Surviving Autocracy

by Masha Gessen

But 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.

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. Then Trump began applying it to news outlets he felt were too critical of him, especially The New York Times and CNN. The flip served a dual function: the classic one of a liar, caught red-handed, screaming “Liar!” at his accusers, and of positioning Trump as the victim. The president complains about “fake news” as though the legacy media outlets were more powerful than he is—powerful enough to treat him unfairly.

The inauguration is remembered less for the speech—aggressive, vulgar, a striking downgrade of American political language—than for the battle of realities that followed. There was the issue of crowd size. A reporter for The New York Times tweeted two images side by side: aerial photographs of the 2009 and 2017 inaugurations showing a sea of bodies at the Obama event and white spaces at the Trump one. The official Twitter account of the National Park Service retweeted the images, along with another tweet, of an Esquire magazine item noting that civil rights, climate change, and health care content had disappeared from the White House website. Trump took time away from the festivities to call Mike Reynolds, acting chief of the National Park Service. The Interior Department suspended all its social media accounts.

The following day, Trump made his first public appearance. He went to CIA headquarters, stood in front of a wall of stars—a memorial to fallen agents—and lied. He attacked the television networks for reporting on the comparatively low turnout. He claimed that he had drawn a million and a half people (the best available estimate was two hundred and fifty thousand). And he lied about the weather. He said, “God looked down and he said, we’re not going to let it rain on your speech.” A couple of drops fell when he began to speak, Trump said, but “the truth is that it stopped immediately. It was amazing. And then it became really sunny. And then I walked off and it poured right after I left. It poured.” In fact, it had been raining during Trump’s speech, and the sun never came out that day.

The journalists in the room had observed Trump’s campaign, and many of them had reported on it firsthand. It was hardly news to them that Trump was a habitual liar. But Spicer’s first meeting with journalists served as an announcement that the staff and rituals of the presidential administration would now be deployed to enforce Trumpian reality. This was news, and journalists looked for ways to report it. On CBS, anchor DeMarco Morgan said, “We want to play for you a press briefing by the new White House press secretary, Sean Spicer. . . . It was very unusual.” CNN, breaking with tradition, declined to air the press conference live. 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.

And they’re giving Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts to that. But the point remains—” “Wait a minute!” Todd exclaimed. “‘Alternative facts’?” “Alternative facts” was not a phrase concocted to justify or whitewash a lie—it was a declaration that the new administration reserved the right to lie.

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?

When Trump claimed that millions of people voting illegally cost him the popular vote, he was not making easily disprovable factual claims: he was asserting control over reality itself.

When he insisted that the Obama administration had had him wiretapped, and continued to insist on this even after FBI Director James Comey said that it wasn’t true, Trump was splitting the country into those who agreed to live in his reality and those who resisted and became his enemies by insisting on facts.

he was claiming the power to lie to people about their own experience. His right to make such claims was the substance of Conway’s conflict with Todd: Todd was arguing that the president had a responsibility to the public to tell the truth; she was asserting that the president can say whatever he wants because he is president.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, which reports to the executive branch, rebuked Alabama forecasters for contradicting the president. The existence of alternative facts had become policy.

Unmoored from lived reality, the autocrat has no need to be consistent. In fact, the ability to change his story at will is a demonstration of power.

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. 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. In his word-salad way, Trump was clear about why he wanted Comey gone: it was to quash the Russia investigation.

so much in our lives depended on words that meant so little to the man who said them.

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.

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. Both approaches are victories for Trump in his attack on politics.

Journalism is essential to democracy because it creates a sense of shared reality across a city, a state, a nation. Without this shared reality, a public sphere—the term philosopher Jürgen Habermas uses to describe the space where public opinion takes shape—cannot exist.

a large-scale study commissioned by Columbia Journalism Review found that consumers of legacy media read and watched and were exposed on social media to a large variety of stories and opinions, while Breitbart sat at the center of a closed media ecosystem. In other words, a slight majority of Americans inhabit a fairly healthy public sphere without realizing it. Equating this space with the Trumpian media universe is not merely factually wrong, it is also giving Trump exactly what he wants: the erasure of distinction between truth and lies.

