by John Ambrosio
Liberals, progressives, and others who closely follow U.S. national politics often experience a sense of vertigo and disorientation, of being emotionally upended and mentally exhausted trying to untangle and refute the incessant barrage of lies, disinformation, and conspiracy theories emanating from the White House. While Trump frequently makes outrageous and inflammatory remarks to elicit a response from his political opponents and dominate the news cycle, the primary effect of his rhetoric is to envelop people in a fog of incoherence, to psychologically overwhelm them by flooding the zone with a tsunami of falsehoods, inconsistencies, and contradictory narratives that leaves them cognitively numb.
But when we dismiss Trump’s incoherent rants and inscrutable word salads as the utterances of a disorganized and deranged mind, which they clearly are, we overlook the political appeal of his rhetoric. Trump does not seek to persuade people by appealing to reason and the intellect, but to create a feeling of uncertainty, doubt, distrust, and chaos that disables and short-circuits the capacity of people to engage in rational and fact-based dialogue, that bypasses the intellect in order to appeal directly to deep feelings of anger, resentment, and racial grievance in his supporters.
We should not assume that people who espouse ostensibly crazy ideas and conspiracy theories are incapable of coherent reasoning. While this may be true in some cases, the problem is not that Trump’s supporters are incapable of rational thought. What may appear irrational to some can make rational sense to people who inhabit Trump’s invented reality. That is, when people have marinated in the far-right news and information ecosystem and become emotionally and psychologically invested in Trump’s lies, and when belief in his falsehoods is essential to their identity, rational thought can become detached from empirical and fact-based reality. For Trump’s core supporters, the sense of belonging to a supportive and affirming community of shared belief and feeling is more important than facts and truth.
Like others, I rarely paid attention to the noise, to the craziness and nonsense, and simply dismissed far-right propaganda as the irrelevant chatter of marginal voices. But I was mistaken to assume that these voices would simply disappear or would remain in the margins forever. Even when Rush Limbaugh’s angry rants found their way into my family gatherings, I thought this too will pass, that reason and fact-based reality would ultimately prevail. Well, reason did not prevail and has been largely banished from Republican political discourse and far-right media. Millions of people who are steeped in Republican propaganda have come to believe whatever Trump says, which many of his evangelical supporters view as divine truth.
As Timothy Snyder argues, the purpose of lies in an autocracy is not to deceive people, to have them accept falsehoods, but to strengthen and solidify support for the autocratic leader through public demonstrations of fealty, of bending the knee. Lies, even those that are transparent and easily debunked, telegraph the official narrative people are expected to publicly affirm, which is how the “big lie” that Biden stole the 2020 presidential election functions in the MAGA universe, as a marker of tribal identity and a litmus test of personal loyalty.
Trump’s incessant lies and incoherent rants are a central feature of fascist propaganda that insulates his followers from unwelcome facts and inconvenient realities. Fascist propaganda does not seek to persuade people on the basis of cogent fact-based arguments, but to incite, amplify, channel, and mobilize angry and hateful emotions to win and sustain political power, to destabilize society by keeping people in a constant state of fear, confusion, and uncertainty.
In Trump’s gross inflation and deadening of language, words are decoupled from their common meanings and become free-floating signifiers that can become invested with whatever meaning he chooses, so that language no longer describes objective reality and lived experience becomes largely unintelligible.
Hannah Arendt, the political philosopher, famously wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism that the “ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
Totalitarianism, she warned us, aims to destroy the capacity of people to discern reality, to know what is true. By creating a political environment in which every fact is contested and dismissed as partisan, in which reality itself is a matter of opinion, the concept of truth loses its power and meaning. Trump’s political rhetoric has a similar aim: to confuse and disable people, to have people throw up their hands in disgust and give up on ever knowing what is true.
Has the U.S. become fertile soil for the spread of far-right propaganda? Have a significant number of Americans become so conditioned by years of exposure to profit-driven commercial television, especially reality TV, ubiquitous advertising, tabloid newspapers, and Hollywood movies, that they can no longer distinguish between fact and fiction? Will the advent of AI, which can create voices and images that so closely resemble those in the real world that people will be increasingly unable to distinguish between what is real and what is not? Will AI inadvertently create the conditions in which fascist propaganda thrives?
