Donald Trump’s Alt-Reality
 Thomas B. Edsall


Since Election Day there has been an abundance of liberal hyperbole about the dangers of a Trump administration.

Michael Kinsley wrote in the Washington Post that “Donald Trump is Actually a Fascist.” Jonathan Chait warned in New York magazine of “the step-by-step acceptance of the unthinkable as normal.” Masha Gessen, a Russian journalist known for her opposition to Vladimir Putin who is also a colleague, primed Americans on what to expect from a Trump administration in an essay in The New York Review of Books: “Autocracy: Rules for Survival.”

Some on the right dismiss these arguments as over the top — “articles about the Left’s freakout over Donald Trump are getting a little stale,” Jonah Goldberg wrote on National Review’s website – and it’s possible that Kinsley, Chait and Gessen will be proven wrong.

There is, however, a good chance that they are dead right.

Trump proved throughout his campaign and in the month since he won that he would not only lie repeatedly, but that he could get away with it. As Glenn Kessler, who writes the Fact Checker column for The Washington Post, pointed out on Nov. 4:

Donald Trump has amassed such a collection of Four-Pinocchio ratings — 59 in all — that by himself he’s earned as many in this campaign as all other Republicans (or Democrats) combined in the past three years.

Trump’s 59 totally false “whoppers,” in the Kessler rating system, compare to seven awarded to Hillary Clinton.

Trump’s success in winning the presidency despite a modern day record of lying suggests that for the moment he has been empowered by a large segment of the electorate to redefine the past, present and future to suit his agenda. He has been unconstrained by facts.

We don’t yet know if Trump will take full advantage of this free pass or how much leeway Congress, the courts and the public will grant him. But once established, this command over reality has an appeal that is difficult, if not impossible, to let go. Trump has shown no signs of doing so. Indeed, he brings to mind George Orwell’s observation that totalitarianism demands

the continuous alteration of the past, and in the long run probably demands a disbelief in the very existence of objective truth.

Trump, in a notorious tweet on Nov. 27, asserted that

In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.

Appearing Dec. 11 on Fox News Sunday, Trump, despite losing the popular vote by 2.84 million, continued to describe his win as “one of the great victories of all time,” arguing that Democrats “suffered one of the greatest defeats in the history of politics in this country” and that “we had a massive landslide victory.”

Trump’s adamant rejection of the C.I.A.’s finding that Russia intervened in the election in order to help him has become the focus of partisan warfare putting Trump in conflict not only with Democratic congressional adversaries, but with Republican critics like Senators John McCain and Lindsey Graham.

On Dec. 9 the Washington Post published a story on the C.I.A.’s assessment that American intelligence agencies had

identified individuals with connections to the Russian government who provided WikiLeaks with thousands of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and others, including Hillary Clinton’s campaign chairman, according to U.S. officials. Those officials described the individuals as actors known to the intelligence community and part of a wider Russian operation to boost Trump and hurt Clinton’s chances.

The Trump transition team quickly attacked the credibility of the C.I.A. in a prepared statement:

These are the same people that said Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. The election ended a long time ago in one of the biggest Electoral College victories in history. It’s now time to move on and “Make America Great Again.”

The push back against Trump was swift. Michael V. Hayden, director of the National Security Agency and later the C.I.A. under George W. Bush, told The Times:

To have the president-elect of the United States simply reject the fact-based narrative that the intelligence community puts together because it conflicts with his a priori assumptions — wow.

The ongoing conflict over the intelligence agency’s analysis of Russian involvement has become the first major test of Trump’s alt-reality vision.

John McCain, the Arizona Republican who chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee, flatly contradicted Trump last Sunday during an appearance on Face the Nation:

The facts are stubborn things. They did hack into this campaign.

On Dec. 12, Mitch McConnell, the Senate majority leader, endorsed a formal inquiry into the allegations. In doing so, McConnell set the stage for a confrontation between the congressional and executive branches even before Trump takes office.

There is method to Trump’s madness. Despite the nine lives he has demonstrated, he seems eager to avoid a damaging challenge to his legitimacy as the nation’s chief executive, intent on defining his election as “a massive landslide victory” and “one of the great victories of all time.”

Studies conducted before and during the election found that support for Trump correlated with voters’ desire for what they see as authoritative leadership. Marc Hetherington, a political scientist at Vanderbilt, described such voters as having what he calls a “fixed worldview,” as opposed to those with a “fluid worldview.” Hetherington notes that those with a fixed view score high on tests of authoritarianism and those with a more fluid view score low.

In an essay published in October in PS: Political Science and Politics, “Authoritarian Voters and the Rise of Donald Trump,” Matthew C. MacWilliams, a teaching associate at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst, found that “Trump’s rise is in part the result of authoritarian voters’ response to his unvarnished, us-versus-them rhetoric” and that

Uniformity and order are authoritarian watch words. Authoritarians obey. They seek order. They follow authoritarian leaders. They eschew diversity, fear “the other,” act aggressively toward others, and, once they have identified friend from foe, hold tight to their decision.

