyptian pharaohs used monumental architecture to propagate narratives of divine rule. Later, monarchs, feudal lords and the Catholic Church wielded near-total control of information dissemination (and censorship), using religious doctrine and imagery to control the thoughts and behaviors of the masses.

Trump’s followers tend to be less educated— if not less intelligent— and have a predilection towards authoritarianism. But outside of the MAGA core, disinformation's effectiveness is far from guaranteed. By controlling information and manipulating public perception, authoritarian regimes like the one he’s trying to build can legitimize MAGA rule by crafting a positive image, suppressing dissent and creating an illusion of popular support while sowing distrust between different social groups— divide and conquer— and weakening potential opposition by creating enough fear and uncertainty to keep people from challenging the regime.

Back to 1984 for a brief moment, Orwell spent a lot of time looking at the perversion of truth— that is a key component of the MAGA and QAnon movements— as well as the existential threat of totalitarianism. The parallels between Orwell's fictional dystopia and what Trump is attempting to build in America are all too relevant to understanding and confronting what the MAGAts are doing to our country today.

Yesterday there was a good example from Ed Kilgore, who noted that the GOP’s spurious claim that we were better off in 2020 than we are now is ust plain weird. I mean 2020 ws pretty wretched. “After all,” wrote Kilgore, “it’s when COVID-19 arrived. The pandemic eventually took over a million lives just in America. Our economy collapsed. Schools and businesses closed, unemployment sky-rocketed, most people were isolated and terrified. As scientists struggled to figure out how the virus spread, how to keep from contracting it, and how to treat it, most Americans were hoarding hand sanitizer, paper towels, and toilet paper; avoiding door knobs, hand rails, and other shared surfaces; and obsessively cleaning their groceries and their mail. It was indeed a time most of us would prefer to forget. And it seems the Republican Party is counting on that. As Noah Berlatsky of Public Notice points out, Republicans are now regularly trotting out Ronald Reagan’s famous 1980 debate question, ‘Are you better off than you were four years ago?,’ as though it’s a slam-dunk winner for them.”

As Chris Hayes showed very clearly last week, that whole thing is nowhere near the truth no matter how you measure it. Watch this clip from last Tuesday:

Yesterday, Jim Rutenberg and Steven Myers decided to tackle disinformation for the NY Times in terms of how successful Trump and his movement have been in the battle to spread it. Protecting the public from Trump’s lies sparked “a counteroffensive, a coordinated effort to block what they viewed as a dangerous effort to censor conservatives. They have unquestionably prevailed. Waged in the courts, in Congress and in the seething precincts of the internet, that effort has eviscerated attempts to shield elections from disinformation in the social media era. It tapped into— and then, critics say, twisted— the fierce debate over free speech and the government’s role in policing content... recast as deep-state conspiracies to rig elections.”

While little noticed by most Americans, the effort has helped cut a path for Trump’s attempt to recapture the presidency. Disinformation about elections is once again coursing through news feeds, aiding Trump as he fuels his comeback with falsehoods about the 2020 election.

“The censorship cartel must be dismantled and destroyed, and it must happen immediately,” he thundered at the start of his 2024 campaign.

The counteroffensive was led by former Trump aides and allies who had also pushed to overturn the 2020 election. They include Stephen Miller, the White House policy adviser; the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana, both Republicans; and lawmakers in Congress like Representative Jim Jordan, Republican of Ohio, who since last year has led a House subcommittee to investigate what it calls “the weaponization of government.”

Those involved draw financial support from conservative donors who have backed groups that promoted lies about voting in 2020. They have worked alongside an eclectic cast of characters, including Elon Musk, the billionaire who bought Twitter and vowed to make it a bastion of free speech, and Mike Benz, a former Trump administration official who previously produced content for a social media account that trafficked in posts about “white ethnic displacement.” (More recently, Benz originated the false assertion that Taylor Swift was a “psychological operation” asset for the Pentagon.)

…The biggest winner, arguably, has been Trump, who casts himself as victim and avenger of a vast plot to muzzle his movement.

Biden is “building the most sophisticated censorship and information control apparatus in the world,” Trump said in a campaign email last week, “to crush free speech in America.”