Preparation for Autocracy

Just after the November 2016 presidential election, CBS veteran reporter Leslie Stahl interviewed President-elect Donald Trump.  In the interview, as he had consistently during his campaign, Trump began to attack the press.  Stahl asked him why he kept up his attacks even though he’d won the election.  Trump said he meant to discredit the press and demean the reporters so that “when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you.”  Few seemed to recognize the dark truth of his statement.

Since his election, the President has worked assiduously to discredit reliable sources of truth and accountability — not only the press but also sources within his own close circle, his own watchdogs, official government reports, other politicians, science and so on — and to promote himself as the only credible interpreter of reality.  Observers have usually interpreted his efforts as attempts to protect himself from public criticism and to present himself in the best light.  This is accurate, but it misses the far more important, long-term impact on our democracy: Trump is teaching us to accept the lies of the leader. 

To survive, autocrats must blanket their actions and harmful impact with lies.  Their supporters must be willing to accept the word of the autocrat, even against all evidence.  In this light, many of Trump’s even minor misrepresentations turn more menacing, part of a web of deception.

• In the past months, President Trump has fired five Inspectors General (IGs), government officials who have the authority to investigate wrong-doing in the government, including the presidency.  Although these IGs have been doing their jobs appropriately, the President has made no secret of the fact that these firings have been in retaliation for their truth-telling.  President Trump has not given any explanation for firing them except: 

 It is vital that I have the fullest confidence in the appointees serving as Inspectors General … That is no longer the case with regard to [these Inspectors General].

In other words, when the President no longer believes that an IG is serving his best interest, he fires them, which not only removes another source of truth but also chills other IGs’ willingness to exercise their authority to root out governmental malfeasance and corruption.

• Since its beginning, the President’s descriptions of the coronavirus pandemic and his role in responding to it have swung widely.  For the first two months, he insisted — against all evidence — that there was no problem: “We have it totally under control. It’s one person coming in from China,” he said in January.  Two months later, he said, “No, I’m not concerned at all [about the virus]. No, I’m not. No, we’ve done a great job.”  Two weeks later, he revised history: “This is a pandemic … I felt it was a pandemic long before it was called a pandemic.”  

Like the firings of the IGs, this is the behavior we have come to expect from this President. The mere quantities of his lies have prevented adequate response.  These lies, however, have then been frequently accepted as truth by Fox news commentators, other press supportive of Trump, and that 40% of the voting population who are his followers.  In other words, Trump distorts political reality so that (given his dismissal of mainstream news sources) a large portion of the population has, effectively, no access to accurate news, only his version.

• In what might seem an unrelated issue, Trump announced he was taking the anti-malarial drug hydroxychloroquine and began indirectly promoting it as prevention of COVID-19.  His own medical experts disagreed with his recommendation, but Trump doubled down, essentially denying the objective evidence and presenting himself — rather than the scientists — as the source of medical truth.  While this might be seen as just another expression of the President’s ignorance or grandiosity, it is also another example of his denial of fact-based reality and setting himself up as the arbiter of truth.  The medication may, in fact, be dangerous to people with COVID-19.  Although the President no longer touts the drug, his purpose was not so much to promote it as to distort perceptions of reality.

• The Mueller report described ten instances of Trump’s illegal obstruction of justice for which anyone but a president could have been imprisoned.  For technical legal reasons, Mueller declined to recommend prosecution of the President.  But the report’s descriptions of the events make quite clear that the episodes of obstruction did, in fact, take place.  Nevertheless, absent prosecution, the President and his allies have asserted that he had been “completely EXONERATED” by the report, despite his own Attorney General’s acknowledgement that the report did NOT exonerate him.  His claim, however, is important not only for his projection of innocence, but also — and perhaps more importantly —his attempt to assert his “truth” against all others.  It is a denial that an objective Department of Justice investigation provides more access to the truth than his uncorroborated assertion does.  The President has been successful: Mueller’s report has been completely discredited among his supporters; even his detractors have largely given it up as an issue.   

• Trump has been asserting that the economy will start to turn positive after June (clinging tenaciously to a report of a 2.5% increase in jobs in May) and that “next year is going to be incredible.”  The Administration, however, has decided not to release its usual mid-year, updated projections on economic trends such as unemployment, inflation and economic growth, which would almost certainly contradict the President’s beliefs.  Trump must be right and his own economists wrong.

• Just this past week, the President sent federal law enforcement into the Washington streets, declaring that the rioters must be controlled.  In fact, however, there had been little violence from the protesters themselves, and it is not at all clear how much of the destruction was from protesters and how much from vandals, looters and petty criminals.  The Post’s Robert McCartney writes: “It seems clear that those crimes were committed by a small number of opportunists motivated by ideology, greed or both.”  Again, the President proclaimed his own truth and called out the National Guard and law enforcement from multiple other agencies to quell the “riots.”  The President had peaceful demonstrators violently cleared from Lafayette Park across the street from the White House in order that he could walk across the park for a photo-op.  DC officials deny that they needed help and accused Trump of politicizing the need for “law and order.”

None of this is fresh news.  Each (and 20,000 others) of these individual transgressions is serious enough, and many columns of news have been devoted to each one.  But it is the cumulative impact that is even more important.  Trump repeatedly creates false narratives of public events that have reflected badly upon him.  He attacks journalists with baseless accusations.  He denies the conclusions of his own experts.  He is creating a culture in which — for a large swath of people — he alone creates the truth.

Autocrats do not live for long in the sunshine.  Trump’s actions are serious preparation for autocracy when enough of the population must accept his lies. Because his life-long assumption that only he knows the truth, he may not be consciously aware of the deeper meaning of his lies. Trump’s consciousness — however fascinating it may be to attempt to understand it — is not the issue.  Regardless of what he thinks he is doing, he is, in fact, preparing the country for something new and dangerous in our politics.  It is hard to overestimate the importance to our democracy of his defeat in November.