The Ideology of Ignorance

 

By David K. Shipler 

            President Trump thinks that car exhaust doesn’t harm the environment. He believes that Ukraine started its war with Russia. He thinks that the US has given $350 billion in aid to Ukraine, more than Europe. (It’s $174 billion, less than Europe.) What’s more, he remains sure, even after being corrected in public, that the European aid is all loans to be paid back, although both Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky and French President Emmanuel Macron tried to set him straight. 

            Trump thinks that French opposition leader Marine Le Pen is “in prison.” (Her sentence for embezzlement includes no jail time.) Trump believes that the American economy is a “sick patient,” ripped off by trading partners. (The US economy is the world’s biggest, with the highest per capita GDP.) He thinks American car companies aren’t allowed to sell in other countries. (They are, and China has been a big market for GM.) He believes that Canada charges 250 to 300 percent tariffs on US dairy products and forgets that he got those eliminated in his first term. (They never kicked in anyway, because Canadian imports never reached the triggering threshold.)

He thinks that the US never charged tariffs on Chinese goods until he became president, when “I took in hundreds of billions of dollars.” (The figure was $75 billion during his first term, and tariffs have been levied on imports from China since 1789.)

            He thinks the country is reeling under a crime wave by immigrant gangs. (Crime rates have been falling for years and are lower among immigrants than Americans.) He believes the men deported to an El Salvador prison are in violent gangs. (Few if any have been convicted, and some are demonstrably innocent.)

            And on and on and on. In an autocracy, which is developing under Trump, the leader’s flaws and whims and fantasies are replicated by his underlings out of either zealous loyalty or fear for their jobs or their freedom. Even casual assertions at the top, whether factual or not, become doctrine. From below, contradictions of the narrative do not reach the highest authority; they are filtered out by subordinates unwilling to sacrifice themselves. So, a leader like Trump sets his own trap. He grows insulated and unaware, existing in a feedback loop that amplifies his falsehoods. The alternative reality he creates forms the basis of policy, which often has immense impact.

            A recent illustration got less attention than it deserved. When Jeffery Goldberg of The Atlantic wrote about being inadvertently invited into a Signal chat on attack plans against the Houthis in Yemen, Trump was not told by anybody in White House or Cabinet. He learned it from a reporter’s question in a press pool. He seemed genuinely surprised and said he didn’t know anything about it.

The ensuing uproar legitimately focused on the security lapse, but Trump’s ignorance was telling. He is the architect of a structure of deceit. Unlike his first term, when more mainstream officials were willing to set him straight, he and the Heritage Foundation have populated agencies with ideologues who command loyalty to Trump personally and “his agenda” above the country or the Constitution. That loyalty includes subordination of the truth. The most recent case: the Justice Department lawyer just suspended for saying honestly in court that an error had been made in deporting a Maryland man legally in the US under an immigration judge’s protective order.

            Since every president learns something from reporters’ questions, press pools can leak information to the president, embarrassing him with his own ignorance. So, Trump’s White House has taken from the correspondents’ association the power to choose who’s in the press pools in the Oval Office, Air Force One, and elsewhere. A ban would surely be put on any reporter who might dare to ask this question, for example: “President Trump, do you know that you’re lying, or do you believe the lies you tell?”

Various answers suggest themselves, but the accurate one might lie beyond Trump’s reach. During last year’s campaign, when he wandered aimlessly through speeches, early dementia was raised as a possibility. Whether or not it’s dementia, Trump appears to suffer from some form of cognitive impairment.

It has been obvious for years that Trump, either by design or inability, does not absorb facts and analyze the patterns of contradiction and nuance that compose reality. That could be deliberate and calculated, or it could be a neurological defect. The fabrications have certainly worked for him politically, and they align with his and his closest advisers’ radical views. He has a transactional relationship with the truth, just as he does with individuals, institutions, and countries: If they suit his purpose, he’s with them. If not, he spurns them. Truth, too, can be embraced of discarded as it helps or hurts him. Perhaps, in his own mind, he negotiates with the truth. We don’t know. The public knows his mouth, not his brain. What he hears himself saying, true or not, seems to be what he believes and what all his acolytes think and act on.

