by Rick Wilson
THE WALL IS IN OUR HEARTS
The Wall. You know, the Wall that was going to span America from the Pacific to the Gulf of Mexico? That wall that Mexico was going to pay for?
“I will build a great, great wall on our southern border, and I will have Mexico pay for that wall, mark my words.”
A staple of rally after rally, call-and-response after call-and-response, the Wall became a singular, powerful, and incredibly stupid signifier in the Trump Con. Those of us not easily taken in by simple state fair carny tricks realized right away this was boob bait for the rubes. It had so many embedded meanings, mostly about brown people and the threat they posed to the virginal white daughters and high-paying jobs of America’s heroic, beleaguered white working class. It was classic Trump pitchmanship: promise an impossible project, get someone else to pay for it, and leave investors holding the bag when it never gets built.
When the early models for Douchehenge were unveiled in the fall of 2018, many of Trump’s fervent supporters believed the job was practically done. The Master Builder would protect them with ramparts and towers, like some medieval warlord drawing his serfs inside the castle walls as Goths or Franks or Mongols approached. Trump would pretend the Wall was going to stop the Bad Things and Brown People, when in reality he barely bestirred his round ass to do any of the political things needed to make a deal to build the wall. The Democrats offered the easiest path possible by offering to fund Donnie’s pet project in exchange for a DACA fix. It’s telling that for Trump the issue was never worth any compromise with the hot nationalists around him.
Of course, the Wall as a signifier was always more important than a wall qua wall. It was a way of making racial animus acceptable. It was a method for Trumpites to distance themselves from actually having to see Mexican immigrants face to face, to attach a story to a statistic. The Wall was magical thinking writ large, ignorant of history, economics, immigration, and the American story.
A common trope of the Wall crowd was “Without borders we don’t have a nation.” The alt-right and immigration hard-liners loved this theme and repeated it endlessly. Trump’s ideological architects—Miller, Bannon, Gorka, and Coulter—never understood that the propositional nature of America was always bigger and more powerful than their blinkered, racial interpretation of this country. They weren’t protecting what we are and can be; they’re just second-order effects of a decline in the idea and ideals of America. Call me a cockeyed optimist about the power of this country to not only welcome but also create new Americans, but I still believe that we are a system, not a race. We are a nation of universal ideals and principles, not just a few lines on a map or a wall in the desert.
MUSLIM BANS, MASS DEPORTATIONS, AND OTHER MAGA FANTASIES
Trump’s promises of Muslim bans and deportations were perfect fodder for the Breitbart set. In their conception of the world, every Muslim is one YouTube video away from strapping on a bomb vest or taking control of an airliner. The argument that we are in a war of civilizations with an implacable, global Muslim enemy has become deeply wired into the conservative worldview promulgated by Fox, Breitbart, and other Trump-friendly media.
Once in office, Bannon and Miller cooked up Trump’s now infamous Muslim ban, which went about as well as expected for people with no knowledge of government or the law. Breitbart and other Trump-right media outlets were in paroxysms of joy. The ban was shot down by the courts off and on for the next year, with subsequent iterations getting a long series of boot-to-the-head smackdowns. The travel ban was fatally flawed, but that didn’t stop the Camelot of Stupid from pursuing it until the last dog died. There are a dozen other ways to stop Islamic terrorism, but why not just engage in trolling by executive order instead?
Of course, Muslim terror is a painful and serious reality in the world. We’ve fought an almost 20-year global conflict since that terrible day in September 2001 and lost almost 5,000 military and 3,000 civilian lives in the process.
What Trump and his allies don’t want you to know is that when it comes to violence on our shores the alt-right and white supremacists have been running neck and neck with Al Qaeda. In this country for the past two years, they’d prefer to isolate, segregate, and persecute Muslims.
