Or Has COVID Made People Dumber?
It’s not next week or the week after; it’s the week after that. I mean Election Day, which isn’t a national holiday because… the Democrats never bothered? Anyway by then over half the voters will have cast their ballots. Votes are already coming in in Virginia, California, Maryland, Illinois, Maine, Michigan, Arizona, Georgia, Minnesota, Alaska, Florida and Indiana. Iowa and Indiana start tomorrow and Colorado starts Friday.
As always, Democrats are panicking. The party establishment likes that; fear of Trump is, unfortunately, the best motivator the party has. Possibly even more freaked out than Democrats are the NeverTrump Republicans. Yesterday, Bill Kristol was comparing Orwell’s “Two Minutes of Hate” from 1984 with Trump’s more recent Two Months of Hate… and Midnight In America. “The September 10 presidential debate,” he wrote, “taught Trump and his campaign that they could not win if the campaign were… a debate. So Trump is refusing to participate in a second debate, or for that matter in any interview that might be a simulacrum of a debate. More fundamentally, Trump has abandoned any pretense of having to debate real issues or having to put forth any serious programs. Of course, Trump’s heart has always been in authoritarian demagoguery, not in democratic and civic debate. But in the closing weeks of this campaign, any mask of democratic normalcy and civic decency has been tossed aside… [His] racist, anti-immigrant messaging is getting darker.”
Are Trump and Vance being punished at the polls for this intensification of lying and hatred? Not at all. The Trump-Vance ticket seems to have gained a bit in the last two weeks, just as the hatred and darkness have become more central to their message. It turns out that what it means to be an undecided or swing voter is to be undecided about the choice between liberal democracy and authoritarianism. And the swing voters seem to be swinging towards authoritarianism.
It’s shocking and depressing. One could tell oneself in 2016 that Trump won despite the lies and hatred. Now if he wins, it would seem to be because of the lies and hatred.
…We Americans also want to believe instinctively that evil always defeats itself. But it doesn’t. We want to tell ourselves that it can’t happen here. But it can.
And it’s not just that it can happen here. Trump is now promising us that it will happen here.
Now of course, it needn’t happen here. The presidential race is a toss-up. And I think the Harris campaign understands that it needs to close by more effectively emphasizing what’s at stake.
But the burden can’t all be on the campaign or the candidate. Others could step up.
When Trump calls for the use of the military here at home, surely it is time for his former cabinet secretaries and retired general officers, John Kelly and Jim Mattis, to explain, straight to camera, how a Trump second term would be a threat to the Constitution they swore to uphold and to the nation they’ve served, and to urge a vote for Harris.
When Trump spews hatred at immigrants, surely it’s time for George W. Bush, the former Republican president, who was— in the tradition of his father and Ronald Reagan— a fierce critic of demagoguery against immigrants, to come off the sidelines and help in the good fight.
When Trump and Vance refuse to back away from the Big Lie, surely it’s time for other Republicans who care about the truth, like Mitt Romney, to spend time explaining to the country how serious the Big Lie was and is.
And if the Great and Good don’t choose to help as they should?
Well, here the people rule. If we’re to be saved from being governed by four years (or more) of hate, we’ll have to muster the votes to save ourselves.
They’d be joining Trump’s former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley, who described Señor T to Bob Woodward by noting “he is the most dangerous person ever… he’s a total fascist. He is now the most dangerous person to this country… a fascist to the core.
On Sunday, Heather Cox Richardson wrote that “Trump’s behavior is Authoritarianism 101. In a 1951 book called The True Believer, political philosopher Eric Hoffer noted that demagogues appeal to a disaffected population whose members feel they have lost the power they previously held, that they have been displaced either religiously, economically, culturally, or politically. Such people are willing to follow a leader who promises to return them to their former positions of prominence and thus to make the nation great again. But to cement their loyalty, the leader has to give them someone to hate. Who that is doesn't really matter: the group simply has to be blamed for all the troubles the leader’s supporters are suffering. Trump has kept his base firmly behind him by demonizing immigrants, the media, and, increasingly, Democrats, deflecting his own shortcomings by blaming these groups for undermining him. According to Hoffer, there’s a psychological trick to the way this rhetoric works that makes loyalty to such a leader get stronger as that leader's behavior deteriorates. People who sign on to the idea that they are standing with their leader against an enemy begin to attack their opponents, and in order to justify their attacks, they have to convince themselves that that enemy is not good-intentioned, as they are, but evil. And the worse they behave, the more they have to believe their enemies deserve to be treated badly. According to Hoffer, so long as they are unified against an enemy, true believers will support their leader no matter how outrageous his behavior gets. Indeed, their loyalty will only grow stronger as his behavior becomes more and more extreme. Turning against him would force them to own their own part in his attacks on those former enemies they would now have to recognize as ordinary human beings like themselves.”
