Surviving Autocracy

by Masha Gessen

When Putin rose to power in 1999, a new kind of damage to language commenced. Putin declared a “dictatorship of the law.” His main ideologue, Vladislav Surkov, advanced the idea of “managed democracy.” Dmitry Medvedev, who kept Putin’s chair warm between Putin’s second and third terms, declared, “Freedom is better than unfreedom.” These were no longer words used to mean their opposite. These were words used simply to mean nothing. The phrase “dictatorship of the law” is so incoherent as to render both “dictatorship” and “law” meaningless.

Ouch. I feel this

Trump has an instinct, perhaps even a talent, for mangling language in both ways: using words to mean their opposite and stripping them of meaning.

Brandon Victor Dixon, who played Aaron Burr, stepped forward to read a statement from the cast apparently drafted in the course of the show. You know, we have a guest in the audience this evening. And Vice President–elect Pence, I see you walking out, but I hope you will hear us just a few more moments. There’s nothing to boo here, ladies and gentlemen. There’s nothing to boo here. We’re all here sharing a story of love. We have a message for you, sir. We hope that you will hear us out. And I encourage everybody to pull out your phones and tweet and post, because this message needs to be spread far and wide, okay? Vice President–elect Pence, we welcome you and we truly thank you for joining us at Hamilton: An American Musical. We really do. We, sir, are the diverse America who are alarmed and anxious that your new administration will not protect us, our planet, our children, our parents—or defend us and uphold our inalienable rights, sir. But we truly hope that this show has inspired you to uphold our American values and work on behalf of all of us. All of us. We truly thank you for sharing this show—this wonderful American story told by a diverse group of men, women of different colors, creeds, and orientations. Dixon was addressing Pence in the standard language of American politics, which assumes the possibility of sharing reality across difference. It assumes that the phrases “inalienable rights” and “American values” have clear meaning even if politicians need to be r...

It also assumes that politicians will accept the obligation at least to hear out all of their constituents.

Trump’s sensibilities were offended. “Our wonderful future V.P. Mike Pence was harassed last night at the theater by the cast of Hamilton,” he tweeted. A few minutes later, he added, “The Theater must always be a safe and special place. The cast of Hamilton was very rude last night to a very good man, Mike Pence. Apologize!” The tweets summed up Trump’s understanding of power. His election victory entitled him—and, by extension, those whom he saw as his people—to adulation. Criticism, confrontation, and even the simple acknowledgment of political difference amount, in his view, to disrespect. Being disrespected makes him feel victimized—and he claims his imagined victimhood with glee. This claim turns the reality of power upside down, enabling Trump to come out on top by placing himself at the bottom.

Claiming that the second most powerful man in the world should be granted a “safe space” in public turned the concept precisely on its head. Trump performed the same trick on the phrase “witch hunt,” which he repeatedly claimed was being carried out by Democrats to avenge their electoral loss by launching the Russia investigation. Witch hunts cannot actually be carried out by losers, big or small: the agent of a witch hunt must have power. Trump seized and flipped the term “fake news” in much the same way. Until roughly late fall 2016, “fake news” referred to false stories proffered by the likes of Breitbart, Russian internet trolls, or Macedonian teenagers who made a killing off gullible Americans by posting made-up tales on social networks. The term was unfortunate—something is either “fake” or “news,” not both—but briefly it was widely understood.

Trump’s other gift is for using words to make them mean nothing. Everyone he has ever mentioned while he was feeling disposed toward them is “great” or “wonderful,” and everything is “tremendous.”

This is an old American vice.

A trademark Trumpian approach to attacking language is to take words and throw them into a pile that means nothing. In April 2017, he gave several media interviews to discuss his first hundred days in office. The AP published one that was almost all word salad. Number one, there’s great responsibility. When it came time to, as an example, send out the fifty-nine missiles, the Tomahawks in Syria. I’m saying to myself, “You know, this is more than just like, seventy-nine [sic] missiles. This is death that’s involved,” because people could have been killed. This is risk that’s involved, because if the missile goes off and goes in a city or goes in a civilian area—you know, the boats were hundreds of miles away—and if this missile goes off and lands in the middle of a town or a hamlet. . . . every decision is much harder than you’d normally make. [unintelligible] . . . This is involving death and life and so many things. . . . So it’s far more responsibility. [unintelligible] . . . The financial cost of everything is so massive, every agency. This is thousands of times bigger, the United States, than the biggest company in the world. A partial list of words that lost their meaning in this passage is: “responsibility,” the number “fifty-nine” and the number “seventy-nine,” “death,” “people,” “risk,” “city,” “civilian,” “hamlet,” “decision,” “hard,” “normal,” “life,” “the United States.” Even the word “unintelligible,” inserted by the journalist, became suspect here. While it is...