In an interview with Chuck Todd on Meet the Press in August 2016, Trump promised to deport the Dreamers and their families. Todd, incredulous, asked Trump if he really meant he was going to deport the children of immigrants and their families. Trump repeated, “They have to go. They have to go.” Quite obviously, they didn’t.
NO, THEY DIDN’T TAKE YOUR JERB: ECONOMIC ILLITERATES GET TAKEN. AGAIN
A central tenet of Trump’s nationalist populism is the rhetorical primacy of trade wars. He successfully convinced a chunk of the electorate that their economic problems came from the horde of job-stealing Mexicans and wily Chinese. Too bad none of it was true. The trade war Donald Trump launched in 2018 may have the support of his economically illiterate base, but the consequences to the American economy promise to be devastating.
Trump’s dumb obsession with trade deals stretches back decades and reflects his own idiotic hubris at his own skills at the negotiation table. His promise to shred trade agreements like NAFTA and to renegotiate “stupid” trade deals reflects a common and utterly wrong view among his voters that international trade, the global supply chain, just-in-time delivery, and a rapidly expanding international economy in services are somehow a bad thing.
Trump’s long-standing, notoriously dumb hatred of NAFTA was an echo of Ross Perot’s 1992 complaints about the free trade agreement. That was what worried smart trade experts the most at first, but as with all things Trump, it can always get worse. After all, no one would be stupid enough to provoke a trade war with China and Asia, right?
As Trump slowly purged every commonsense, mainstream economist from his circle, he left the White House Goldman Guys, Republican free-traders (prior to Trump, the vast majority), and Wall Street suffering from their own case of ETTD. That left Peter Navarro, Larry Kudlow, and Wilbur Ross still at the table, and those men share the Trump-Bannon view of trade, namely, that it is a sucker game and that America has been undercut both by the guile of devious furriners and by the perfidy of American trade negotiators who lack the Trumpian edge for the art of the deal.
It’s not simply that Trump doesn’t get it. This isn’t a policy debate with two sides. Conservatives fought for free trade because markets matter. Conservatives fought against tariffs because tariffs are taxes. Trade is good; tariffs and isolation are bad. All nations seek advantage, and our global trade system is far from perfect, but the alternatives are spectacularly, existentially bad.
A drunk monkey can understand this, which is why it is an impenetrable mystery to this president. There is a monstrous, looming Mt. Everest of economic studies and real-world examples that the Trump trade war and tariffs path leads to economic disaster. The irony was lost on the MAGA crowd, of course, but they’re the ones who will bear the costs and the burden of his blistering stupidity.
That cruel nostalgia about closed borders and high tariffs making the nation secure militarily and economically was a snare and a delusion. It was Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro circle-jerking themselves into an alternate economic universe where Americans would stand on an assembly line soldering chips to PCBs for $2 an hour. The so-called trade deficit in material goods ignored the fundamental reality of the new American economy: we do things, not just build things. I know the tangible end product of a widget assembly line may seem more real, but American services, intellectual property, and ideas matter as much now as do cars, pork bellies, and frozen concentrated orange juice.
Americans, more than most, benefit from the global web of trade in goods and services. A global regime of free trade has made us richer, more influential, and more secure. It has opened up markets for U.S. products and services around the world. As in any global system of multivariate inputs the upsides can be unevenly distributed, but closing down a multidecad
e system of trade freedoms would inevitably lead to less, not more prosperity.
What Trump didn’t, wouldn’t, or couldn’t understand was that sometimes the vast global consensus of experts is right. He just had to touch the hot stove. Since the defenders of Trump’s trade policy were thin on the ground, his supporters often fell back on Ronald Reagan as a policy backstop. They were, of course, embarrassingly wrong about the impact of trade policy under Reagan. Colin Grabow and Scott Lincicome of the Cato Institute wrote:
The WTO—ironically a Reagan-era accomplishment today decried by President Trump!—provides a new and impressive venue for resolving trade disputes without, in almost all cases, the need for unilateral action. The United States has prevailed in 86 percent of the complaints that it has brought to the WTO—all without angering our trading partners, disrupting markets, or burdening American consumers.
