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.
