Trump’s Ugly Self-Interest Is Bad Enough— But It’s Vance Who’s Plotting To Undermine Democracy

Orwell’s Nightmare— Rebooted By Vance, Thiel And Curtis Yarvin

Mencius Goldbug Dummy

Monday, on Twitter, CNN anchors Kaitlin Collins and Jim Sciutto went back and forth about politics’ most egregious liar. After reporting that Biden angrily said that Señor Trumpanzee was lying about his contact with Governor Brian Kemp after the hurricane hit Georgia. “He is lying,” said Biden. “Let me get this straight: he's lying... I've spoken to the governor. I've spent time with him and he told me he's lying. I don't know why he does this.” Kemp contradicted Trump’s bullshit about Biden ignoring Georgia: “He offered that if there’s other things we need, just to call him directly, which I appreciate that.” Sciutto added some useful context: “Trump lies, repeats the lie and then, as the right-wing information bubble becomes more impregnable, the lie becomes fact for a portion of the population. This is not new but it has become the norm for Trump. And there is less and less pushback from his party for either the lies, or personal insults, or threats, etc. It’s now a decade-long American story.”

A friend of mine in the New York suburbs told me that two of her neighbors believe everything Trump says. Everything. Cats and dogs being devoured by avaricious Haitians? “Quick, lock up Fido and get the AK-47 out of the gun safe.” It’s why Trump— like authoritarians the world over before him— discredited the mainstream media as quickly as he could. He couldn’t afford to have his followers with an independent source of reality reality could only come from him.

The neighbors are in a high end neighborhood but maybe they weren’t paying a lot of attention in high school literature classes. If they had, they would be aware that Señor T’s relationship with the truth mirrors Orwell’s depiction of “doublethink” in 1984. Doublethink, the ability to hold two contradictory beliefs simultaneously and accept both, thrives in the Trumpian universe. He repeatedly asserts his lies, knowing that for a large portion of his base, reality is malleable— something to be reshaped through sheer repetition and volume.

Like Big Brother’s Party in Orwell’s dystopia, Trump understands that control over information is the first step in controlling people’s perceptions of truth. By undermining trusted sources of information, he became the singular voice dictating what was real and what was false. In doing so, he transforms blatant falsehoods into accepted realities for those willing to submit to his narrative. In 1984, Orwell warned of the dangers of a population that succumbs to this kind of manipulation, where the truth is whatever the ruling figure says it is. Trump's technique— bombarding the public with endless lies, each reinforcing the last— creates a feedback loop reminiscent of Orwell's Ministry of Truth, which rewrote history to suit the present needs of the regime. Sciutto's observation about the “right-wing information bubble” is a perfect parallel to Orwell’s portrayal of a society trapped in an information cage, incapable of questioning authority. In both instances, facts become flexible, while dissent is rendered meaningless, buried under a constant stream of falsehoods.

And beyond the constant stream of falsehoods, let’s never forget that the projectionism— accusing others, without a shred of evidence, of the very actions or traits he embodies—  could have been ripped straight from Orwell, where the Party perpetually blames external enemies for its own sins. Just as Big Brother's regime constantly warns of threats from imagined adversaries to distract from its own brutal control, Trump reflexively accuses others of dishonesty, corruption, and deceit, traits he demonstrates with every passing day. By casting Biden, the media or political opponents as liars, he projects his own relentless dishonesty outward, ensuring his base remains focused on these imagined faults in others rather than confronting the overwhelming evidence of his own. Projection, like Orwell's “Two Minutes Hate,” serves a vital purpose: it directs rage and suspicion away from the leader and towards a convenient scapegoat. Trump’s lies about the media being “fake news” or calling his political adversaries corrupt, serve this function perfectly. Just as the Party’s enemies in 1984 are the eternal villains responsible for the people's suffering, Trump's adversaries— whether the mainstream media or his Democratic rivals— are endlessly blamed for the nation's ills. This deflection not only shields Trump from accountability but also solidifies his control over a population eager to follow his lead, leaving them trapped in a cycle of projection and misplaced anger.