Trumpist intellectuals’ frequent invocations of Reagan to defend President Trump’s protectionism ignore ample historical context, actual policy results, and the evolution of the modern global trading system. Seen in the proper light, Reagan’s legacy argues strongly in favor of free trade and multilateral engagement, rather than a return to a bygone era of trade-policy failure.2
Trump’s unfortunate press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders made a statement at the launch of Trump’s trade war that is sure to go down in the Famous Dumb Last Words Hall of Fame. “We may have a little bit of short-term pain, but we’re going to have long-term success,” she said, just before the stock market cooked off over 1,000 points in a week.3
But the game wasn’t played on a one-way street. The Chinese got a vote in the battle, and vote they did. Within days, and with a precision that made me laugh, they launched their own new round of tariffs on things like corn, hogs, and soybeans.
Trump apparently couldn’t see into the future far enough to know that China would immediately put tariffs on bourbon from Mitch McConnell’s home state of Kentucky and on the Harley-Davidson motorcycles made in Paul Ryan’s backyard.
All of China’s decisions targeted districts and states squarely in the heart of Trump country. If Iowans didn’t know about the ETTD curse before the trade war, they certainly got the picture rather quickly after its opening skirmishes. Trump, indulging his economic ignorance, never considered that in a boxing match on trade that China could push back with sanctions that hurt folks who voted for him.
Like all technopeasants and economic boobs, Trump didn’t understand the global economy or the imperfect but resilient web of commerce that has made the U.S. and China the ultimate economic frenemies. Yes, Americans no longer build certain things our Chinese slave factories deliver. On the other hand, we enjoy cheap consumer goods, an astounding quality of life, and an economy that is as much about ideas as it is about heavy manufacturing.
He failed to understand that the Chinese could crash the entire U.S. economy if they sat out just one T-Bill auction. The idea that Trump is a brilliant international business leader is deeply embedded in the minds of people who watch too much reality television. There’s just one problem: he’s not. In the first major trade skirmish of the 21st century, he proved it over and over.
THE MODERN PARANOID STYLE
Trump’s base is the logical end point of both the anti-intellectualism and the oft-cited “paranoid style of American politics” predicted by the great historian and observer of American political life Richard Hofstadter in 1964. Their contempt for experience, knowledge, and qualifications was perfectly captured in Tom Nichols’s The Death of Expertise just as the Trump movement began its descent into outright rejection of traditional Republican and conservative principles.4
After the election, almost unbelievably, that paranoia became even more pronounced.
The Republican Party’s headfirst dive into breathless conspiratorial fantasies in defense of President Trump was a brand-defining moment for the party of Lincoln. The GOP spent 2017 and 2018 morphing into the party of LaRouche. Listening as members of Congress, the Fox News and talk-radio world, and the constellation of batshit-crazy people drawn to Esoteric Trumpism adopted increasingly baroque theories to protect The Donald wasn’t just depressing, it was tragic.
The tools that radically democratized communication and broke the monopoly of a few corporate media titans on shaping the national media agenda formed a sluice into the Facebook feeds of millions of voters. These voters aren’t looking for news or information. They’re looking for confirmation of their beliefs and their biases and for ways to justify their rage.
The diseased slurry of fake news, post-truth Trumpism, and Russkie agitprop available at the click of a mouse is ludicrous, comically overdrawn, patently false, and depressingly common. It wasn’t just the postmodern propaganda stylings of Russia’s information warfare specialists; a cottage industry of fake news sites of varying longevity appeared in a Darwinian struggle to get lower-middle-class Americans to click “Share” on their latest story of “Hillary and Huma’s Recipe for Roast Baby.”