Based on survey data collected in the course of this year’s Republican primaries, MacWilliams found a strong relationship between support for Trump and voters’ support for authoritarian values.

The power and depth of this kind of support has freed Trump from the normal obligation to avoid making statements that are verifiably untrue. His loyalists are strongly inclined to believe what he says, and to forgive falsehoods that they see as harmless exaggerations.

“One thing that’s been interesting this campaign season to watch is that people that say facts are facts — they’re not really facts,” Scottie Nell Hughes, a Trump supporter, said on The Diane Rehm Show on Nov. 30. Her remarks caused a ruckus, but Hughes also laid bare Trump’s basic method, which got lost in the kerfuffle:

There’s no such thing, unfortunately anymore, as facts. And so Mr. Trump’s tweets, among a certain crowd — a large part of the population — are truth. When he says that millions of people illegally voted, he has some facts — among him and his supporters — and people believe they have facts to back that up. Those that do not like Mr. Trump, they say that those are lies and there’s no facts to back it up.

Or as Corey Lewandowski, Trump’s former campaign manager and current adviser, puts it:

This is the problem with the media. You guys took everything that Donald Trump said so literally. The American people didn’t.

This willingness to suspend disbelief “gives Trump not only license but incentive to spin fantasy, because no one expects him to tell the truth,” Rob Stutzman, a Republican consultant who worked for Jeb Bush, told the Los Angeles Times. “They believe they’re getting lied to constantly, so if their hero tells lies in order to strike back, they don’t care.”

Ownership of this phenomenon is not the exclusive property of the right. Democrats, liberals and academics have made significant, if unknowing, contributions to the credulity of Trump’s supporters.

In a Nov. 15 essay “Straight Talk on Trade,” Dani Rodrik, an economist at Harvard, poses the question, “Are economists partly responsible for Donald Trump’s shocking victory in the US presidential election?”

Proponents of globalization, Rodrik argues, have in recent decades downplayed the costs of trade on the “implicit premise” that

there are barbarians on only one side of the trade debate. Apparently, those who complain about World Trade Organization rules or trade agreements are awful protectionists, while those who support them are always on the side of the angels.

The result is that many in the economics profession

have consistently minimized distributional concerns, even though it is now clear that the distributional impact of, say, the North American Free Trade Agreement or China’s entry into the World Trade Organization were significant for the most directly affected communities in the United States.

Eduardo Porter, a Times colleague, raised the same basic issue in a column earlier this week, “Where Were Trump’s Votes? Where the Jobs Weren’t.” Porter wrote that

less-educated white voters had a solid economic rationale for voting against the status quo — nearly all the gains from the economic recovery have passed them by.

Since Nov. 7, 2007, according to Porter, Hispanics have gained nearly 5 million jobs, African-Americans and Asian-Americans have each gained over 2 million jobs, but whites have lost nearly 1 million jobs. Those job losses were heavily concentrated in those Rust Belt and, relatively speaking, more rural states where Trump racked up his Electoral College win.

The credibility of the Democratic Party generally among Trump voters is at an all-time low, as Democratic candidates discovered on Nov. 8.

This Democratic vulnerability was explored in depth by Katherine Cramer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin, in a book on voters in that state, “The Politics of Resentment,” which came out in March. In her study, Cramer described the three elements of “rural consciousness”:

First, a belief that rural areas are ignored by decision makers, including policy makers, second, a perception that rural areas do not get their fair share of resources, and third a sense that rural folks have fundamentally distinct values and lifestyles, which are misunderstood and disrespected by city folks.

The result, she argues, is the creation of a rural identity “infused with a sense of distributive injustice,” much of it focused on liberal policies directing tax dollars to urban racial minorities.

These rural voters, and others in the Trump coalition, are more than willing to give Trump the benefit of the doubt. Their deep feeling that whatever else he was, he was on their side permitted him to shrug off criticism as emanating from malevolent political elites.


Trump’s attempt to subvert truth is a major challenge to democratic governance. In this context, it may be wise to listen to the predictions of Masha Gessen. “Despite losing the popular vote, Trump has secured as much power as any American leader in recent history,” she writes in The New York Review of Books essay I mentioned earlier. “He will want to maintain and increase it — his ideal is the totalitarian-level popularity numbers of Vladimir Putin.”

Having watched in frustration as Trump ran roughshod over the party establishment and all of its candidates, Republicans are actually more likely than Democrats to recognize the potential threat posed by the president-elect. Because of this — in the strange pathways of politics — the hearings on alleged Russian hacking will become not only an inquiry into cyber espionage, but also a forum for Republican leaders to put Trump in his place and to set limits on his presidency.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/15/opinion/donald-trumps-alt-reality.html?action=click&pgtype=Homepage&clickSource=story-heading&module=opinion-c-col-left-region&region=opinion-c-col-left-region&WT.nav=opinion-c-col-left-region

Last edited by Goose (12/15/2016 3:15 pm)