The role of the journalist was rendered meaningless, too, in the most basic way: the interviewer was compelled to participate, interrupting this incomprehensible monologue with follow-up questions or words like “right,” which only served to further the fiction that there was a narrative or a train of thought being laid out that the journalist (and hence a reader) could follow, that something was indeed “right” or could be “right” about what Trump was saying—when in fact he was saying nothing and everything at the same time, and this could not be right.

Haha. Ok. I am sometimes guilty of this. Read lots of books. It helps keep the word salad a little more focused on what is real and useful. Pretty sure this habit has to do with DJTs upbringing. He could say anything or nothing and it wouldn’t effect the world around him. That image, though, requires too much empathy for this truly dangerous man.

In 2018, former New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani published a book called The Death of Truth, in which she argued that postmodern thinkers enabled the Trumpian moment. Broadly speaking, postmodernist arguments deny an objective reality existing independently from human perception, contending that knowledge is filtered through the prisms of class, race, gender, and other variables. In rejecting the possibility of an objective reality and substituting the notions of perspective and positioning for the idea of truth, postmodernism enshrined the principle of subjectivity. Language is seen as unreliable and unstable (part of the unbridgeable gap between what is said and what is meant), and even the notion of people acting as fully rational, autonomous individuals is discounted, as each of us is shaped, consciously or unconsciously, by a particular time and culture.

When writers and academics question the limits of language, it is invariably an exercise that grows from a desire to bring more light into the public space, to arrive at a shared reality that is more nuanced than it was before the conversation began: to focus ever more tightly on the shape, weight, and function of any thing that can be named, or to find names for things that have not, in the past, been observed or been seen as deserving of description. A shared language is essential to this exercise, and observing the limits of this language is an attempt to compensate for them.

Hannah Arendt argued, the awareness of one’s subjectivity is essential to political conversation: We know from experience that no one can adequately grasp the objective world in its full reality all on his own, because the world always shows and reveals itself to him from only one perspective, which corresponds to his standpoint in the world and is determined by it. If someone wants to see and experience the world as it “really” is, he can do so only by understanding it as something that is shared by many people, lies between them, separates and links them, showing itself differently to each and comprehensible only to the extent that many people can talk about it and exchange their opinions and perspectives with one another, over against one another. Only in the freedom of our speaking with one another does the world, as that about which we speak, emerge in its objectivity and visibility from all sides.

Trump’s attack on language is an attack on freedom itself.

In his philosophy of the “rectification of names,” Confucius warned: “If language is not correct, then . . . morals and art will deteriorate; if justice goes astray, the people will stand about in helpless confusion. Hence there must be no arbitrariness in what is said. This matters above everything.”

Trump’s lies and his word piles both are exercises in arbitrariness, continued assertions of the power to say what he wants, when he wants, to usurp language itself, and with it, our ability to speak and act with others—in other words, our ability to engage in politics.

This is important. It’s why I stopped recording Brad’s sermons at St. Paul’s. It’s also why I stopped hanging out there — shit is corrosive and irritating.

The Russian poet Sergey Gandlevsky once said that in the depth of the Soviet era he was taken with the language of hardware stores. He mentioned “secateurs” (garden shears). It was a specific word; it had weight, dimensions, shape. When a person said “secateurs,” they could only possibly mean the distinct object the word indisputably described.

The vocabulary of American political conversation is vague. “Authoritarian” is used to mean any regime or approach to governance that’s not democratic. The Trump era saw a surge in the use of such words as “fascism,” “coup,” and “treason,” often deployed less in reference to specific events or actions than to signal that American politicians were acting in ways American politicians ought not act. “Democracy” stands for everything we miss about the way politics used to be. But all of these words have clear, if sometimes multiple, definitions in political science, history, and law. If politicians, journalists, and even kitchen-table debaters adopted the habit of defining their terms, we would understand each other better—and begin the process of restoring language.

The damage done to American language is not yet nearly as profound as the century-long decimation of Russian under totalitarianism and Putinism, but the lessons of Russian journalists hold.

Essential words, in the debasement of which journalists have often been complicit, have to be rehabilitated before it’s too late. The word “politics,” or “political,” is an example. It ought to refer to the vital project of negotiating how we live together as a city, a st...