In other words, Trump might suffer from a grave disability. It would be sad enough for him, but his autocratic style transmits this disability throughout his staff and the ideological subordinates who now populate government agencies. So, the disabled president is disabling the country and much of the world.

What’s more, Trump’s cognitive impairment, if that’s what it is, has been codified into an ideology of ignorance, now implemented by battalions of aspiring totalitarians. When Trump officials dismiss reality as inconvenient, watch out. Immigrants are first, now being deported under legal-sounding lies. The same method of fabricated charges can be used to jail citizens. Political opponents can be labeled enemies and charged as supporters of terrorism, audited by the IRS, threatened by pardoned Proud Boys, fired by fearful employers.

The totalitarian mindset understands that information is power. Even in the US, which is still pluralistic, government collects and keeps huge stores of data, which are designed to inform sensible policy. Under Trump, information is now being subjected to suppression and manipulation. Offices that test and survey are being abolished, and statistical sets are being taken offline.

Trump has set out to destroy the open forums of honest inquiry, the very institutions that have been jewels in the crown of American brilliance: universities, museums, libraries, private foundations, institutions honored with Nobel Prize-winning research. Vice President JD Vance has called universities the “enemy.” Free universities are always a threat to autocracies.

Those running the federal government are like counter-revolutionaries, attempting to overthrow the country’s decades of progress in almost every area of achievement. They are working to facilitate the creation of alternate “realities” to serve a broader takeover of American thinking in economics, medicine, social science, history, and other fields.

Whether or not this counter-revolution will succeed is an open question. But it is making headway as Trump’s illness becomes America’s illness.

Why People Distrust Government

                                                         By David K. Shipler 

            This is a story about high-handed Maine state officials proposing to jeopardize island residents’ emergency access to mainland hospitals. It is a local outrage, small in comparison to the sweeping outrages that are uprooting global security and undermining American democracy. But its significance is immense, because it’s a case study in how anti-government sentiment can be generated among good citizens who depend on key services. Nationwide, that disaffection has been a key element in the country’s dramatic political shifts.

            The issue is straightforward. For 65 years, since the state launched car ferry service, the boats have docked overnight on four islands, which don’t have hospitals but are populated year- round and have a surge of summer residents. So, the Maine State Ferry Service provides sleeping quarters on the islands for the crews, who can be roused if there’s a medical emergency in the middle of the night. An island ambulance drives onto the ferry and drives off on the mainland.

That system might be scrapped for three of the islands in two or three years, if the state has its way. The commissioner of transportation, Bruce Van Note, and the director of the ferry service, William Geary, say they’re considering docking the ferries overnight on the mainland. They are in the Democratic administration of Governor Janet Mills, whose press secretary, Ben Goodman, did not answer my emailed request for an explanation of her position.

Under the proposal, there would be no transportation by ambulance between the last ferry run of the day and the first the next morning. I’m biased, because I spend four to five months a year on Swan’s Island: I’ll try to arrange my stroke or heart attack in the daytime.

Moscow on the Potomac

                                                         By David K. Shipler 

            Back in the bad old days of Soviet Communism, a dissident in Moscow was summoned for interrogation by the KGB, the secret police. As the agent ticked off a list of charges, the dissident rebutted each by citing one guarantee after another in the Soviet Constitution, which protected free speech, privacy, and other rights. “Please,” the KGB agent interrupted. “We’re having a serious conversation.”

            I have treasured that story since I heard it decades ago. It dramatized the difference between the Soviet and American systems, between a constitution of fictional rights and one of actual rights. When an American political scientist, Robert Kelley, taught for a semester at Moscow State University, he used to tell his students that if the United States had a state religion, it would be constitutional democracy.

            No more.

            President Trump and his zealous aides do not blatantly mock the Constitution in words, but they do so in actions. They are ignoring some of its central principles, particularly the separation of powers, defying both the legislative and judicial branches. And while I’m always diffident about drawing parallels since no analogy is perfect, I am feeling an uneasy sense of familiarity as Washington spirals down into a darker and darker place. Trump and his allies—plus Americans who are capitulating in their businesses, politics, and universities—would have fit comfortably in Moscow, where they would have survived and prospered.

