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December 28, 2022 - January 11, 2023
With Carson at his side, he said, “Frederick Douglass is an example of somebody who’s done an amazing job and is being recognized more and more, I notice.” Given what an amazing job Fred is doing these days, it seemed a glaring omission that Trump hadn’t invited him to the breakfast. Three
during a Fourth of July speech in 2019, when he offered this time-bending narrative of the Revolutionary War: “Our army manned the air, it rammed the ramparts, it took over the airports, it did everything it had to do, and at Fort McHenry, under the rockets’ red glare, it had nothing but victory.” People were so distracted by the image of eighteenth-century airports—did they have Sbarro back then, too?—that most overlooked the fact that the battle of Fort McHenry occurred during the War of 1812.
Now that we’ve answered the question “What does Donald Trump know?,” let’s ask another question, one that Sarah Palin raised so insightfully: “Does any of this really matter?” To millions of his supporters, the answer is no. To them, Trump is successful, smart, and well-informed.
Trump’s followers apply a similar rule to his behavior: When Trump does it, that means that it is not idiotic. Regardless of what he says or does, Trump is right, and the media, always doing a “hit job” on him, are wrong.
Trump became a celebrity in spite of an almost uninterrupted string of failures: six bankruptcies, a laughable football team, a fraudulent university, and a board game no one wanted to play. Once a wrestler steps into the ring, the audience asks to be fooled. But how did someone as blundering as Donald Trump ever get into the ring? His fame has been with us for so long that it’s become one of life’s certainties, like death and hiding taxes.
Donald Trump does indeed have an island of competence, and it has taken him far: a preternatural talent for drawing attention to himself. He captivates by bragging, bullying, and, like Ronald Reagan, telling stories of questionable veracity. His genius for attention-grabbing has proven adaptable, serving him in his multifarious career as a New York tabloid star, TV juggernaut, and internet troll. But, gifted as Trump is, he couldn’t have become famous on his own.
Reflecting on his youthful antics, Trump observed, “When I look at myself in the first grade and I look at myself now, I’m basically the same.”
The Apprentice was an exquisite work of video chicanery, repackaging an inept scion as the preeminent business genius of our time. “Most of us knew he was a fake,” the show’s editor, Jonathan Braun, told The New Yorker’s Patrick Radden Keefe, in a 2019 profile of Burnett. “He had just gone through I don’t know how many bankruptcies. But we made him out to be the most important person in the world. It was like making the court jester the king.”
The flimflam succeeded, in part, because of Burnett’s genius, but also because Trump—like Ronald Reagan, professional wrestlers, and other charlatans and con men—made people want to be fooled.
“Our current president came out of nowhere. Came out of nowhere,” he declared. “In fact, I’ll go a step further: The people that went to school with him, they never saw him, they don’t know who he is. It’s crazy.” If, as Trump asserted, schoolmates’ failure to remember you proves you’re a foreigner, this raises troubling questions about his own birthplace.
a binary opposition of his own: us versus immigrants. “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” he said, sounding like the lead singer in a Pat Buchanan tribute band. “They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”
when the White House press secretary, Sean Spicer, made the easily refutable claim that Trump’s inauguration crowd had been larger than Obama’s, and was, in fact, the “largest audience to ever witness an inauguration—period—both in person and around the globe.” (In a possible homage to Trump’s punctuation skills, Spicer said “period” in the middle of a sentence.) Later that week, Kellyanne Conway, formerly Dan Quayle’s pollster and now counselor to Trump, appeared on NBC’s Meet the Press to defend Spicer’s statement as an example of what she called “alternative facts.”
Defending Trump’s ban on travel from predominantly Muslim countries, she cited the cautionary tale of two Iraqi refugees who masterminded something called the “Bowling Green Massacre.” Her follow-up statement about the mythical tragedy at Bowling Green at least contained a kernel of truth: “Most people don’t know that because it didn’t get covered.”
in Celebration voters were free to choose only the facts they agreed with. On outlets such as Fox News, Breitbart, right-wing talk radio, and countless Facebook and Twitter accounts, Trump wore an immunity idol around his neck.
like Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, of Georgia, who was elected in 2020. She shared not only Trump’s ignorance but his island of competence. The prolific QAnon loudmouth began her campaign against verifiable reality as an official of a far-right group with the deceptively benign name Family America Project. As a leader of FAP, she moderated a Facebook page promoting, somewhat quaintly, the old-school conspiracy theories of the John Birch Society.
Among the non-Bircher theories she advanced was that California wildfires were caused by lasers, fired from outer space, at the behest of the Jewish banking family the Rothschilds. Her claims had the unintended consequence of stoking the pride of many Jews, including me, who up to that point had felt that our control of the cosmos fell far short of our renowned hammerlock on the media and show business.