NBC’s Meet the Press host Chuck Todd tried to confront Trump counselor Conway. “Why put him out there for the very first time in front of that podium to utter a provable falsehood?” he asked. “It’s a small thing—but the first time he confronts the public, it’s a falsehood?” “Chuck,” Conway said, “I mean, if we are going to keep referring to our press secretary in those types of terms, I think that we are going to have to rethink our relationship here.” In other words, it was acceptable for the White House press secretary to lie, but it was not acceptable to call his lie a lie. “It undermines the credibility of the entire White House press office on Day One!” Todd said. “No, it doesn’t,” said Conway. “On Day One,” said Todd. “Don’t be so overly dramatic about it, Chuck. What—You’re saying it’s a falsehood. And they’re giving Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts to that. But the point remains—”

Haha. Did everyone in Trumpworld grow up in Oconomowoc??

The two of them were having two different conversations: Todd was trying to cover a major news story, which was that the new White House press secretary had lied to the public; Conway was setting the new terms of the conversation between the administration and the media. “You sent the press secretary out there to utter a falsehood on the smallest, pettiest thing,” Todd said. “I don’t think that anybody can prove the—” “And I don’t understand why you did it,” he persisted. “Look, I actually don’t think that—maybe this is me as a pollster, Chuck,” Conway said. “And you know data well. I don’t think you can prove those numbers one way or the other. There’s no way to really quantify crowds. We all know that. You can laugh at me all you want. But I’m very glad—” “I’m not laughing,” Todd said. “I’m just . . . befuddled. . . . What was the motive to have this ridiculous litigation of crowd size?”

This hurts my soul.

Todd was trying to engage Conway in a conversation about trust. His show, the work he had done as a journalist in the past, and, more broadly, mainstream American media were built on the premise that people value trust. Politicians and journalists need the public to trust them; both can earn public trust, and each can lose it easily. Everybody lies, but no one wants to be caught lying—or so Todd thought. Conway was defending a liar’s right to lie. There were no facts in her universe, and no issue of trust. There was power. Power demanded respect. Power conferred the right to speak and not be challenged. Being right was a question of power, not evidence.

The Trumpian lie is different. It is the power lie, or the bully lie. It is the lie of the bigger kid who took your hat and is wearing it—while denying that he took it. There is no defense against this lie because the point of the lie is to assert power, to show “I can say what I want when I want to.” The power lie conjures a different reality and demands that you choose between your experience and the bully’s demands: Are you going to insist that you are wet from the rain or give in and say that the sun is shining? Trump’s lies are outlandish because they are not amendments or embellishments to the shared reality of Americans—they have nothing to do with it.

When, in the winter and spring of 2020, Trump claimed that the United States was prepared for the coronavirus pandemic, when he promised quickly to triumph over the virus, when he said that hospitals had the necessary equipment and people had access to tests, when he promised health and wealth to people facing illness and precarity, he was claiming the power to lie to people about their own experience.

Damn. And true.

“I mean it’s story after story after story is bad. I won. I won.” His victory should have made him immune to challenge, he thought. By the time he was lying about Hurricane Dorian, he was not merely criticizing those who contradict him; he was trying to bring the weight of the White House to bear on people who choose facts over Trump.

Trump re-created Putin’s script in the spring of 2017, when he fired FBI director Comey. The original cover story was that Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein had brought to Trump’s attention Comey’s handling of the investigation of Hillary Clinton’s use of a private e-mail server when she was secretary of state and this was why Trump fired Comey. It was an obvious lie, but Spicer and Conway were dispatched to disseminate it, and Rosenstein’s memo, to the media.

Yeah. What the fuck was this even?

But then Trump spoke to NBC anchor Lester Holt and told him that the decision to fire Comey had been entirely his own, made before he asked for Rosenstein’s memo.

🤦‍♀️ Dude, seriously. 🥸🤬🥸😔🤦‍♀️

Trump demands that the media recognize his domain over reality—this was the substance of Conway’s argument with Todd. This was also the heart of Trump’s rant during his one press conference before he started holding daily briefings in March 2020. He had captured the term “fake news.” He said, “The press—the public doesn’t believe you people anymore. Now, maybe I had something to do with that. I don’t know. But they don’t believe you.” He was saying that he had given the American people a choice between two realities and they had chosen his. Are you going to believe your own eyes or the headlines? This is the dilemma of people who live in totalitarian societies.

Trusting one’s own perceptions is a lonely lot; believing one’s own eyes and being vocal about it is dangerous. Believing the propaganda—or, rather, accepting the propaganda as one’s reality—carries the promise of a less anxious existence, in harmony with the majority of one’s fellow citizens.

😭😫😖🤯🤕

Accepting that the president continuously tweets or says things that are not true, are known not to be true, are intended to be heard or read as power lies, and will continue to be broadcast—on Twitter and by the media—after they have been repeatedly disproven means accepting a constant challenge to fact-based reality.

