Next stop, Hell
A couple of lines rattle around behind my eyes this morning. “The Last Days of Pompeii” is one. Another is “Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time.”
“The Trump people are living in a bubble and it’s affecting their ability to understand the world around them,” Digby wrote yesterday, reacting in part to this passage from Anne Applebaum:
Europeans can also see that this alternative reality is directly and profoundly shaped by Russian propaganda. I don’t know whether the American president absorbs Russian narratives online, from proxies, or from Putin himself. Either way, he has thoroughly adopted the Russian view of the world, as has Vance.
They’ve gone down a rabbit hole and mean to take the country and the world with it.
The Russians are certainly playing Trump and his circle, but there’s more to it.
Republicans as a party have habituated themselves to lying and to living inside the bubble of lies they tell. This tendency predates the rise of Trumpism. We might trace it to Newt Gingrich’s cynical strategies of the 1990s like his “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control.” Or to their drilling it into their voters’ heads starting decades earlier that large numbers of, you know, THEM, were voting improperly, or illegally, or most importantly, not for Republicans. Evidence was irrelevant. It became an article of faith, and lying a habit of mind.
The Republican Party has come unstuck in reality
Synthesizing Roy Cohn’s three rules about power and Norman Vincent Peale’s teachings about the power of positive affirmation, Trump treats reality as maleable, truth as instrumental, and all human interactions as transactional. He believes he can bend reality to his iron will. He not only insists he always wins but has trained himself to believe it. His father, Fred, trained him that the way to run a successful business is to lie, cheat and steal. Do unto others before they do unto you. Members of Trump’s cult of personality know to follow Dear Leader if they know what’s good for them, to do as he does, and to repeat the lies until they become reality.
- Attack! Attack! Attack!
- Admit nothing and deny everything.
- No matter what happens you claim victory and never admit defeat.
The Big Lie is now a habit of mind. Trump failed (he won, you know) to upend the 2020 election with it. But he’s now deploying another Big Lie to topple Social Security.
The Republican Party has come unstuck in reality, untethered from truth, dismissive of facts and science. The party that spent well over half a century railing against the Russians and Russian propaganda now embrace both.
In 2016, I called it Quantum Conservatism:
It is a dimension of belief, not fact, where up is down, black is white, in is out, and wrong is right. Where Ann Coulter’s cat can be both alive and dead. Where the Kentucky Fried Chicken company is a person … headquartered in Louisville … in a bucket.
Someone the other day asked a filmmaker how they could create fictional stories that have resonance in a world that’s stranger then fiction. How indeed, where the Russians are the guys in white hats?
Andy Borowitz is in the business of satirizing that sad unreality. He offers this morning:
WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report)—In one of the more ominous moments from his speech to Congress on Tuesday night, Donald J. Trump blamed a surge in transgender mice on “Haitians eating all the cats.”
“For four years, mice swarmed over the border, looking for sex-change operations that Sleepy Joe Biden would pay for,” he alleged. “These mice had nothing to fear because they knew that all the cats had been eaten.”
Vowing to usher in what he called a “golden age for cats,” he vowed to use billions in tariff revenue to establish a Strategic Cat Reserve.
Trump spent the rest of his speech listing his second-term accomplishments, boasting, “I have already caused more damage than all other presidents put together.”
That last line is not satire, but the truth. The rest counts for truth deep inside the MAGA rabbit hole. If Trump had said it, Speaker Mike Johnson, Fox News talking heads, and the MAGA faithful would repeat it until it becomes the only reality they know.
* * * * *
Have you fought the coup today?
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water