What the lying president says is going on is not in fact what’s going on. But, in the sense in which Rosen uses the phrase, Trump’s saying that something is going on is “what’s going on,” because he is president and he said it, even though it’s not what’s actually going on. Reality bifurcates: “what’s going on” at any given time consists of actual events on the one hand and what Trump said on the other, and often no bridge exists between the two.

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. Worse still, this particular gateway has a way of placing the lie and the truth side by side, as though the facts were a matter of debate. Then one of the sides of the debate drops the conversation while the other continues pounding the subject. Arguments are often lost this way.

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.” When the media fact-checked his assumption that he can order companies to pull out of a country, he insisted that a 1977 law gave him the power to do so. More fact-checking followed: it appeared that, while the president could not actually order companies to do anything, he had the power to pressure them severely and initiate action that could indeed compel them to divest from a country. All the back-and-forth validated the premise that Trump’s desire to order companies out of China was a legitimate topic of political discussion.

Trump’s Justice Department scuttled a merger deal between AT&T and Time Warner, in apparent retaliation for Time Warner–owned CNN’s coverage of Trump. And, by the force of his tweet, Trump took America into the previously unimaginable territory of discussing whether the president can shut down a television network.

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. They avoid using the old familiar vocabulary of government and policy to cover Trump. Instead, they practice what the Russian literary scholar Viktor Shklovsky called “estrangement.” Trump, Inc. calls itself “an open investigation”—it examines Trump’s and the Trump Organization’s business practices, which include his and his family’s profiting from the presidency. Trumpcast is more like an anthropological inquiry: scholars, journalists, writers, politicians, and former administration officials discuss the nature of Trump and Trumpism. Both shows make ample use of Trump’s tweets and lies, but they treat them as symptoms and clues rather than news in themselves.

During the presidential campaign, National Public Radio took the position that it would not call Trump a liar or call his statements lies. In a letter published on the network’s website, Senior Vice President Michael Oreskes explained: We want everyone to listen to us and read us. We want our reporting to reach as many people as possible. It is a well-established piece of social science research that if you start out with an angry tone and say something a listener disagrees with, they will tune out the facts. But if you present the facts calmly and without a tone of editorializing you substantially increase the chance that people will hear you out and weigh the facts. That is why the tone of journalism matters so much. We need potential listeners and readers to believe we are presenting the facts honestly, and not to confirm our opinions. . . . It is not overly sweeping a thought to say this is a nation built on a faith in facts. At NPR we still hold that faith in facts. . . . We doubt that you, our audience, needs us to characterize people, least of all presidential candidates. . . . The more we inflame our tone, the less people will listen. What we need these days as a network, and as a country, is for people to listen more. Oreskes was making an explicitly political judgment without acknowledging or perhaps even recognizing that it was political.

think the minute you start branding things with a word like ‘lie,’ you push people away from you.”

Both ways of framing the policy—whether by stressing that calling something a lie goes beyond fact and becomes opinion, or by focusing on internal, unknowable intent—place artificial limits on a journalist’s ability to observe reality.

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.

It took NPR until July 2019 to apply the word “racist” to a Trump uttering; the network took the step after Trump tweeted that four Democratic Congress members, all of them women of color, should “go back” to where they came from.

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.

Autocracy is incompatible with free and open media because autocracy does not brook transparency and accountability.

Bálint Magyar suggests that where totalitarian regimes of the past sought to control media, today’s autocracies seek to dominate it; and where a totalitarian regime sought to suppress media rights, the autocrat seeks to neutralize them. The end result is not a controlled communications sphere where reality is dictated from above, but a weak one, where nothing can be known, no reality is tangible.