Haha. This is the power of new warnings on Trump’s tweets. The blue disclaimers are very helpful ❗️✅⁉️🛂🆒

The tension is draining. The need to pay constant attention to the lies is exhausting, and it is compounded by the feeling of helplessness in the face of the ridiculous and repeated lies. Most Americans in the age of Trump are not, like the subjects of a totalitarian regime, subjected to state terror. But even before the coronavirus, they were subjected to constant, sometimes debilitating anxiety. One way out of that anxiety is to relieve the mind of stress by accepting Trumpian reality. Another—and this too is an option often exercised by people living under totalitarianism—is to stop paying attention, disengage, and retreat to one’s private sphere.

But then the election itself precipitated a crisis of faith within the profession. It wasn’t just that so much of the legacy media had failed to imagine the possibility of a Trump victory—this, after all, was a mistake, and mistakes can be corrected. Much more damning was the fact that many media outlets had delivered sterling fact-based reporting on Trump—the malfeasance of his businesses and charities, the credible allegations that he had assaulted women, his racist statements and racist behavior in the past, as a New York real estate developer, and in the present, on the campaign trail, his habitual dishonesty—and it seemed to matter not at all. One might say that Trump voters were not the audience for this reporting by The Washington Post, The New York Times, ProPublica, BuzzFeed, and others, but this could hardly be a comfort to the journalists who felt that the very meaning of their profession had been thrown into question.

Some of his top counterfactual claims—ones that he has reiterated every few days throughout his presidency—are that the border wall is being built; that the U.S. economy is the best it has ever been; and that he passed the biggest tax cut in history. The reiteration highlights the problem with fact-checking as an antidote to the lying: while the lying is repeated, fact-checking is administered only once. The lie dominates in the public sphere. Worse, the fact-checking articles themselves, appearing soon after the lie is uttered in public or on Twitter, serve as a gateway for the lie’s entrance into public consciousness.

Trump is unwilling, or unable, to consider that all of American society doesn’t function like the military. So, if a tweet fails to produce consequences, the president escalates, groping in the ether for levers to exert the power of his displeasure. In August 2019, for example, in a series of late-night tweets, Trump raged against Chinese trade policy and arrived at, “Our great American companies are hereby ordered to immediately start looking for an alternative to China, including bringing . . . your companies HOME and making your products in the USA.”

There is that ‘hereby’ shit. This fucking guy. 🤦‍♀️🤷‍♀️. 😝👻☠️

In the fall of 2017, Trump used Twitter to rage against National Football League players who were kneeling in protest during the national anthem. He issued angry tweets at first, then progressed to threats of using an actual instrument of federal government: “Why is the NFL getting massive tax breaks while at the same time disrespecting our Anthem, Flag and Country? Change tax law!” Less than twenty-four hours later, he noted that the NFL commissioner, Roger Goodell, had sent out a letter urging all players to stand for the anthem: “It is about time.” Perhaps Trump’s tax threat worked.

This is dumb. 1st Amendment burning level toolery. Values, institution, and spiritual decay. They are after our brains like — 🧟‍♀️🧟‍♂️🧟

Then he wanted the Senate Intelligence Committee to go after journalists, “to see why so much of our news is just made up-FAKE!” Then, in October 2017: “With all of the Fake News coming out of NBC and the Networks, at what point is it appropriate to challenge their License? Bad for country!” The Federal Communications Commission is not the military, and Trump could not tell it what to do, by tweet or by any other means. Nor does NBC itself hold a broadcast license: its local affiliate stations do. But battles over licenses in local markets are conceivable, and Trump’s tweet could be interpreted as a call to wage those battles. The New York Times reminded its readers that such a call was not without precedent in presidential history: Richard Nixon encouraged a business associate to challenge a license held by a Washington Post–owned television station in Florida, and Nixon’s Justice Department went after the three major networks on antitrust grounds. Deploying laws and institutions designed for liberal democracy to restrict media freedom is essential to autocratic attempts. Putin has used economic instruments, from hostile takeovers of media companies to libel suits that have bankrupted journalists and entire news outlets.

At least one way out of the tweet trap and the fact-check trap has emerged, and it came into existence even before the election. This solution lies in covering Trumpism not as news but as a system. Two examples of this approach are the podcasts Trumpcast, which then-head of the Slate Group, Jacob Weisberg, launched in 2016, and Trump, Inc., a joint production of ProPublica and WNYC, the New York Public Radio station. These podcasts treat Trumpism as a phenomenon that is distinct from both our experience and our expectations of politics.