For these reasons, far-right propaganda must not be given a free pass in the legacy or mainstream media. The widespread practice of uncritically reporting falsehoods under the guise of upholding the vaunted principle of objective journalism, must be thoroughly rejected. There is a critical need for fact- and evidence-based journalism that clearly distinguishes between the opinions of media personalities, social media influencers, and entertainers masquerading as journalists, and actual journalists whose work is subject to editorial review and verification on the basis of sufficient and credible evidence.
Unusual news events, such as when Trump posts a deranged rant or meme on Truth Social, his social media platform, are often reported in the mainstream media as if they are ordinary news items, just another story about national politics rather than a radical departure from historical norms and precedent. While Trump has repeatedly telegraphed his intention to interfere with the midterm elections, the legacy media typically employs euphemisms that downplay or understate what he is actually proposing, such as when Trump announced that he wants to nationalize state-administered elections and post ICE and CBP agents at polling stations, which are ostensibly unconstitutional and illegal actions. Trump often floats radical proposals to test their viability, to see what kind of public response they elicit. If they generate a particularly strong negative response, Trump will falsely claim that he was only joking or that the fake news misunderstood or deliberately misrepresented his remarks. Rather than sounding the alarm and warning us about Trump’s actual intentions, the mainstream media will often seek to alleviate fear and diminish concern, to assure their audience that the political order is stable and resilient, that there’s nothing to worry about.
How, then, do you report on the utterances of a pathological liar and purveyor of conspiracy theories without validating his claims, without treating what are clearly bad faith arguments as legitimate, without taking his denials and misleading statements at face value? Since you cannot fact-check every false claim that Trump makes, or simply ignore his statements, perhaps the best approach is to interpret his statements by comparing and contrasting them to what he actually does, and by juxtaposing his manufactured reality, his alternative facts, with fact- and evidence-based perspectives that illuminate Trump’s attempt to bend reality to his will.
There is a tendency among mainstream journalists and pundits to “sane wash” Trump’s unhinged rants, to pretend that he did not actually say what he clearly said, so they do not have to correctly portray the U.S. president as mentally unstable and deranged. Mainstream journalists often try to normalize the abnormal, to treat Trump’s insane rants as if they were actual speeches, to impose a kind of narrative coherence where there is none, to treat his impulsive and erratic behavior as if there were some kind of plan or strategy behind it. There is none. Trump is not playing three dimensional chess, he is simply acting on his impulses, his gut instincts, and his malignant narcissism and insatiable hunger for praise and attention.
How do you appeal to a mainstream audience, many of whom are low-information viewers, without normalizing what is clearly abnormal? How do you communicate to the audience the gravity of the present historical moment, the social and political stakes, without overwhelming people and having them turn away from the news? In a world in which news is packaged and presented as entertainment, how do you convey that one of the major political parties in the U.S. poses an existential threat to liberal constitutional democracy? How do you accurately frame and interpret political news so you do not lose their attention in an attention economy?
All of this poses a dilemma for journalists who must cover Trump, who try to make sense of his Truth Social rants, to fit them into some kind of conceptual or political framework that makes them intelligible to people. Mainstream journalists typically feel a professional obligation to report on Trump’s speeches as if they possessed a coherent idea or argument, and to deny the implicit, indirect, and subconscious messages, the dog whistles, that he actually intends to send. Journalists are not supposed to read between the lines, to infer what is not explicitly stated, but they cannot accurately analyze and report on Trump’s utterances without doing so, and without placing his statements in a larger interpretive context. Trump exploits this tendency among journalists to avoid political accountability.
We can begin to address this problem by cultivating truth-telling as an ethical virtue and social norm in public life, by refusing to normalize incessant lying and calling things what they are. While this can be exceedingly difficult in a context in which there are no agreed upon facts, in which Trump and his MAGA allies view reality as a matter of opinion, it is vital that the possibility of truth be continually defended and reaffirmed, not because debunking far-right propaganda with fact and evidence-based arguments will pierce the iron curtain that exists between Trump’s core supporters and empirical reality, or weaken their emotional and psychological investment in perpetuating his fabricated world, but because it is essential to rolling back a metastasizing cancer that is poisoning political discourse and eroding the collective will and capacity to resist Trump’s mafia-state authoritarianism.