Trump’s chief strategist, Steve Bannon, cofounder of the alt-right, alternative-reality site Breitbart, who didn’t usually speak to journalists, gave an interview to The New York Times, specifically to explain the new rules of the game. “I want you to quote this,” he said. “The media here is the opposition party. They don’t understand this country. They still do not understand why Donald Trump is the president of the United States.” His counsel to journalists was that they “should shut up and listen for a while.” Trump seized the phrase “the opposition party” and later upgraded it to the Stalinist “the enemy of the American people.”

for his three years as president before the coronavirus pandemic, he discontinued the practice of press conferences that are announced in advance, ensuring that experienced journalists are present and allowing journalists to prepare. Here was a norm that seemed inviolate to journalists—all other presidents in recorded history of White House coverage had held press conferences—but

dropping the so-called protective pool, a small group of journalists from the White House pool who shadow the president at all times. Other executive-branch agencies also shut out the press: Tillerson discontinued the tradition of traveling with a pool as well as the practice of press briefings; the Pentagon stopped holding briefings. The White House press briefing became extinct in stages. In the first months of the administration, Spicer stopped allowing television cameras into every daily briefing. Then the briefings ceased being daily. Then weeks began to pass between briefings, and then months.

Before routine White House briefings vanished, their tone had changed. While many previous administrations—including Obama’s—had been criticized, fairly, for being less transparent than they ought to have been, all had at least acknowledged that the media served as an essential bridge between the American people and the government they had put into office. Trump’s official stand was that the media were an enemy, and his people had to demonstratively treat them as such. Spicer, during his six-month tenure as press secretary, was belligerent and openly hostile; he lied often. His successor, Sarah Sanders, lied too, but she delivered her lies in an even, bored tone that seemed to indicate that she resented having to answer anything, or to anyone. Sanders’s tenure was just short of two years. Grisham gave her first media interview—to America This Week on the conservative Sinclair network—a month and a half after starting the job.

She had shown who was boss: she could hold journalists to an arbitrary rule by making them offer thanks before asking a question, which diminished the journalists’ ability to hold her to the task of answering their questions. She reaffirmed that both the president and she herself lied easily and blatantly—as he did when he issued a “rhetorical response” on the UCLA students, and as she did at the beginning of the briefing, when she claimed to be thankful for the reporters in the room. By making them laugh when she said that, and when she mocked April Ryan, and when she called the forced ritual a “fun exercise,” she gave them a role in debasing the job of reporting on the White House and their profession as a whole.

Sarah Huckabee Sanders.

The journalists in the room had conflicting motivations: they were there to act as representatives of the public, but they also wanted to get to ask a question, get their question answered, avoid burning bridges so they would get to ask questions in the future, avoid being humiliated in front of their colleagues, on television, and avoid confrontation that would break the veneer of neutrality. Sanders had only one task: to assert power. She won.

The headline, and an unrelated ill-advised series of tweets posted by a Times editor, created a crisis that Baquet addressed with an all-staff town meeting. It began by revisiting the use of the words “lie” and “racist.” Unlike NPR, the Times did not have an outright ban on the use of these words—rather, the paper used them with extreme restraint. “I used the word lie once during the presidential campaign, used it a couple times after that,” said Baquet. “And it was pretty clear it was a lie, and we were the first ones to use it. But I fear that if we used it twenty times, ten times, first, it would lose its power. And secondly, I thought we would find ourselves in the uncomfortable position of deciding which comment by which politician fit the word lie. I feel the same way about the word racist.” In other words, the Times has a policy of not calling every racist remark “racist” and every lie a “lie” but reserving these words for only the biggest lies and the most racist of statements. This, of course, has the effect of establishing a new and fairly consistent standard for both lies and racist comments: one now has to work hard to sink that low.