Who recalls Trump withholding hurricane aid to Puerto Rico and wildfire assistance to California while he was still in the White House? Projecting again, he accused North Carolina Gov. Roy Cooper, a Democrat, of withholding aid from Republican areas, the kind of thing he would do but no decent human being would contemplate. Many people say Trump is a vicious, rabid dog who should be shot in the street. I disagree; he MUST be tried first, executed after. To gin up more deadly divisiveness, he tweeted on his failing social media platform that “Biden and Harris have left Americans to drown in North Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Alabama, and elsewhere in the South. Under this Administration, Americans always come last, because we have ‘leaders’ who have no idea how to lead!” I would pay to be on the jury— or the firing squad after the trial. [Easy to say, but I probably wouldn’t really want to be on the firing squad or even watch it taking place— just know it happened.]

And, of course, it wasn’t just Orwell’s writing that so brilliantly presaged Trump’s appearance on the scene. Another one from back when we were in high school: In Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad’s classic novel, he explored moral corruption and the darkness within individuals who wield unchecked power. Trump’s embrace of lies and manipulation to maintain control mirrors Kurtz’s descent into madness and tyranny in the Congo. Kurtz, like Trump, uses grandiose and deceitful rhetoric to justify his actions and obscure the devastation he leaves behind. In the same way that Kurtz’s followers deify him despite his clear moral decay, virtually all of Trump’s addled and now thoroughly brainwashed supporters remain loyal, blind to the dark ethical void at the heart of his sick version of leadership.

The Crucible, Arthur Miller’s superb 1953 play about— more or less— the Salem witch trials is a brilliant study in mass hysteria, scapegoating and the destructive power of lies. sound familiar? Trump’s baseless accusations— both during his presidency and afterhe was rejected by the American people and failed to win a second term— parallel the witch hunts depicted by Miller, where truth is sacrificed in favor of power, paranoia and control. Just as his character Abigail Williams manipulates fear and fabricates lies to gain influence, Trump uses his own false claims— about election fraud, his political enemies, the media— to fuel a frenzy among his supporters. Miller's work underscores the danger of allowing lies and fear to spiral unchecked, leading to social division and moral collapse. I wonder how many MAGAts have read it and grasped it.

Yesterday, Jill Lawrence wrote something along the lines of what we all fear: Say Goodbye to Truth As We Know It If Trump And Vance Win. “Trump is allergic to facts and analysis,” she wrote, “whether on the campaign trail or in the Oval Office. Maybe people have forgotten how disorienting it was to constantly hear irrational nonsense from the president. Somehow that is not disqualifying for tens of millions of voters… [If they win there will be] a second Trump administration, this time on steroids with JD Vance on board to hasten the end of truth as we know it.”

The attacks on government sources of scientific information began right after Trump took office. Four days after his inauguration, the new administration “instructed the Environmental Protection Agency to remove the climate change page from its website,” Reuters reported at the time. In Trump’s first year, a January 2018 study found, thousands of climate web pages were erased or obscured at agencies across the government. Alarmed scientists had mobilized during the 2016 transition to document the anticipated damage and save endangered government data.

A 2022 research paper concluded the Trump administration had “regularly suppressed, downplayed, or simply ignored scientific research demonstrating the need for regulation to protect public health and the environment.” The authors compiled a lengthy and far-flung catalogue, from firings to hiding information, drawn from the Silencing Science Tracker database. “Anti-science behavior” was documented at twenty-three federal agencies, they said, even in unexpected places like the Justice Department and Federal Communications Commission.

…Vance is already in the same league as Trump when it comes to world-class lies and misinformation. He has already caused real-world harm, just like Trump did with COVID and on January 6th, with his incessant, intentional lies about Haitian immigrants stealing and eating pets. And just as Trump spins absurd tales of America as a dystopian nightmare, Vance is creating his own dystopian fantasy about America’s public schools.

Just the other day, a well-known Christian nationalist interviewed Vance at a “Courage Tour” event near Pittsburgh. (I didn’t believe it at first, but folks, this really happened.) Among the many fact-free things Vance said was this: “We’ve got American children who can’t add 5 plus 5, but they can tell you that there are 87 different genders.” He blamed “creeping socialism in our schools. We’ve gotta get it out of there and I think we cut off the money— stop spending your tax dollars on radical organizations that are poisoning the minds of our kids.”

