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.

Are most Americans as lazy about the truth as Trump seems to think? His artificially bleak portrait of their country sets him up as the rescuer, as long as they accept his false premises. How many believed him when he said in his inaugural address that he’d “end the Green New Deal?” The Green New Deal was proposed but never enacted. How many believed that he’d “revoke the electric vehicle mandate?” A mandate doesn’t exist, only a tax incentive to buy one. How many believed that auto workers were struggling, when employment in the industry hit a 16-year high in July? How many believed that “China is operating the Panama Canal?” Not so. Two ports are managed by a Hong Kong company, but the canal is controlled by the Panamanian government.

And so on. Inflation is down, unemployment is down, the stock market is up, and Trump will surely take credit for all that and more. Even today, his staff could write a schedule of celebratory boasts to be made in coming weeks. In fact, have you noticed that now, on his first full day in office, the “American decline” he so bitterly condemned has ended? Look around. It’s not there. At least not as he means it. Decline of another sort, fostered by Trumpism itself, is gathering momentum.

 In this world beyond the Looking Glass, non-problems are treated as real and real problems are ignored. The real problems for the Republican’s new constituency—those with less than a college degree—include structural and policy defects that impede workers’ prosperity. Hourly wages remain low, with legal minimums being raised reluctantly only at the state level, not nationwide by Congress. Union membership has fallen into the abyss, and Republicans will not facilitate workplace organizing. Resistance to the social safety net remains firm among Trumpist Republicans who still won’t respond to their voters’ needs by increasing housing subsidies, supporting health care, protecting workers’ safety, reforming tax laws, or taking other steps to benefit those who put Trump back in office.

It remains to be seen whether Americans who are having trouble making ends meet will grow disenchanted when Trump tells them, as he must at some point, that they are living in the new “golden age” that he promised. Last November, Democrats learned how angry people get at candidates who brag about an economy whose good statistics don’t match the hardships of individual households.

If you expect the disconnect between upbeat pronouncements and everyday life to catch up with Republicans eventually, a cautionary note, however: Remember how Trump has messed with Americans’ heads. He has led the country into a Bizarro World whose up is down, whose crimes are virtues, whose felons are heroes, whose laws are illegal, and whose most prominent sinner is rescued from death and empowered by God.  

The lasting consequence of this inverted universe is its normalization. Even beyond Trump, America will be broken, perhaps for a long while, perhaps permanently. Faith of the democratic kind—not in the divine but in the common values of fellow citizens and their institutions—has been swept aside, and not just at the righthand end of the political spectrum.

On the left, too. Malfeasance by one side begets malfeasance by the other. The country is losing an essential element of every pluralistic system: the rule of law. Its demise has been on dramatic display in recent days.

Trump promised to have his political opponents prosecuted, his nominee for FBI director published an “enemies list,” and President Biden replied with preemptive pardons to protect those who had stood up for legality and ethics. Republicans threatened to investigate Biden’s relatives, provoking Biden to pardon much of his family as well. It would have been healthier, if uglier, to let the courts rebuff the political persecutions and thereby cleanse the system. But the system itself has become suspect, not only in the minds of the powerless but also of the political class. This is acutely dangerous.

In Vietnam during the war, a sardonic quip circulated that even what you saw with your own eyes was a rumor. So, Republicans have successfully revised what we saw with our own eyes in the January 6 Capitol takeover by Trumpist thugs, making it seem like a rumor, and blocking the united revulsion that would have been society’s normal response to such an attack on the sacred democratic process. Trump compounded the offense, right after his inauguration, by issuing pardons and sentence commutations for nearly all those who pled guilty or were convicted by juries for crimes ranging from seditious conspiracy to assaults on Capitol police officers. Remember the old Republican Party’s support for law enforcement?

These sweeping pardons by both presidents, combined with the Supreme Court’s unwarranted grant of criminal immunity to former presidents for “official” acts, constitute a deep confession of cynicism and distrust in the American criminal justice system. The law is now seen as little more than a shape-shifting tool of favoritism or vengeance. It can be twisted against those at the highest levels of politics in the world’s foremost democracy as easily as in the world’s most corrupt dictatorship.

Not long ago, this would have been considered impossible. But as the Queen says in Alice in Wonderland, to believe impossible things, all you need is practice. And Americans are getting plenty of that.