The Times’ approach to covering Trump’s lies remained unchanged during the coronavirus crisis. The paper did extraordinary reporting uncovering the hidden truths of the pandemic—such as the story of the USNS Comfort, a Navy hospital ship, touted by Trump as aid to the city, that actually barred COVID patients and remained almost empty as city hospitals struggled under the strain—but

David Fahrenthold, a reporter with The Washington Post, uses a radically transparent approach to investigative reporting: he asks for tips and follow-up information on Twitter, openly corresponds with informants, and allows followers to stay abreast of his thinking and reporting. He tweeted, for example, “Update: I am still looking for 9 of the 12 sites supposedly vetted for the G-7. The White House says they were in these states, but won’t say where. Let me know if you know something!” He followed up with a tweet saying, “@realDonaldTrump said the frontrunner was his own golf club in Doral, Fla. But is that the final choice? Not clear. The Doral mayor says they’ve still heard nothing.” The approach is not only a strikingly effective method of crowdsourcing—Fahrenthold won a Pulitzer for his reporting on Trump’s charities—but it also revolutionizes the relationship between a journalist and his readers. Fahrenthold positions himself on the side of the readers: together, they are digging into Trump’s business. The relationship between the journalist and the president is explicitly adversarial, and the relationship between the journalist and the readers is one of actual, observable cooperation. Most American journalists and editors would agree that this is as it should be—the journalists are working on behalf of the public, and their relationship with power should not be overly cozy—but in reality, the tone of neutrality, authority, and restraint that legacy publications adop...

Trump extolled the strength and battle-readiness of American troops but named no current threat. He promised only to strike fear into the hearts of America’s enemies. His intended audience, however, knew who the enemy was. North Korea or China could go from enemy to partner to friend on a whim, but there was one enemy whom Trump had consistently, obsessively described as an existential threat: the immigrant.

We condemn in the strongest possible terms this egregious display of hatred, bigotry and violence, on many sides. On many sides. It’s been going on for a long time in our country. Not Donald Trump, not Barack Obama. This has been going on for a long, long time. He was equating the “many sides” of a demonstration during which protesters had worn Nazi and KKK insignia and shouted Nazi slogans, such as “Blood and Soil,” a rallying cry from Hitler’s Germany.

Every political project requires a definition of “us,” the community of people it aims to unite and protect. This is true of both democratic and antidemocratic projects, it is true of nationalist and imperialist projects, and it is true, too, of autocratic attempts, though they are fundamentally antipolitical. Precisely because an autocratic attempt is the opposite of politics, it demands a narrowing definition of “us,” in opposition to an ever greater and more frightening “them.”

Where Obama’s rhetoric was expansive—an ongoing effort to create a narrative that included all Americans—Trump’s rhetoric is exclusionary.

Trump’s America is like Trump: white, male, straight, besieged, aggressive.

In February 2018, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, the federal agency that handles visas, green cards, and naturalization, revised its mission statement. It had begun, “USCIS secures America’s promise as a nation of immigrants.” The phrase “nation of immigrants,” which generations of Americans had learned as children, was, like most national myths and more than some, a lie: the United States was a settler colonialist nation whose economy was rooted in the enslavement of Africans forcibly brought to its shores. The new statement dropped the phrase altogether. This had nothing to do with correcting the record—it was part of the Trumpian project to redefine America in nationalist, nativist terms. The old mission statement put forth the agency’s function as “granting immigration and citizenship benefits, promoting an awareness and understanding of citizenship, and ensuring the integrity of our immigration system.” The new statement defined it as “administer[ing] the nation’s lawful immigration system . . . while protecting Americans, securing the homeland, and honoring our values.” The new statement, in other words, made it clear that immigrants and Americans are two distinct groups that exist in opposition to each other. Immigrants, it indicated, are not Americans, now or in the future. Americans need to be protected from immigrants. This was a radical narrowing of the definition of “us.” It was also an act of closing the community of “us” to those not already i...

Israeli philosopher Moshe Halbertal has written that a moral life demands overcoming the natural human tendency to “self-privilege.” People feel most comfortable and secure in a closed circle of “us,” but we also realize that broadening that circle to include others makes us better people. This understanding underpins the aspirational narrative of American politics.

Statue of Liberty, with Emma Lazarus’s sonnet “The New Colossus” on its base, as its symbol. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to be free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore” were words of aspiration.

“The future does not belong to globalists,” he said, using a term the alt-right had turned into an anti-Semitic slur. “The future belongs to patriots. The future belongs to sovereign and independent nations.”

President Donald J. Trump speaking at the United Nations.