Don’t Eat the Cats

Scott L. Montgomery on the global ramifications of Trump’s anti-truth serum.

“I have the best words,” Donald Trump has often said. To be sure, it isn’t news that both he and his sorcerer’s apprentice, J.D. Vance, have a troubled relationship with the truth. Even so, as the November presidential election draws near, they have openly, unapologetically, revealed the divorce is final.

There is nothing new in observing that those who seek power in troubled times, whatever kind of political system they inhabit, will sometimes or even often bend facts so that they incline in a supportive direction. But Trump, in particular, has now taken this to a kind of final stage. He has perhaps learned from Vladimir Putin in this. But even here, he has gone further. Putin seeks, if he doesn’t always find, some appearance of rhetorical gravity and adulthood. Trump, however, aims at the lowest common denominator while completely abandoning any connection with factuality. Even for the illiberal elite of leadership in today’s democracies, it is a type of precedent. Say anything—but make sure it is bitter, wrathful, cracked, and, above all, deceitful.

Were the ranks of MAGA to take Trump at his word about the evils of Democrats, only a real revolution would do—why wait and risk a lost election? All things are in hellish circumstance—pets eaten by immigrants, hurricane help funds stolen, a “radical leftist, Marxist country” in sight, and his opponent, Kamala Harris, who was (he has lately stated) a “shit VP,” planning a military draft, while public schools are sending children to transgender surgery centers.

And if such lies tend to sacrifice some of his supporters as collateral damage—Republican people, for example, in the Ohio town of Springfield—so be it. Better for the campaign that tens of millions believe Haitians have Yorkies and Shorthairs charring on the barbie. As Mark Twain nicely put it: “a lie can go half-way around the world while a fact is still putting on its shoes.”

But most Trump followers don’t believe such sludge anymore. They have come to realize it is offered for effect, as a show of energy and force. The situation it has created for political discourse has been genteelly referred to as “post-truth”. A quaint coinage, this seems in league with the refrain of calling Trump and his illiberal kind “fascist.”

These are terms that do weak justice to the actual reality. It isn’t that the parallels to the 1930s are wholly inaccurate or that the once-violent epithet has been bled of vigor by overuse. Nor is the problem that invoking the specters of Hitler, Mussolini, and Franco

seeks to hurl us back into a dark past where we should expect events of that time are just around the corner. There is little chance that Trump and the GOP are soon to form a national MAGA “brown shirt” militia together with a Geheime Staatspolizei (Gestapo). Some parallels are real but not in literal terms. 

One such echo has been the progressive normalization of what the German social critic, Theodor Adorno, called “anti-truth.” This differs from the soft “post-“ variety in that it defines an active effort of attack and dissolution, a quest to destroy public faith in the value of honesty at any level, even the mere appearance of it.

Fascist rhetoric was based on a mind-warping mélange of heroic myths, fearful omens, and unending lies about existential enemies within. Regimes of this kind, or who are inclined in a similar direction, have, as a core element of power, routinely sought control over public media—control, that is, not of the truth but its replacement. Trump and his followers can’t achieve this in the U.S. They cannot take command of the New York Times, Vox, Politico, and so on. What they can do instead, and in fact have done, is try and delegitimize these venues and force them into bleating complaint and repeated moans of warning. Such is the power of the unabated lie on stage, wielded with degrees of charismatic force, without conscience or quarter.

But anti-truth is serious business in the end. Trump and his minions in recent months seem to consider anything resembling the truth either irrelevant or hostile. Another way of putting this: Trump and Vance are not campaigning to lead America—a country of spectacular wealth and inequity, diversity, science and innovation, cultural conflict, and struggles to improve upon a troubled past—but a different country altogether. This country is closer to a Jeffersonian failure: drained of prosperity, bereft of civil order, overrun by felonious aliens, a land where elections are stolen, education is propaganda, citizens are powerless, and the government is run by evil elites who seek to dictate what every person should feel and belief. This is a country not of the imagination but the nightmare, not of challenges and dilemmas but chaos and collapse, a country strangled by liberal oppression, swarming with invasive immigrant species, prostrate upon the ruins of its crumbled glory.

Some have again cried out that Trump has taken to speaking the rhetoric of a Nazi leader. This has been pointed out regularly since he lost the 2020 election though it has become more consistent and aggressive since  a year ago. But the historical reality is that authoritarian leaders of all stripes have referred to their opponents as “enemies of the people,” as “vermin,” and as those who wish to “poison the blood of our beloved country.” Trump is employing a rhetoric that he believes can, as he puts it, “make things happen”.

There is reason to feel unsettled by this, to be sure, and to be wary. Like more than a few authoritarians, Trump has a high Caligula quotient, also more apparent than ever. We know he is more than a paper autocrat; he is vindictive, vengeful, proudly ignorant, and, like Nicolas II (Russia), willing to listen to crude and violent extremists. Yet, anti-truth has a very poor record of winning presidential elections in America, a reality made clear by such memorable candidates as Barry Goldwater, George Wallace, Pat Roberts, Pat Buchanan, Michele Bachman, Ted Cruz, Ron de Santis, to name but a few. 

Trump’s anti-truth serum has had its effects, however. Having corroded all limits to what will be tolerated in speeches, rallies, and interviews, Trump has rendered “lie” itself an accusation emptied of charge and disrespect. He and his supporters have transformed this term into a confirmation of impact. Telling lies in front of the prestige media has become equivalent to calling their bluff. Mendacity is now the fount of Trump’s political theater and calling it out has become part of the tragedy of 21st century American politics. Lying even in a presidential debate--“They’re eating the cats!”—becomes a display of resistance.

Though it may not have been his original plan, Trump has set a new precedent—established a new “freedom.” For the foreseeable future, Republican politicians are now able to say whatever might serve a desired effect and final goal. The evangelicals may not like the profanity (Franklin Graham has asked the ex-president to not use “foul language”), but Trump knows that, in an era when movies, tv series, and even magazines like The New Yorker employ such language as a matter of course, it would be foolish and damaging to his drug-like effect on listeners were he to try and appear more “dignified.”

The GOP, truth be told, has been pushing back the limits of rhetorical outrage for decades. Ever since Newt Gingrich and Lee Atwater in the early 1990s gave credence to the use of nihilistic, cynical, and scurrilous tactics in national politics, far-right Republicans have been employing factual matter as unrefined raw material, increasingly less useful than fiction. Trump was the obvious endpoint of this, but he—that is, his utterly unrestrained dishonesty and denial of any curb to verbal fraud—arrived sooner than anyone expected.

None of this means that his threats are hollow. There is high potential for abandoning Ukraine to Putin, renewed splintering from NATO, betrayal of allies, required loyalty oaths, a new global trade war, firing and demonization of civil servants, and other, less predictable damages.  

But whether Trump is elected or not, he has set the bar for lying at ground level. It will no longer suffice to merely call out the GOP on fabrications, conspiracy theories, and the like. It will not be long before fact-checking becomes as obsolete and outmoded as calling someone a Nazi. An abiding question is whether America’s right-wing abandonment of truth will be its next soft-power export to global democracy.

Photo by Tim Mossholder