Once elected to Congress, Boebert tried to turn the House of Representatives into Shooters on the Potomac by bringing a gun, as others might bring their daughters, to work.
Possibly fearing that his GOP rivals in Congress were outduncing him, the Florida governor, Ron DeSantis (Yale ’01, Harvard Law School ’05), upped the ante. He flatly refused to issue a shelter-in-place order, arguing that imposing a lockdown on Floridians would be “throwing their lives into potential disarray,” ignoring the possibility that their lives could also be thrown into disarray by dying.
In the summer of 2021, Florida became responsible for a whopping one-fifth of the entire nation’s new COVID-19 cases. If, as many predict, DeSantis runs for president, he has already locked up the endorsements of several major variants.
When Fred Trump taught his son that the world was divided into killers and losers, he probably didn’t guess that this fatherly advice would someday lead to a riot at the U.S. Capitol. After Donald Trump lost the 2020 presidential election, by 7 million votes, the man who refused to go near Mike Tyson for fear that losing might be contagious couldn’t accept his own decisive knockout.
In 2019, as the special counsel Robert Mueller investigated his campaign’s alleged collusion with Russia during the 2016 election, Trump told Breitbart, “I can tell you I have the support of the police, the support of the military, the support of the Bikers for Trump—I have the tough people, but they don’t play it tough—until they go to a certain point, and then it would be very bad, very bad.”
In light of Trump and the GOP’s long-standing love affair with mob violence, the insurrection at the Capitol seems less like an outlier and more like a sequel. But its predictability makes it no less horrifying. When the history of American infamy is written, Trump might actually read it. So many paragraphs will feature his name.
published It Was All a Lie: How the Republican Party Became Donald Trump. Stevens points out what few Republicans have acknowledged: the views that people find abhorrent in Trump make him not the antithesis of Reagan but his rightful successor. “What happens if you spend decades focused on appealing to white voters and treating nonwhite voters with, at best, benign neglect?” Stevens asks. You get good at doing what it takes to appeal to white voters. That is the truth that led to what is famously called “the southern strategy.” That is the path that leads you to becoming what the Republican
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Reagan helped stoke the anti-government anger that achieved critical mass with the Tea Party and exploded on January 6. Of course, his followers would argue that he was merely talking about reducing the size of government, not overthrowing it. But making that distinction would require something that Reagan and his successors in the Age of Ignorance have done their best to eliminate: nuance.
I thought that, if we were better educated as a nation, we’d make smarter choices on Election Day. I wasn’t alone: Franklin Delano Roosevelt wrote, “Democracy cannot succeed unless those who express their choice are prepared to choose wisely. The real safeguard of democracy, therefore, is education.”
there isn’t a ton of evidence that it would result in our electing smarter leaders. Why? Because our emotional, not-very-rational engagement with politics renders even the best-educated among us capable of voting like dopes.I This is true no matter where you sit on the political spectrum.
The same is true on the left. Democrats were justifiably aghast at polling after the 2020 election showing that a huge chunk of Republicans believed Trump’s big lie that President Biden’s election was illegitimate. But a 2018 YouGov poll revealed that two out of three Democrats believed Russia actually changed the vote tallies of the 2016 election, a baseless conspiracy theory. Similarly, while they were right to assail Trump’s attempts to overturn the 2020 election, some liberals—including some well-educated ones—were hoping for a similar scenario after 2016. They were counting on an FBI
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But people like me—college-educated white people—are most likely to engage in what Hersh calls “political hobbyism.” We think we’re participating in politics, but we’re often just spectators, following it the way we follow sports. Obsessively watching cable news, checking Twitter, and monitoring the latest polls—all of which I’ve been guilty of—makes us feel like we’re staying informed, but to what end? When I do these things, I’m just a passive observer, rooting for my team.
But you know who’s been super patient? The Kochs. They’ve worked for decades to effect change on the local level, with a special emphasis on statehouses and the judiciary. Now we’re all living in the Kochs’ world, and it’s on fire. Hobbyists like me have no choice but to stop checking our phones and get to work.
Deep canvassing worked because activists on the ground weren’t offering canned talking points. They opened people’s minds with the power of personal stories.
That’s why so many people are drawn to professional wrestling—not to mention folklore and mythology. In the case of Donald Trump, people’s hunger for a false story helped elect the worst president in U.S. history.
Predictably, Republicans in Georgia and other states moved to pass restrictive election laws to keep the nasty surprise of January 5 from recurring. The GOP was all for exporting democracy to Iraq and Afghanistan, but it turns out they don’t like it much here at home.