Effective resistance to far-right propaganda begins by taking Trump’s rhetoric seriously, by understanding how the unhinged rants of a would-be autocrat can have a corrosive effect on the psychic health and cognitive functioning of people, on their ability think rationally within the context of a fact and evidence-based reality, and on the social bonds and deliberative norms that undergird civic and political life in liberal constitutional democracies.
Educators and others can help people develop the mental habit of actively engaging with news and information, and the critical thinking and online literacy skills that enable them to distinguish between fact and opinion. By critically reflecting on and questioning what they see and hear, seeking multiple sources and perspectives, and assessing truth claims on the basis of cogent arguments and sufficient, credible, and verifiable evidence, people can develop the cognitive skills needed to effectively resist far-right propaganda.
Tens of millions of Americans have embraced far-right propaganda because the political ground has been prepared for decades by neoliberal social and economic policies and a far-right media ecosystem, which emerged in 1988 with Rush Limbaugh’s talk radio show, expanded in 1996 with the advent of Fox News, and has come to include a galaxy of podcasters, social media influencers, news and information web sites, talk radio stations, and cable news networks.
The problem is not merely one of Trump and his supporters, but of a radicalized Republican Party that has become increasingly authoritarian and fascistic. Even party members who realize that Trump’s “big lie” and conspiracy theories have no basis in fact or reality, continue to support him. When faced with a choice between Trump or the Democratic Party, many Republicans consider Trump the least objectionable and dangerous option. Former Arizona House Speaker Rusty Bowers, who testified at the January 6th congressional hearings after being harassed by Trump supporters who publicly called him a pedophile and corrupt politician, and who refused to go along with Trump’s scheme to overturn the 2020 election results in Arizona, nonetheless said that he would vote for Trump again in 2024. But this demonstration of party loyalty was not enough to overcome the unforgivable betrayal of testifying against Trump, and Bowers was defeated in the Republican primary for a seat in the Arizona state Senate.
Trump has damaged or destroyed large parts of the federal government and weakened the political norms that undergird liberal constitutional democracy. Much of the damage is long-term and will take years to repair, if it can be done. We cannot put the genie back in the bottle, but we can push back against Trump by resisting the deadening effect of his rhetoric on our ability to think critically and act rationally and by refusing to give up on the possibility of truth.
The bad news is that defeating Trump will not, by itself, save the us from this madness. The truth is that the rot runs deep and has been festering for decades. The malignant cancer of unreason, hate, and cruelty emanating from the base and leadership of the Republican Party will not stop metastasizing until the underlying social and economic conditions that produced it are adequately addressed and when the Republican Party suffers significant electoral defeats through multiple election cycles. In the meantime, keeping alive the possibility of fact- and evidenced-based truth and rational democratic discourse is essential.
While the desire to turn away from this endless source of confusion, discomfort, and mental anguish is understandable, it is essential that people not be deterred from paying attention to political news by Trump’s pathological lying and rejection of empirical reality, and by cabinet secretaries like Kristi Noem, who falsely and maliciously accused U.S. citizens murdered by ICE and CBP agents in Minneapolis of being terrorists bent on killing those responsible for their public executions.
We can resist the mentally numbing and stultifying effects of Trump’s rhetoric by not trying to make rational sense out of his twisted logic and non sequiturs or trying to fit them into liberal democratic conceptual frameworks, but by seeing them for what they are: attempts to confuse, intimidate, frighten, demoralize, and disable his political enemies. When understood in this way, following the daily litany of lies, misinformation, and conspiracy theories will not achieve its intended effect. By taking a step back and not reacting emotionally to statements intended to elicit outrage and disorient his political opponents, people can protect their mental health while sustaining the will and capacity to resist Trump’s gangster authoritarianism.
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