And just before she published her post, she noted that “Trump made the full leap to authoritarianism, calling for using the federal government not only against immigrants, but also against his political opponents. After weeks of complaining about the ‘enemy within,’ Trump suggested that those who oppose him in the 2024 election are the nation’s most serious problem. He told Fox News Channel host Maria Bartiromo that even more troubling for the forthcoming election than immigrants ‘is the enemy from within…we have some very bad people, we have some sick people, radical left lunatics… And it should be easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military.’ Trump’s campaign seems to be deliberately pushing the comparisons to historic American fascism by announcing that Trump will hold a rally at New York City’s Madison Square Garden on October 27, an echo of a February 1939 rally held there by American Nazis in honor of President George Washington’s birthday. More than 20,000 people showed up for the ‘true Americanism’ event, held on a stage that featured a huge portrait of Washington in his Continental Army uniform flanked by swastikas. Trump’s full-throated embrace of Nazi ‘race science’ and fascism is deadly dangerous, but there is something notable about Trump’s recent rallies that undermines his claims that he is winning the 2024 election. Trump is not holding these rallies in the swing states he needs to win but rather is holding them in states— Colorado, California, New York— that he is almost certain to lose by a lot.”
Trump seems eager to demonstrate that he is a strongman, a dominant candidate, when in fact he has refused another debate with Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris and backed out of an interview with 60 Minutes. He has refused to release a medical report although his mental acuity is a topic of concern as he rambles through speeches and seems entirely untethered from reality. And as Harris turns out larger numbers for her rallies in swing states than he does, he appears to be turning bloodthirsty in Democratic areas.
Today, Harris told a rally of her own in North Carolina: “[Trump] is not being transparent… He refuses to release his medical records. I've done it. Every other presidential candidate in the modern era has done it. He is unwilling to do a 60 Minutes interview like every other major party candidate has done for more than half a century. He is unwilling to meet for a second debate… It makes you wonder, why does his staff want him to hide away?... Are they afraid that people will see that he is too weak and unstable to lead America? Is that what’s going on?”
David Corn terms the Trump campaign a full-on disinformation campaign. “He freely tosses falsehoods at the electorate. The economy when he was president was the best ever. He did a great job on Covid. The current rate of inflation is the worst in US history. The US has provided more aid to Ukraine than Europe. Every Democrat and legal scholar wanted Roe v. Wade overturned. He was the smartest and most accomplished president the country has ever seen. And so on. It’s absurd braggadocio and a firehose of supposed but untrue facts— spewed to a degree far beyond what previous presidential candidates attempted to get away with.” But that ain’t nothin’ compared to the strategy his team has come up with.
“He concocts and promotes utterly false narratives to shape voters’ perceptions of fundamental realities,” Corn reminds us. “His campaign is a full-fledged project to pervert how Americans view the nation and the world, an extensive propaganda campaign designed to fire up fears and intensify anxieties that Trump can then exploit to collect votes. And the political media world has yet to come to terms with the fact that Trump is heading a disinformation crusade more likely to be found in an authoritarian state than a vibrant democracy. This is unlike other presidential campaigns in modern American history— other than his own previous efforts… Not merely peddling a series of lies, Trump is knitting together a full story that is bogus, trying to convince tens of millions of a reality that does not exist: They’re living in a dangerous hellhole in which they’re imperiled by barbarians, who happen to be people of color. And Trump then accuses Harris and President Joe Biden of purposefully orchestrating this purportedly deadly situation and the collapse of America. At a recent campaign stop, Trump presented a nutty conspiracy theory: ‘I will shut down all entries through Kamala’s migrant phone app. She’s got a phone app. It’s meant for the cartel heads. The cartel heads call the app, and they tell them where to drop the illegal migrants… It’s not even believable.’ It’s not true. The overarching goal of Trump’s disinformation efforts is to persuade voters that they should live in fear— and that only he can save them. At a campaign event in Wisconsin, Trump said of migrants, ‘They will walk into your kitchen, they’ll cut your throat.’ And elsewhere he brayed, ‘They’re conquering your communities.’ He pointed to Aurora, Colorado, ‘where they’re taking over with AK-47s.’ In another campaign speech, he warned it will get worse: ‘They’re going to take over a lot more than Aurora. They’re going to go through Colorado. They’re going to take over the whole damn state by the time they finish. Unless I become president.’ This was another phony story. Crime in Aurora is not driven by migrant gangs. On a different occasion, Trump maintained these beasts were on the rampage across Middle America: ‘You see how bad it’s getting when you look at what’s going on with migrants attacking villages and cities throughout the Midwest.’”