Who wants to defund public schools? Practically nobody. Only 8 percent of adults in a recent poll said they’d be most likely to support a political candidate who wanted to cut public school funding. But Vance will keep using words like “radical” and “poison” and “socialism,” and insisting students can’t read, write or do math, to justify eliminating the U.S. Department of Education and starving public schools of resources.

Trump’s White House tenure was highly disconcerting for journalists and everyone else who depended on government data. Government information was the gold standard, whether you wanted to know how many people died in a war or what to wear the next day. And then, suddenly, web pages would be blank. Information had vanished. Trend lines could not be determined. Transcripts sometimes didn’t match what you heard,or what was said.

We should be able to count on our government for facts and truth. But it’s a true and frightening fact that we won’t be able to if Trump and Vance win.

Perhaps via Peter Thiel, perhaps not, new right ideologues like Vance (and Blake Masters) acknowledge— when in the right environment— that neo-monarchist Curtis Yarvin is a kind of guru. Earlier we watched Rachel Maddow bring up Yarvin while trying to explain how Vance turned so weird. In 2022, Andrew Prokop, looked at some of the same information and came to some of the same conclusions. Vance, then a Senate candidate, said on a obscure right-wing podcast that Trump “should he win another term, to ‘seize the institutions of the left,’ fire ‘every single midlevel bureaucrat’ in the US government, ‘replace them with our people,’ and defy the Supreme Court if it tries to stop him. To the uninitiated, all that might seem stunning. But Vance acknowledged he had an intellectual inspiration. ‘So there’s this guy, Curtis Yarvin, who has written about some of these things…’”

Yarvin, writing as Mencius Moldbug, advocates that the democratically-elected U.S. government should be abolished and replaced with a dictatorship or a monarchy… Yarvin has laid out a critique of American democracy: arguing that it’s liberals in elite academic institutions, media outlets, and the permanent bureaucracy who hold true power in this declining country, while the US executive branch has become weak, incompetent, and captured. But he stands out among right-wing commentators for being probably the single person who’s spent the most time gaming out how, exactly, the US government could be toppled and replaced— ‘rebooted’ or ‘reset,’ as he likes to say— with a monarch, CEO, or dictator at the helm. Yarvin argues that a creative and visionary leader— a ‘startup guy,’ like, he says, Napoleon or Lenin was— should seize absolute power, dismantle the old regime, and build something new in its place.” [NOTE: things worked out quite badly for the French and Russians because of Napoleon and Lenin, but I have no doubt that Yarvin feels he can do it better than either.]

Yarvin is comfortable advocating for absolute power but disputes the ‘fascist’ label, noting that “centralizing power under one ruler long predates fascism, and that his ideal monarch should rule for all rather than fomenting a class war as fascists do. ‘Autocratic’ fits as a descriptor, though his preferred term is ‘monarchist.’ You won’t find many on the right saying they wholly support Yarvin’s program— especially the ‘monarchy’ thing— but his critique of the status quo and some of his ideas for changing it have influenced several increasingly prominent figures,” particularly Tucker Carlson and the avidly anti-American German-South African Peter Thiel, who bought Vance his Senate seat and his place as Trump’s running mate.

Overall, Yarvin is arguably the leading intellectual figure on the New Right— a movement of thinkers and activists critical of the traditional Republican establishment who argue that an elite left “ruling class” has captured and is ruining America, and that drastic measures are necessary to fight back against them. And New Right ideas are getting more influential among Republican staffers and politicians. Trump’s advisers are already brainstorming Yarvinite— or at least Yarvin-lite— ideas for the second term, such as firing thousands of federal civil servants and replacing them with Trump loyalists. With hundreds of “election deniers” on the ballot this year, another disputed presidential election could happen soon— and Yarvin has written a playbook for the power grab he hopes will then unfold.

…Take, for instance, Vance. In explaining to podcast host Jack Murphy why he became a Trump supporter after initially disdaining him, Vance said, “I saw and realized something about the American elite, and about my role in the American elite, that took me just a while to figure out. I was redpilled”— using the reference Yarvin helped popularize. “We are in a late republican period,” Vance told Murphy. “If we’re going to push back against it, we’re going to have to get pretty wild, and pretty far out there, and go in directions that a lot of conservatives right now are uncomfortable with.”