Both shows make ample use of Trump’s tweets and lies, but they treat them as symptoms and clues rather than news in themselves. It’s probably no accident that this approach has been successful in the conversational, engaged format of a podcast; the traditional, neutral tone and current-moment focus of a legacy newspaper is more easily bent by an actor like Trump.

This is important.

When ridiculous pronouncements have grave real-life consequences, the world feels topsy-turvy. How can we balance an appreciation for the ludicrousness of Trump’s subliterate, ignorant, absurd tweets and the power his words and actions wield? The stakes demand respect; the president does not deserve it—but his office does.

Ask kids who grew up in violent homes how to deal with this shit. They’ll tell you 1,001 ways how.

American journalists, who shared a strong belief in reporting “what’s going on” neutrally, by which they usually mean without assigning value or providing more than the immediate context, were ill-equipped to problematize the normalization of what had indeed become the norm. The standard tools and approaches of American journalism translate into enforced restraint in language and tone—many journalists believe that these are the hallmarks of objectivity.

Trump repeats his false statements after they have been fact-checked by the media and, in many cases, contradicted by officials in his own administration—and it is this repetition that gives Trumpian lies much of their power. A journalist who assumes that Trump’s intention is unknowable, that repeated false statements—when the truth is indeed knowable—do not, factually, constitute lying, is abdicating the responsibility to tell the story, to provide the context of what happened a year ago, yesterday, or even in parallel with the lying. The journalist becomes complicit in creating the bizarre sense of ahistoricism of the Trump era, which seems to exist only, ever, in the current moment. NPR and many other media outlets practice the same self-enforced amnesia in a recurrent argument about whether to call Trump a racist—or even whether to call his statements racist.

The dichotomy, characteristic of virtually all media discussions of Trump, creates two counterintuitive assumptions: that a person can systematically say racist things but still not be a racist—and that there is a meaningful distinction between making racist statements and being a racist.

This is a dichotomy reserved for behavior that society claims to condemn but in fact tolerates, behavior that may not sully the actor’s reputation. One cannot steal and not be a thief, commit murder but not be a murderer, drive drunk and not be a drunk driver—but one can establish a pattern of racist statements over decades and still not be a racist.

Damn. This is very true.

The White House released a letter to Kim that read, in part: Based on the tremendous anger and open hostility displayed in your most recent statement, I feel it is inappropriate, at this time, to have this long-planned meeting. . . . You talk about nuclear capabilities, but ours are so massive and powerful that I pray to God they will never have to be used. . . . If you change your mind having to do with this most important summit, please do not hesitate to call me or write. . . . This missed opportunity is a truly sad moment in history. The tone of the letter was a mix of a first-grader taking his toys and going home and a forlorn seventh-grader hoping that his love interest will come running after him.

😳

In August 2019, The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump had become preoccupied with the idea of buying Greenland from Denmark; the headline was “President Trump Eyes a New Real-Estate Purchase.” In short order Trump confirmed his interest and tweeted an image of a giant golden Trump tower looming over Greenland, with the caption “I promise not to do this to Greenland!” The image read as satire on several levels—a comment on the nature of Trump’s interest in the world; an illustration of the negligible value of his promises—but it was, in fact, a public statement by the president of the United States. The Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, explained that Greenland was not for sale and made the most genuinely diplomatic statement possible under the circumstances: “I strongly hope that this is not meant seriously.” Trump took offense and canceled a planned visit to Denmark.

In a lot of ways much of US history is condensed into this moment. Not only are we perpetually trapped in the present under DJT, but we are in a very small room with our worst selves — and the resultant chaos is broadcast out to the world. They might be harmed by this. They might be next. 😨😱🥶

Explanations of the strategic and economic importance of the Arctic proliferated; many media outlets noted that President Harry S Truman had also wanted to buy Greenland. Washington Post columnist Anne Applebaum, a consistent Trump critic, tried the opposite approach and wrote a piece explaining why the United States needs a tiny country like Denmark to be its ally. The media were doing what media should do—providing context, organizing relevant information, creating narrative—and this too had a normalizing effect, simply by helping media consumers to absorb the unabsorbable.

It was as though the other dinner guests had carried on with their polite conversation and even handed the disruptive, deranged visitor a clean fork so that he wouldn’t have to eat dessert with the utensil he had stuck in his shoe.

Yup. I feel this.

To think that a madman could be running the world’s most powerful country, to think that the commander in chief would use Twitter to mouth off about whose nuclear button is bigger or to call himself a “very stable genius,” verges on the impossible. This can’t be happening.

This is happening—the thought pattern of nightmares and real-life disasters has become the constant routine of tens of millions of people.

If the word “unthinkable” had a literal meaning, this would be it: thinking about it makes the mind misfire; it ...