This Ebola of wild-eyed, MK-ULTRA paranoiac raving quickly spread to every organ of the Republican body politic through disease vectors no one could have foreseen. Suddenly Reddit wasn’t just nerdy dudes talking gaming, tech, and Bitcoin. Suddenly it was Midwestern Trump-fanatic housewives following Reddit’s /r/the_donald and, God-forbid, 4chan. Conspiracy theories from Pizzagate to Uranium One, from Seth Rich to QAnon (“They’re all connected, man, and just wait till I tell you about the Jewwwwws and global banking”) became more involved, more complex, and more contingent on a continued suspension of disbelief.
In the spring of 2018, a Trump fan sent me a long email connecting a project I had done in German politics in 2005 to the “fact” that Angela Merkel was Hitler’s daughter produced by a secret artificial insemination program and claiming I was part of the Rothschild–Catholic Church–communist-Soros conspiracy that Trump was working his heart out to stop. This person wasn’t an ordinary troll, just a Trump-lover who has slipped into the warm bath of conspiracy cray.
The depth of this dive into paranoia, propaganda, and alternate truth illustrates just how deeply Trump touched the psyche of his followers. Part of it is understandable human psychology. There must be something causing the cognitive dissonance between what they see and what they want, and the more crazypants the theory, the more they find comfort in it.
Trump himself is one of the most aggressive peddlers of conspiracy theories, which should surprise no one at this point. The conspiracies he pushes to his audience of 50 million social media followers range from infamous to inane, but no president before ever had a personal media channel into the minds of millions of Americans. Why does this matter?
First, there is an abundantly clear chain of evidence stretching back more than a decade before he ran for office that Trump was inclined to believe the world is governed by dark forces that simply don’t exist. The world is dark and crappy enough without making up new conspiracy theories to add to the chaos. Roger Stone, a longtime Trump insider and confidante, has both monetized and weaponized conspiracy nonsense for a generation.
Second, it matters because his followers aren’t, to be generous, all that brilliant about parsing fantasy from reality, confirmation bias from data, and truth from the most dramatic fictional perspectives. Alternate facts aren’t facts. The leap from “I want to believe Hillary is bad on the issues” to “Hillary murdered Seth Rich with her bare hands before changing out of her bloodied pantsuit to head over to a cannibal pizza party” is a short one for these folks, particularly when they have characters like Sean Hannity the Lord Haw-Haw of Fox stoking the lunatic flames.
Third, it matters because he’s now the president of the United States of America. A president makes decisions based, one hopes, on facts, and from those facts makes policies based on principles. Much of what Donald Trump believes is based on facts only in the most tangential way, and the election of 2016 didn’t punish him for this. His continued visitations to the catalogue of Great
est Conspiracy Hits to rouse his base to anger and action are as corrosive as they are dangerous.
Let’s review a few of the Infowars President’s most treasured kookspiracy favorites, shall we?
The ludicrous theory that Barack Obama was a Kenyan sleeper agent and that his birth certificate was fake sits atop a golden pyramid of dumbassery. It was always absurd, easily debunked, and politically idiotic, so of course Trump (inspired by Roger Stone, you’ll be shocked to hear) embraced it with gusto. If there was a single, long-lead warning that my party would eventually lose its goddamned mind and sink into the messy world of alternate facts, this was it.
Trump’s promotion of birtherism spanned Twitter, Fox News, and a host of television interviews. In March 2008 he appeared on The View with Whoopi Goldberg and Barbara Walters, milking the birther game for all it was worth. “I want him to show his birth certificate! There’s something on that birth certificate that he doesn’t like,” said Trump.5 A few days later he told Fox & Friends, “He’s spent millions of dollars trying to get away from this issue. Millions of dollars in legal fees trying to get away from this issue. And I’ll tell you what, I brought it up, just routinely, and all of a sudden a lot of facts are emerging and I’m starting to wonder myself whether or not he was born in this country.”6
As you’d expect, Trump’s birtherism was a gumbo of racism and easily disproved conspiracy lunacy. It continued well after Obama released a copy of his birth certificate in June 2008:
