The journalist Maria Konnikova has written that the frequency and seeming irrelevance of Trump’s eruptions of “alternative facts” indicate that he lies “for the pure joy of it.”22 But his myriad falsehoods, although spontaneous, are not insouciant. And when it comes to conspiracism specifically, the pleasure principle is not in evidence, only explosive assertions of his own account of reality.
Truth, Lies, and the President’s Claim to Own Reality
Liars do not claim to own reality. True, they lie and misrepresent a particular set of facts or events. But they assume and exploit a background condition of veracity. Liars do not create a reality wholesale; their goal is to deny a particular verity to achieve a particular purpose. Trump, like most people, tells useful lies, or tries to. Some of his lies are preposterous and easily refuted—for example, his claim that the Access Hollywood tape that recorded his boasts of sexual harassment was doctored. The same thing happened when, in an attempt to distance himself from his campaign manager, Paul Manafort, who was indicted and convicted on multiple criminal charges, Trump claimed, “He worked for me, what, for 49 days or something?”; the actual number was 144 days during a critical time in the run for the presidency.23 A momentous instance occurred at the 2018 summit meeting with Russian president Vladimir Putin. Asked whether he accepted American intelligence reports that it was Russia that intervened in the 2016 election, Trump echoed Putin’s denial: “I have President Putin. He just said it’s not Russia. I will say this. I don’t see any reason why it would be.” Encountering outrage at home, he backpedaled, said he misspoke, and amended the record to read, “I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia.” This was widely characterized as a lie.
If Trump sometimes lies for the same reason everyone does, to protect himself and for some advantage, still, lying seems to be the wrong term to describe many of his speech acts. Better to say that he emits endless falsehoods and at an astonishing rate—every day for the first forty days of his presidency; over 3,000 falsehoods as of May 2018; 21 in one speech in Missouri.24 A report in July 2018 documented the increasing frequency of his deviations from fact—going from making 4.9 false claims a day to making 6.5 a day.25
Liars want their lies to be believed as if they were the truth, but it is not clear that Trump cares whether his falsehoods are believed; he seems to care only that they are affirmed. He wants the power to make others assent to his version of reality. When Sean Spicer, Trump’s first press secretary, said that Trump’s inauguration had “the largest audience ever to witness an inauguration,” he may not have intended for people to believe him, only to describe the world Trump wished for, and thus to enact Trump’s own power. It was not a lie but rather an act of submission.
This is how the first president of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Havel, writing as a dissident in 1978, described the public speech of everyday life in Communist Czechoslovakia in his essay “The Power of the Powerless.” Havel invokes a sign hung in the window of a corner store: “Workers of the World, Unite!” The grocer hung the sign in the window because the entity that delivered the fruits and vegetables dropped off this official sign, and the greengrocer did as he was supposed to. He put that sign in the window, Havel says, “simply because it has been done that way for years, because everybody does it, and because that is the way it has to be. If he were to refuse, there could be trouble.”26 In Havel’s essay, the greengrocer’s invocation of working-class unity was not about genuine conviction; the sign only conveyed that the storekeeper complied with authority. He submitted, as did the White House press secretary when he repeated Trump’s assertion about the size of his inaugural crowd.
There is another way to try to characterize the claim to own reality, one that conforms to philosopher Harry Frankfurt’s concept of bullshit, which he defines as an indifference to the truth or falsity of things.27 In the myriad falsehoods he utters every day, Trump is manifestly indifferent to the truth of what he says. But his conspiracism is different. It is not bullshit. He is not blithely indifferent to the truth or falsity of his conspiracist claims. He presents an emphatic picture of political reality, and he cares very much that others affirm his reality.
The power to make people affirm the message is the power to impose reality. But brute facts are stubborn obstacles, as the philosopher Hannah Arendt argued. She illustrates the point by telling of French prime minister Georges Clemenceau’s answer to a question about how future historians would assign guilt for the outbreak of World War I: “I know for certain that they will not say Belgium invaded Germany.”28 What Arendt calls brute facticity impedes those who want the power to remake the world according to their desires.
The question for politics is how politicians respond to the resistance facts impose on them. Trump wants to obliterate facts that frustrate his wishes and desires, and the new conspiracism is the tool he instinctively reaches for to create a new reality. For him, frustrating facts are not truths to be accommodated but rather fictions created by forces that conspire against him. Many of Trump’s falsehoods come and go; they are reversed or dropped in the moment. But unlike the avalanche of lies and falsehoods, which hardly register before the next news cycle condemns them to oblivion, his conspiracist charges have long life. They are repeated over and over. His signature conspiracist claims do not die. In Trump’s reality, Obama’s presidency is illegitimate, busloads of fraudulent voters threw the New Hampshire presidential election, Trump’s inauguration crowd was the largest ever, and the investigation into Russian assaults on American democracy is a witch hunt. Trump inhabits that made-up world. The pictures of what is happening, which serve his aggrandizement (or constitute his armor against humiliation), are the only pictures he can register.
There is no doubt about the consequences in any case: because of the rhetorical power of his office and his institutional capacity as president, his compromised relation to reality ascends from a private to a public condition. Because he is president, his conspiracism is not merely a concoction of his own private mind; it becomes a public thing. As president, Trump’s conspiracist claims have initial authority, a moment of presumptive plausibility, that they would otherwise lack. Despite the astonishment and confusion that follow each fresh claim on the president’s Twitter feed, his conspiracist accusations command attention and generate attempts to interpret them in a way that makes them coherent. All this comes with the office.
So Trump’s conspiracist reality has consequences for our reality. It is something his supporters adopt and repeat, that officials in the White House and across the executive agencies are compelled to accept or to discreetly ignore, that Republican officials—almost to a person—acquiesce in a show of partisan reticence, and that thousands of civil servants and others must accommodate as they go about the now besieged and often distorted business of government. Trump imposes his reality on the country. That is the distinctive threat of the new conspiracism when it occupies the White House.
Creating “Malignant Normality”
Amplified by presidential power, conspiracism’s cumulative effect is the long-term delegitimation of the institutions of American democracy. There is also the immediate distortion of these institutions as the president degrades them in the service of his conspiracist claims. On one hand, Trump’s new conspiracism is gesture and innuendo, with no attempt to ascertain the truth of his claims, though as president in command of every part of the intelligence apparatus, he could. On the other hand, he commands officials and commandeers institutions to substantiate his reality. We have what psychiatrist and historian Robert Jay Lifton calls “malignant normality,” where people accommodate themselves to distorted processes and inverted purposes.29 In doing so, they make the malignant normal.
The feat of exploiting and corrupting critical institutions and the officials who run them is repeated over and over. The president accuses key government agencies of engaging in conspiracy and at the same time commissions them to affirm his charges and to expose and punish the alleged
conspirators. “Uninhibited by the traditional protocols of his office, he makes the most incendiary assertions based on shreds of suspicion.… After setting off a public firestorm with no proof, he then calls for investigation to find the missing evidence.”30
A story on Fox News gets Trump’s immediate attention and he demands that the Justice Department investigate the Clinton Foundation, for example. Or, at the president’s request, then–CIA director Mike Pompeo meets with William Binney, a conspiracist who suggests that the hack of Democratic National Committee emails was an inside job.31 Congressional committees are recruited and special commissions are created to chase down Trump’s claims that a specific conspiracy is in the works. He established a spurious Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity charged, in effect, with confirming his claim that organized voter fraud cost him the popular vote. Its mandate was to engage in a “quixotic search for nonexistent evidence.”32 We have become familiar with the commandeering of institutions for conspiracist purposes and the manufacture of ad hoc arenas for “investigating” conspiracist allegations. The commission is a prime example of how conspiracist claims are now “making their way into the halls of Congress, and wasting the time of allies, intelligence officials and the FBI director.”33
Conspiracism in power does double damage to democratic institutions and processes: it simultaneously denigrates them and enlists the very same debunked institutions to confirm conspiracist claims. That is, conspiracism simultaneously delegitimates and corrupts. Take Trump’s unsupported accusation that Obama ordered the tapping of phone lines in Trump Tower. Trump charged congressional investigative committees with looking into this unsupportable tale of abuse of power. He enlisted Homeland Security secretary John Kelly to defend the claim as best he could on CNN, where Kelly said that “the president must have his reasons.” As New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman wrote, “Then why doesn’t the secretary of homeland security know them and why doesn’t the president share them? And … why are you on television … saying the President has reasons but not saying what they are? That’s how a morally bankrupt president soils everyone around him, even such a good man.”34
A president who regularly attacks the press as purveyors of “fake news” and enemies of the people would have been extraordinary and is now routine. Yet malignant normality involves more than the routinization of unprecedented and destructive presidential language and behavior. We have malignant normality when the ordinary business of elected representatives, administrators, and civil servants is turned upside down or inverted inside out. Many in government accommodate and do what is demanded of them. The duty of executive branch officials is to serve the duly elected president, regardless of party or program. This obligation, which under ordinary circumstances supports the constitutional order, comes to threaten it. From the White House press secretary, whose job becomes endorsing the president’s falsehoods, to the director of national intelligence, who cannot both serve the president and accurately report the threat Russia poses to American elections, malignant normality endows routine obligations with destructive consequences. Accommodation to malignant normality advances the momentum of delegitimation.
We see how the longer-term process of delegitimation goes: a conspiracist president tilts against his own government—against the Justice Department, the State Department, and potentially every agency he directs. Offended by the “deep state” that he imagines plots against him, the president first ignores and then eliminates the career bureaucrats who (in his mind) impede him. Initially, these agencies look illegitimate mostly to the company of conspiracists and the president’s own base. Beleaguered, ignored, harried, and underfunded, the agencies—once staffed by professionals who responsibly served whatever party is in power—are progressively gutted and demoralized. As they lose competence and capacity, they will come to look more and more illegitimate to more and more people. The steady stream of conspiracist claims has cumulative force.
This is the uniqueness of presidential conspiracism: conspiracist accounts of reality can be realized. Processes ranging from information gathering to established norms of decision-making are cast aside as impediments to getting at the conspiracist truth of how things really are. Under conditions of malignant normality, what was once unthinkable becomes ordinary. And when that happens, it can become normal to assault the institutions on which democracy depends and make them look illegitimate.
Trump and the Parties
One institution on which democracy depends is political parties, and that is where delegitimation begins. In chapter 4 we will take an extended look at this process; we will show that the assault on parties amounts to a rejection of political pluralism and political opposition, and that the process of delegitimation turns on the charge that political candidates and parties themselves are conspiracies. Trump, who is both a conspiracist and an antipartisan, who is hostile to the critical place of parties in democracy, fuels this process.
Over most of his life, Trump was neither a Democrat nor a Republican. He campaigned for the Reform Party nomination in 1999 (hoping to enlist another television celebrity, Oprah Winfrey, as his vice presidential running mate). He considered challenging George W. Bush in 2004, saying on CNN, “In many cases I probably identify more as a Democrat.”35 He is an accidental partisan who opportunistically ran for president on the Republican ticket and confessed, “I’m not sure I got there through deep analysis.… When I give speeches sometimes I’ll sign autographs and I’ll get to talk to people and learn a lot about the party.”36 He ran against sixteen primary challengers, whom he gleefully emasculated. He won without the support of the national Republican leadership, party elites, or donors who were in anguish over his campaign, fearful that his dark, racist, and sexist rhetoric would be a long-term disaster for the party. He does not characterize his supporters as Republicans. One commentator described Trump as “the first independent to hold the presidency since the advent of the two-party system” 150 years ago. But “independent” is misleading if it suggests a centrist or moderate pose.37 The political consultant Roger Stone put it in terms Trump would agree with: “He is bigger than the Republican Party.”38
As president, Trump does not see the Republican Party—or any party—as the source of his power; hence his ephemeral alliances with Republican representatives and frequent attacks on both congressional Democrats and Republicans. He demeans leaders of both parties, including Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell: “Our leaders are stupid. Our politicians are stupid.”39 He campaigns against the reelection of sitting Republican senators, threatening their slim majority.40 He feints at making “deals” with congressional Democrats. He exploits the deep division within the Republican Party—applauding the radical conservative caucus and obstructing the leadership’s attempt at putting the factions of the party together in a way that would allow them, when they were the majority party in Congress, to govern. To the extent that Trump is interested in governing, he shows only sporadic interest in building an organization that can carry his policies and principles into the future. Seen this way, Trump is not, in fact, committed to governing at all. He has pet policies, which he tries to institute by executive order, but his own disinterest in governing and indifference to hiring people adept at administration often make a mash even of them.
This description of Trump as antiparty may sound startling, given that he has successfully recruited the allegiance of Republican voters. He does value the loyalty and affirmation of his supporters in the electorate. He encourages them to form a personal connection to him. In that way he has also tied the electoral fortunes of Republican candidates to his own. But he values the party only insofar as it is identified with him, not as a carrier of principles and programs that defined Republicans before him. Nor does he call the party to organize around new principles that could continue to define it after him.
Trump is consistent only in his inconsistency—his capricious passing preferences, his frustrations and reversals, and
his conspiracist distortions of political reality. He leaves Republicans (and everyone else) flummoxed and at odds. One day, he urges members of Congress not to pass any immigration bill and rather to wait until after the midterm elections, when more Republicans will have been elected. Five days later, he urges—via an ALL CAPS tweet—those same members of Congress to pass a comprehensive immigration reform bill.41 An organized Republican Party with a recognizable political identity may not survive his presidency. Indeed, the political commentator Charles Blow declares it already defunct: “The pre-Trump Republican Party is dead; the zombie Trump party now lives in its stead.”42
This is the man and these are the circumstances under which the delegitimation of political parties is carried on. One way or another, Trump’s presidency will come to an end—perhaps it will have ended by the time this book goes to press—but the disruptive force of conspiracism may not. What Trump has started, future presidents—not to mention members of Congress, senators, governors, and mayors—may emulate. He has made the new conspiracism a useful political practice and demonstrated its force. Moreover, neither the technology that fuels it nor the way repetition on social networks (“a lot of people are saying”) validates it is going away. And there’s this: we noted in chapter 1 that conspiracism is a stamp of being a political outsider willing to overturn the regular order. Future demagogues, if we allow them to rise, will not resist using it as a signal and a tool.
Trump is of interest as he directs our attention to the delegitimation of democratic foundations. In the next section we take a deep plunge into this process of delegitimation. We show why political parties and knowledge-producing institutions are foundational, why they are conspiracists’ targets, and how delegitimation works.
A Lot of People Are Saying Page 7