Trump has been depicting all of America as a place of tremendous peril: “You can’t walk across the street to get a loaf of bread. You get shot, you get mugged, you get raped, you get whatever it may be and you’ve seen it and I’ve seen it.” Yet crime rates across the nation are down this year, including for murder.
Trump’s effort to manipulate reality encompasses more than fear-mongering on immigration and crime. He regularly portrays America as in economic free fall: “A lot of great things would have happened, but now you have millions and millions of dead people. And you have people dying financially, because they can’t buy bacon; they can’t buy food; they can’t buy groceries; they can’t do anything. And they’re living horribly in our country right now.” While poverty remains an issue, as it always has, and prices for certain goods and services are high, traditional economic indicators show the US economy growing at a healthy clip and stronger than the economies of other Western nations. Still, Trump preaches doom-and-gloom: “Our country is a failing nation. This is a failing nation…We’re failing at everything we’re doing.”
… It’s one bullshit story after another, with the malicious intent of dehumanizing and demonizing his political rivals and large groups of people. When Trump denounced legal migrants at one rally, the audience chanted, “Send them back!” It was a real-life version of the Two Minutes Hate from George Orwell’s 1984. All told, Trump is relentlessly presenting a dark and spurious view of America— even darker and more spurious than previous iterations of the American Carnage message he has hawked— and proclaiming himself the only available savior. He is perpetuating a fraud. His electoral success is dependent on his ability to poison the national discourse and turn his fictions into reality for tens of millions of voters. And he is enthusiastically aided by a right-wing media ecosystem, a conservative movement, and a GOP that all work together to echo and affirm Trump’s deceptions, for that is how residents of MAGA-land attain influence, power, and profit. They must endorse Trump’s deceit or face being excommunicated.
“We live in a world now in which, because of social media and foreign interventions, the truth is always under assault, and that’s bound to seep into political campaigns,” says Larry Diamond, a professor of sociology and political science at Stanford who specializes in studying democracy around the world. “But to have a presidential campaign doing it on this scale— we’ve never seen anything like it. But this is not new for Trump. It’s his persona and mode of operation. In this campaign, it’s getting more chronic and extreme.”
…What Trump does, Diamond notes, is different: “It’s more comprehensive. It’s more systemic. It’s more outrageous. Most of the stuff pulled by previous candidates had some relationship to a real thing. He’s completely making stuff up. It’s not just one or two lies or the twisting of the truth. This is, like that film, everything, everywhere, all at once.”
…Trump is not merely heading a campaign fueled by the routine lies of politics. He is endeavoring to use these and other lies to create an alternative reality for millions so they will vote on the basis of a false understanding of the world. “I get asked all the time how to counteract it,” [Hunter College history professor Benjamin] Hett notes, “and I wish I had a better answer than ‘come with the truth and try to teach critical reading skills where and when you can.'” Diamond says, “What frustrates me is that I don’t know how to counter this. If you point out every single lie, it’s all you’ll be reporting. And still people will believe this.”
Trump’s disinformation con, boosted and abetted by a political party, an expansive media infrastructure, and an entire political movement, is a challenge for the United States and a test. Can his all-out war on the truth prevail? That depends on whether other media accurately portrays it, on how the rest of the political system responds to it, and on whether enough voters resist its pull. Trump has gotten far with this campaign, proving that disinformation delivered by the right carnival barker can be highly effective within America. The final vote count— and perhaps what happens afterward— will show if this nation can resolve its political divisions and differences within the realm of reason and rationality.
As D. Earl Stephens wrote yesterday, “Trump is provably a bigot, a tax-cheat, a felon, a serial liar, a traitor, and a complete fraud. He verbally and physically abuses women, and writes love letters to dictators… He insults our military, our NATO allies, and lately has gone full-Hitler on the campaign trail spewing some of the most disgusting venom that has been heard in this country in 100 years. He calls his political opponents ‘vermin.’ He has encouraged Americans to blame the Jews if he loses, and has accused hard-working immigrants of some of most abominable and heinous things imaginable including ‘raping our women’ and ‘eating our pets’— just to name a few… We won’t survive another Trump presidency. America will be toppled, and a madman will be given free rein to wage war and exact revenge on his own citizenry.” So for people wondering if there are any other reasons these MAGAts remain so loyal to their cult leader... how about this?
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