With Trump, the Lies Don’t Matter
Reality Is What He Says It Is, for His Supporters
Here is The New York Times headline I woke upI woke up to this morning:
Trump Struggles to Turn the Page on ‘American Carnage’
On the last night of the G.O.P. convention on Thursday, Donald J. Trump promised to bridge political divides, and then returned to delighting in deepening them.
This led an analysis of Donald Trump’s acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention, a speech so full of lies and distortions and the language of violence that it was clear what lies ahead.
Clear, that is, unless you write for The New York Times. According to the “paper of record,” the former president “has long been a man undone by himself.” Trump, the piece implies, could be presidential if he wanted, but he allowed his “personal grudges, impulsiveness and an appetite for authoritarianism” to derail him. This is part of an old — and mistaken — narrative that the mainstream media seem unable or unwilling to abandon: That it is Trump and not Trumpism that is a problem, that it is his “challenge with discipline” that is the problem and not his overt appeal to an authoritarian streak in the American voting public that puts our democracy on the knife’s edge.
Trump’s supporters at the convention wore bandages on their ear in solidarity with the candidate, whose right ear was injured during the July 13 assassination attempt. I won’t make light of the shooting — though the attempts to claim it as somehow outside of American norms ignore our long history of gun violence and violence and threats of violence against candidates and political leaders. But the image of overwhelmingly white Trump supporters sporting bandages should not be ignored. It borders on the cult-like and leaves open the question of what unity actually means to the Trump base.
Dan Froomkin argues that “There is no such thing as unity in American politics today.” He’s right. “The only way Republicans want to unify the country is under Trump as paramount leader,” he adds, “with absolute and unchecked power to reshape the government and the lives of its citizens.”
This is what is at stake in the election. Trump and Project 2025 have a vision for an America that is less fair, and more at the whims of money than at any time since the New Deal and at a time when concerted efforts need to be made to dismantle corporate capitalism to save workers and the planet.
Rather than focus the coverage of the convention on this, to unmask Republican feints toward workers (in the person of J.D. Vance, with help from Teamster President Sean O’Brien), we have been treated to spectacle. Millions of words and thousands of hours of video were devoted uncritically to the image. The Times ran a “Critics Notebook” essay that focused solely on answering “Would the final night of the convention portray (Trump) as a bellicose, combative alpha male, or as a sensitive late convert to empathy and self-reflection?” It was a question that need not have been asked, because we all knew the answer.
Still, too many of my liberal friends — as the cliche goes — “missed the forest for the trees,” thinking that calling Trump and the Republicans out for their lies would have any effect on the election. Trump lies with impunity because he knows that the truth does not matter to his voters, or that only his version of the truth matters to them. In this way, he has carried on Karl Rove’s project from the George W. Bush administration (Rove is unnamed, but has since been identified as the official who said that “guys like” journalist Ron Susskind “were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’” Rove — and Bush — did not think the world worked that way. “(W)hile you're studying … reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out.”
Trump — and his supporters — are immune to the lies because they do not see them as lies. Trump acts, they believe, and his actions create the correct reality. That is the point of the hypermasculinity, of Hulk Hogan unironically ripping off his shirt — operating as if his absurd macho is anything but pure theater, like all professional wrestling.
The Democratic Party — and liberals more generally — fail to understand this. It is why the debate over whether President Joe Biden should step aside following his disastrous debate performance is so debilitating. The discussion itself undermines the party, and the longer it goes on the worse it gets.
Democrats have ceded all that is important politically in recent years. They bought into the personality cults of the Clinton and Obama presidencies, did little to build on what were supposed to be generational and demographic shifts that favored the party. They are awful at class analysis and politics, though class is the only way they can dig themselves out of this mess.
The party’s turn to the donor class made them easy targets for a right-wing populist like Trump, who has managed to marshal just enough support in just enough states to be a viable candidate. Playing the role of technocrat and protector of norms leaves working people — Black, Brown, and White — to question who represents their interests.
Michigan will go red this time, because workers there are angry, and because the Democrats ignored the concerns of the large Palestinian community in the Detroit area. They tell everyone who will listen that they plan to stay home. Young voters also are abandoning the party, not for Trump but for third-party candidates or no one. In close races, like the states that ultimately will decide this, these losses at the margins will matter.
Biden is a terrible messenger, but this is not his fault. The party created the conditions that made Trump possible.
Let’s be clear: Trump is a fascist -- or at least someone with fascist and autocratic tendencies -- who is expert at showmanship and image. He says what his base wants to hear, even if the facts are that his entire business life has been about sticking it to everyone, especially the working class. He appeals mostly to racial resentment, but dresses it up as patriotism and class consciousness. Defeating that is going to be difficult, but it has to be done. We will not do that by pointing out his lies. We can only do that through mobilization and organization.