…It no longer seems clear that voters would reject such a pitch. Trump’s ascendancy already proves that many American voters are no longer so enamored of niceties about the rule of law and civics class pieties about the greatness of the American separated powers system. Political messaging about “threats to democracy” has polled poorly this year, with voters not particularly engaged by it.

… The rule of law in America is based on shared beliefs and behaviors among many actors throughout the system, but it has no magical power. The courts have no mechanism to actually force a president to abide by their wishes should he defy their rulings. Yet, with certain notable exceptions, they have had an extraordinary track record at getting presidents to stay in line. Defying the Supreme Court means ending the rule of law in the US as it has long been understood.

Yarvin has suggested just that— that a new president should simply say he has concluded Marbury v. Madison— the early ruling in which the Supreme Court greatly expanded its own powers— was wrongly decided. He’s also said the new president should declare a state of emergency and say he would view Supreme Court rulings as merely advisory.

Would politicians back this? J.D. Vance, in the podcast mentioned above, said part of his advice for Trump in his second term would involve firing vast swaths of federal employees, “and when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did, and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’”

One reason past presidents may have been reluctant to defy the Supreme Court is that there is one body that can keep them in check— Congress, which can impeach and actually remove a president from office, and ban him from running again.

Now, congressional majorities have been gradually getting more deferential to their party’s presidents. Yet the threat of impeachment and removal hung over much of Trump’s decision-making and likely prevented him from going further in several key moments. For instance, he didn’t fire special counsel Robert Mueller, and he backed down and left office after January 6 (while Mitch McConnell’s allies were leaking that the GOP Senate leader might support impeachment, in an apparent threat to Trump). Congress also frequently cut Trump out of policymaking, ignoring his veto threats.

Yarvin’s idea here is that Trump (or insert future would-be autocrat here) should create an app— “the Trump app”— and get his supporters to sign up for it. Trump should then handpick candidates for every congressional and Senate seat whose sole purpose would be to fully support him and his agenda, and use the app to get his voters to vote for them in primaries. Trump has been picking primary favorites and had some success in open seat contests, but this would be a far more large-scale, strategic, and systematic effort.

The goal would be to create a personalistic majority that nullifies the impeachment and removal threat, and that gives the president the numbers to pass whatever legislation he wants. If you can win majorities in this way, then “congratulations, you’ve turned the US into a parliamentary dictatorship,” Yarvin told Chau. Effectively, the US’s Madisonian separation of powers will have been made moot.

“I think it could be done by, um, anyone with a few billion dollars to spare,” he continued. “This is what pisses me off— that I don’t know anyone with, like, billions of dollars who could do this.” He then paused, which you can read into as you wish. “Oh— you know, such is life.”

Moving forward in the state of emergency, Yarvin told Anton the new government should then take “direct control over all law enforcement authorities,” federalize the National Guard, and effectively create a national police force that absorbs local bodies. This amounts to establishing a centralized police state to back the power grab— as autocrats typically do.

Yarvin sells his brand of autocracy as modern and efficient— appealing to a tech-driven generation that may not see the warning signs of history (recall Napoleon and Lenin). His ability to wrap dictatorship in the language of innovation and startup culture makes his philosophy all the more dangerous, because it taps into a futuristic idealism while undermining the very structures that safeguard freedom. The danger isn't just theoretical— it's very real. If Vance and those like him gain power, we risk watching our democratic institutions hollowed out from within, replaced by a government run by tech oligarchs and power-hungry elites who care nothing for the will of the people. It's not just about 'rebooting' a broken system; it's about creating a new order where citizens' voices no longer matter. Let’s not lose sight that just as Trump has spent years dismantling trust in institutions and spinning a dystopian vision of America, Vance is taking it even further by suggesting a literal seizure of power— an echo of Trump's authoritarian tendencies, but more calculated and ideologically driven. While Trump thrives on chaos and spectacle, Vance's vision represents a cold, methodical erosion of democracy, guided by twisted thinkers like Yarvin, whose endgame is a government stripped of any democratic veneer.

If Vance ever gets power, America gets Yarvin