            The essence of the American idea is the din of ideas, exactly what Soviet leaders found distasteful, and what American leaders are now trying to muffle. There was a way of thinking in the Soviet Union, which continues today in Vladimir Putin’s Russia, that eschewed pluralism and imposed conformity. Only a single truth was tolerated. Disagreements and debates were considered antithetical to the historical progress that Communist theory envisioned. Political irreverence might be heard quietly around the kitchen table, but elsewhere it was punished.

Gaza: Facts on the Ground

 

By David K. Shipler 

            In the late 1970s, Israel’s former general Ariel Sharon used to call Jewish settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories “facts on the ground.” As agriculture minister then, he provided the roads, wells, and power lines that made settlements possible. They would anchor the Israeli presence, he argued, making it hard to dislodge.

            He was accurate as far as the West Bank was concerned. Those settlements, proliferating over the decades, have balkanized the land that would be the heart of any Palestinian state.

But he himself dislodged the Israeli presence from the Gaza Strip. He still had a general’s mindset as he later became defense minister and then prime minister, and by 2005 had come to see the densely-populated territory as more liability than asset. His most notable and controversial act as prime minister was to end the occupation by withdrawing the army and sending Israeli soldiers to forcibly evict Israeli Jews from Gaza settlements.

The resentment and backlash by Israel’s religious right, combined with the area’s rapid takeover by Hamas militants, demonstrated the limitations of pure military calculations, which rarely consider politics, emotions, or the human quest for dignity. Israelis’ willingness to consider a Palestinian state was virtually obliterated by Hamas rockets.

Sharon was known for brutal retaliation, so if he were still alive and in power, he would surely be decimating Gaza as thoroughly as Israel has done since the intimate atrocities by Hamas fighters during their invasion of Oct 7, 2023. The resulting “facts on the ground”—some 80 percent of Gaza’s buildings destroyed or damaged, the bones of tens of thousands in the earth, a health care system and infrastructure in ruins, systematic sexual violence, over 2 million traumatized Palestinians struggling to survive—define a new reality not easily dislodged.

Save the Neutral Panama Canal

 

By David K. Shipler 

            PANAMA CITY, PANAMA—If President Trump takes over the Panama Canal, a wish he keeps pushing, he will be able to disrupt a significant chunk of global trade at his whim, rewarding and punishing countries he happens to like or dislike, as he has done with various measures in his first few weeks in office. The canal’s neutrality, enshrined in a US-Panama treaty, would be in jeopardy, and this shortcut between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans would be compromised.

            On a trip through half the canal’s length last Sunday, and in subsequent research in two museums, I learned how easy it would be to weaponize the vital waterway. While most cargo through the canal is part of US trade, Trump could force long waiting times on certain other vessels, impose different fees for different countries, or even bar passage to ships transporting goods to or from disfavored nations.

That is, he could add the canal as a tool in the global and domestic protection racket that he has already devised with on-and-off tariffs, interrupted military aid, funding cuts to schools and universities, sanctions against lawyers who oppose him, and the like. Nothing in his behavior, even toward his own citizens, suggests that he would respect the Panama Canal’s universal accessibility, which served 170 countries last year.

Although Trump has railed against what he calls the high transit fees charged by Panama, it’s a good bet that his long-term desire is less about money than political leverage. His method of political leverage, based on bullying, would risk a popular backlash in Latin America, especially in Panama, and undermine US standing in the region.

Furthermore, the canal has water problems that only Panama can address from outside the strip that Trump wants to own.

Putin's Gamble

                                                         By David K. Shipler 

When Vladimir Putin sent Russian troops into Ukraine three years ago, he made several bets that might have seemed like sure things to him then. One, that Ukraine would quickly fold. Two, that the United States had no staying power. Three, that Europe was too fractured to mount effective resistance.

            Ukraine has fought valiantly, however. The US under President Biden mustered huge supplies of weaponry and diplomatic support. Europe united to provide even more aid than the US. And instead of crumbling, NATO added two new members, Sweden and Finland.

Nevertheless, Putin’s gamble finally began paying off last week, thanks to his admirer Donald Trump, who is so obviously volatile that next week might be different. Putin once labeled him unpredictable. By contrast, the Russian leader has the patience of a chess master—albeit an emotional player, as I wrote in the Washington Monthly two months before the invasion.

His long game relies on a wish and a belief: his wishful, messianic ambition to expand and restore a Russian empire, and his passionate belief that Western democracies are vulnerable to moral decay, internal disorder, and external subversion.

He is acting in both these dimensions simultaneously, and now has a willing (or unwitting) partner in President Trump.

Russia has tried to accelerate the decline of democracies by exacerbating domestic divisions with online disinformation during elections, which probably helped elect Trump in 2016. Moscow is promoting pro-Russian parties in Germany and other NATO states, a Russian interference campaign that has been joined by Elon Musk and Vice President J. D. Vance, who have championed rightwing European parties with neo-Nazi sympathies.

Trump Defunds the Police

 

By David K. Shipler 

            There are several ways to curb law enforcement. One is to cut off funding literally, as a minority of Black Lives Matter protesters urged. Another is to redirect some money from uniformed officers to social workers and mental health counselors, which is what many demonstrators meant by “defund the police.” Still another is to release convicted violent assailants of police officers. Or to ignore specific laws; declare no intention to enforce them; and to investigate, fire, and intimidate prosecutors and policing authorities who combat certain crimes.

            President Trump is doing all of those things except, of course, moving money to mental health services. He and his consigliere, Elon Musk, have frozen spending broadly enough to impede law enforcement. Trump has fired most of the inspectors-general who investigate waste, fraud, and abuse. He has frozen hiring at the IRS and discussed laying off 9,000 employees to undercut tax enforcement. He has pardoned men found guilty of violently attacking police officers on January 6. He has removed veteran specialists from counter-terrorism work in the Justice Department, robbing the country of expertise in a critical area of national security.

            He has announced that the law prohibiting Americans from bribing foreign officials to get contracts abroad will no longer be enforced. He has defied the congressional statute, unanimously upheld by the Supreme Court, that bans Chinese-owned TikTok and has promised no prosecutions of companies that continue to distribute the prohibited platform.

            He has stymied three agencies that enforce laws protecting workers and customers of banks and credit card companies by shutting down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and illegally firing the Democratic-appointed chair of the National Labor Relations Board and two of three Democrats on the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission.

Trump: Promises Made, Promises Broken

 

By David K. Shipler 

                One of President Trump’s campaign slogans most popular with his supporters was the mantra, “Promises Made, Promises Kept.” But the most important promises that presidents are obligated to keep are those made by their country. And in merely three weeks, Trump has broken multiple solemn promises made by the United States, many longstanding and life-saving.

                His message is clear: Don’t trust America.

If you work for our soldiers in war and are promised safe passage to the US, don’t believe it. If you’re promised continuing treatment with HIV medication, don’t believe it. If the world’s leading democracy promises to keep supporting your pro-democracy efforts in your not-so-democratic country, don’t believe it. If you’ve obtained a hard-won promise to fund effective work combating sex-trafficking, civil conflict, ethnic strife, or radicalization that leads to terrorism, don’t believe it. If you have a subcontract or a lease or an employment commitment from a non-profit organization funded by the US, don’t trust it. Don’t think that promised funds for hospitals, ports, roads, or other development projects already underway will actually be paid—unless the money is coming from China.   

                Don’t trust any international agreement with the United States, not on nuclear weapons, climate change, or trade. Don’t believe in any alliance with Washington. Don’t think that common security interests or economic interdependency protects you from a blizzard of broken promises.

If you’re in the US, don’t believe the promise of a written contract based on federal funding; it can be scuttled at midnight. If you’re a federal employee, don’t believe in the promises of the law, civil service protection, due process, or even plain ethics; you can be kicked out of your office in an instant. Don’t believe that your long expertise will protect you; in fact, it is likely to hurt you, since the Trump movement resents, vilifies, and distrusts “experts.”

Do not, under any circumstances, text or email anything sensitive, particularly with such terms as “gender” or “diversity.” Use the phone if you have to communicate. Don’t trust your coworker, who might be an informant.

Trump's Coup d'Etat

 

By David K. Shipler 

                Anyone who has seen the overthrow of a country’s government, either peacefully or by force, must be watching the United States with an uneasy sense of familiarity. In less than two weeks since his inauguration, President Trump and his zealous staff have committed offenses typically associated with a sudden takeover of an unstable autocracy.

Is this what most voters who elected Trump wished for? While stopping short of arresting political opponents (so far), the new regime has threatened criminal investigations of disfavored officials, begun ideological purges in government agencies, ordered federal workers to inform on colleagues, yanked security details from former officials who criticized Trump, risked the health of millions by halting worldwide humanitarian programs, erased essential medical information from government websites, pressed colleges to report on foreign students’ supposed antisemitism, undone rules against racial and gender discrimination, dictated that schools nationwide indoctrinate children with a “patriotic” curriculum, and more.

 The widespread destruction of norms and institutions, aimed at creating immense vacuums to be filled with a new belief system, has never before been seen in the United States. It reflects an aspiration that might be called totalism—not totalitarianism, which connotes complete subservience of the population to the will of the state. But rather, an effort to infuse both government and civil society, as totally as feasible, with a comprehensive ideology. Part of that is borne of a distaste for government itself, except when used to expand raw presidential power.

This cannot be accomplished within the confines of the Constitution’s separation of powers and the republic’s decentralization of authority to the states. Therefore, Trump has been ignoring the legislative branch—the laws passed by Congress—and in one case so far (not shutting down TikTok), ignoring both the legislative and judicial branches. He also seems poised to bully recalcitrant states by withholding federal aid.

Trump Leads America Through the Looking Glass

 

By David K. Shipler 

     Alice laughed. “There’s no use trying,” she said: “One can’t believe impossible things.”

 “I daresay you haven’t had much practice,” said the Queen. “When I was your age, I always did it for half-an hour a day. Why, sometimes I’ve believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast.” 

                The United States is capitulating to one-man rule so rapidly that only Lewis Carroll could describe the absurd fantasies that Americans have accepted.

                Consider this: The world’s richest man, Elon Musk, flatterer and purchaser of President Donald Trump, gives two straight-arm, Nazi-type salutes at a Trump Inauguration Day rally, and the Anti-Defamation League, which touts itself as “the leading anti-hate organization in the world,” dismisses it as “an awkward gesture in a moment of enthusiasm, not a Nazi salute.”

Judge for yourself. Watch these two videos, one of Musk, one of Hitler: Compare.

And consider this: The number of illegal entries from Mexico drops to a four-year low, and Trump declares a state of emergency at the southern border. The country’s oil and gas production reaches an all-time high, and Trump declares an energy emergency. The violent crime rate drops steeply, lowest among non-citizens, and Trump pictures a crime wave driven by immigrants. The society spends decades combating discrimination against minorities and women of merit, and Trump calls for a meritocracy by demolishing the programs that are achieving it. What’s more, big companies rush to follow his lead back into bigotry.

To appear to be a solver, Trump needs problems to tackle. And since his remade Republican Party is still averse to attacking the real problems of its own working-class supporters, who have financial trouble in everyday life, Trump needs fake problems. Then he can conjure up fake solutions to the fake problems, crow about his progress, and—evidently—fool most of the people most of the time. And that’s a most distressing feature of this new American era, which might be called Make America Gullible Again.

It is not remarkable that a charlatan could come along in American politics. The world is full of con artists. They once traveled from town to town selling magical potions to make your hair grow or infuse perpetual youth. Now they’re online weaseling millions of dollars from lonely people lured into the mirages of love affairs and financial windfalls. And also online, Trump will benefit from his billionaire friends who run social media companies. In trepidation or collaboration, they have abandoned fact-checking and opened their platforms to Trumpist alternative realities.

Defending Minorities Against the Defense Secretary

 

By David K. Shipler 

                The one true thing that Pete Hegseth said in his Senate confirmation hearing for Defense Secretary this week was that the military is a better place for minorities than perhaps any other American institution. What he fails to recognize is how much work it has taken to get there, and how much it will take to stay there. That point was not even made by Democratic senators as they berated him about his history of sexual assault, alcohol abuse, and lack of management experience. It was a missed opportunity for serious discussion.

Hegseth railed, mostly unchallenged, against programs promoting DEI (diversity, equity, and inclusion) and pictured “wokeness” as antithetical to the lethality essential in a fighting force. Yet actual experience shows the opposite: racial, religious, and gender tolerance has to be taught, sadly, and if it isn’t, fissures can open to the military’s detriment.

In 1971, after the decay of military cohesion as racial tensions and violence spiked among troops during the Vietnam War, the Pentagon established the Defense Race Relations Institute, now named the Defense Equal Opportunity Management Institute (DEOMI). There, military trainers operate on a pragmatic philosophy about the interaction between bias and readiness. They summed it up for me years ago, when I visited DEOMI several times while researching A Country of Strangers: Blacks and Whites in America: You can think anything you want; that’s your business. But what you do becomes our business if you undermine your unit’s cohesion and fighting effectiveness.    

Like most conservatives, Hegseth apparently believes that the natural landscape is a level playing field, and that doing nothing will guarantee a meritocracy devoid of privilege for one group or another. (Or, perhaps more likely, he and other conservatives make this self-serving argument to preserve white males’ longstanding advantages.)

Not only is Hegseth’s position oblivious to the nation’s history, it’s also blind to the future. Halting diversity efforts allows institutions to snap back into old patterns of bias and discrimination. The military “does not do the equal opportunity and fair treatment business because it’s the nice thing to do,” I was told back then by DEOMI’s director of training, army Colonel Eli A. Homza Jr., who was white. “We do it because we have learned that if we don’t do it, we will not have cohesive and battle-ready units.”

The Fragile World

 

By David K. Shipler                 

                As of January 20, when Donald Trump is inaugurated, the world’s three strongest nuclear powers will all be led by criminals. Only Trump has been convicted, but Vladimir Putin faces an outstanding arrest warrant from the International Criminal Court—for his war crime of abducting children from Ukraine to Russia—and Xi Jinping should face one for his genocide against the Muslim Uighurs in China. Trump has obviously been found guilty of much less—mere business fraud—although he was justifiably charged with mishandling classified documents; obstruction of justice; and attempting, in effect, to overturn the linchpin of electoral democracy.

                The world is in the throes of criminality. Where government is weak—or complicit—organized crime or terrorism often fills the vacuum. In Mexico, cartels manufacture drugs freely and now control the conduits of illegal immigration into the United States. In areas of Myanmar ravaged by internal combat, narcotics producers are in open collusion with Chinese traffickers, and kidnap victims are forced onto the internet to scam the unsuspecting out of their life savings. And so on, amid a sprawling disintegration of order.

    Moreover, warfare has widened far beyond the familiar headlines. Not only in Ukraine, the Middle East, and Sudan, but in 42 countries total, wars are raging: invasions, insurgencies, ethnic conflicts, and militias fighting over precious resources. Combined with drought and storms fueled by the earth’s unprecedented warming, the wars are uprooting millions in the most massive human displacement of modern history. As of last June, an estimated 122.6 million people were living as refugees worldwide after having been driven from their homes by violent conflict, persecution, and human rights violations, according to the UNHCR, the United Nations Refugee Agency. Another 21.5 million people each year, on average, are forced out by droughts, floods, wildfires, and stifling temperatures.

                  Into this maelstrom come Trump and his eccentric minions with their wrecking balls and decrees, soon to be taught the inevitable Lesson of Uncertainties: The outside world can be neither controlled nor ignored by Washington. It intrudes in unexpected ways, defies prediction, and resists domination. It pushes presidents around.

    Therefore, while some sure things are probably in store, it’s more useful to examine questions, not answers, regarding what the new year might bring.