Trump Hopes Avalanche of Lies Will Return Him to Power
As the November election nears, the absurdity of trump is growing exponentially worse, like stage four cancer, as he lies about everything from pet-eating Haitian immigrants, to blaming Democrats for two aborted assassinations to untrue claims that the Biden administration spent a billion dollars to help immigrants and has no money left for victims of Hurricane Helene.
Like a spaceship spinning wildly out of control in space, trump’s culture of dishonesty has been untethered in his lies that he poses with such abandon and such disdain and contempt for how his efforts are undermining the democratic system. Trump ignores the dangerous consequences of his lies, including bomb threats, closed buildings, canceled events, terrified residents and death threats in the wake of his claims of Haitians eating neighbors’ pets in Springfield, Ohio. He is equally feckless about how his lies are damaging the lives of the southern victims who did not ask for hurricane aid believing trump’s lies that the government was keeping Republican victims out of the loop.
And trump is hardly alone, with House Speaker Mike Johnson R-La., refusing to condemn claims by trump’s son that Democrats caused the assassination attempts. And there are the preposterous allegations by. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., that the hurricane was caused by the administration, saying an unidentified “they” “can control the weather. It’s ridiculous for anyone to lie and say it can’t be done.” And of course, trump’s main conspirators are the echo chambers of the far-right media.
And whether people believe trump or not, he is effectively poisoning the public’s ability to discern fact from fiction, while attacking the very bedrock of democracy.
The parallels with the rise of Nazi Germany cannot be ignored.
Trump has breathed new life into his version of the German, “Dolchstosslegende,” the disproved legend that Germany did not lose the first world war in battle but was betrayed on the home front by Jews and leftists, a “stab in the back.” Hitler later used the claims to back his rise to power and to eliminate the Jews.
In his own Dolchstosslegende, trump said last week that if he loses in November, the Jews will be to blame for not giving him all of their votes.
“I’m not going to call this as a prediction, but in my opinion, the Jewish people would have a lot to do with a loss,” trump said. “If I don’t win this election — and the Jewish people would really have a lot to do with that if that happens because if 40 percent, I mean, 60 percent of the people are voting for the enemy …”
In another nod to the Nazi regime, trump brought back the distorted “volksgemeinschaft,” the community of Germans who have shared, ethnic blood. Hitler made clear that Volksgemeinschaft did not include the “vermin” who would pollute the Aryan blood, principally Jews but also Slavs, Poles and Roma.
“All great cultures of the past perished only because the originally creative race died out from blood poisoning,” Hitler said.
On Aug. 31, trump addressed Moms for Liberty, the far-right group in the lead to ban books in schools around the country. Trump again spoke of “poison in the blood” and that “what’s happening to our country, our country is being poisoned, poisoned!”
In an interview with conservative commentator Hugh Hewitt, trump railed against undocumented immigrants, taking a cue from what is known as eugenics, the false philosophy behind Hitler’s attempt to exterminate the Jewish people.
“Many of them (immigrants) murdered far more than one person,” trump said. “A murderer, I believe this, it’s in their genes. And we got a lot of bad genes in our country right now.”
In a March campaign speech in Ohio, trump made reference to his own volksgemeinschaft, or “Blut und Boden,” blood and soil, the slogan of the Nazi regime to express its ideal of Germany rooted in the authentic unity of Aryan blood.
Speaking of undocumented immigrants, trump said, “In some cases, they’re not people, in my opinion. But I’m not allowed to say that because the radical left says that’s a terrible thing to say. These are animals, OK, and we have to stop it.” Trump told the horde of followers that when the immigrants are removed, it will be “a bloody story.”
And where are trump’s calculated lies leading? Timothy Snyder, author of the book, “On tyranny. Twenty lessons from the twentieth century,” said in an interview with the N.Y. Times that the parallels to the road to fascism can’t be denied.
“You submit to tyranny when you renounce the difference between what you want to hear and what is actually the case,” said Snyder. “Post-truth is pre-fascism and to abandon facts is to abandon freedom.”
Snyder said that people who have lived through fascism know to be on guard when a leader speaks about the dangers of terrorism and extremism, such as the rhetoric of trump.
“Because these are always the words you hear before your rights are taken away from you. If another terrorist attack occurs in the United States, which unfortunately is very likely, we have to be vigilant about what comes next. For these are the moments when rights are lost and regimes are changed,” Snyder said. “We can’t trade our actual freedom for a false feeling of security.”
Snyder said the issue of alternative facts and outright lies are familiar to the Germany of the 1920s.
“It’s a vision that’s very similar to the central premise of the fascist vision. It’s important because if you don’t have the facts, you don’t have the rule of law. If you don’t have the rule of law, you can’t have democracy,” Snyder said.
Snyder warned about the effects of a trump election and said regime change in a democracy usually happens after an election. He cited the Bolshevik Revolution where a young republic was overturned by a true revolution. Hitler came to power after he collected more votes than anyone else and then decided the system needed to change, dramatically. In Czechoslovakia, communists won the 1946 election and then carried out a coup d’état.
“The general circumstances are when an unusual figure is elected by way of normal mechanisms at a time when for other reasons the system is under stress,” Snyder said.
Snyder also said that Americans should not be lulled into believing that democracy is indestructible and that the country will naturally right itself.
“As a historian, I understand that democratic republics fall all the time. You work on European history and you know that most times it actually doesn’t work out,” Snyder said. “People mistakenly assume that history moves in only one direction, that liberal democracy is the logical endpoint of Western civilization. But that’s clearly not the case. History, like everything else, is in flux, and the range of outcomes is infinite.”
The great analysts of truth and speech under totalitarianism were George Orwell, Hannah Arendt and Vaclav Havel.
In Orwell’s prescient novel, “1984,” he wrote that the political party slogan was “War Is Peace, Freedom Is Slavery, Ignorance Is Strength.”
The protagonist Winston Smith considers if the “Inner Party” might declare that “two plus two equals five” is a fact. Smith asks whether or not belief in such a consensus reality makes the lie true. In the Ministry of Love, interrogator O’Brien tells the “thought criminal” Smith that “control over physical reality is unimportant to the Party, provided the citizens of Oceania subordinate their real-world perceptions to the political will of the Party…”
Orwell used the idea of “2 + 2 = 5” in an essay of January 1939 in The Adelphi; “Review of Power: A New Social Analysis by Bertrand Russell.”
“It is quite possible that we are descending into an age in which two plus two will make five when the Leader says so,” Orwell wrote.
Orwell could have been speaking about the high-ranking Nazi Hermann Göring when he offered hyperbolic praise of Adolf Hitler, saying “If the Führer wants it, two and two makes five!”
In propaganda work for the BBC (British Broadcasting Corporation) during the Second World War, Orwell used the illogic of 2 + 2 = 5 to counter the reality-denying psychology of Nazi propaganda.
“Nazi theory, indeed, specifically denies that such a thing as ‘the truth’ exists. There is, for instance, no such thing as ‘Science.’ There is only ‘German Science,’ ‘Jewish Science,’ etc. The implied objective of this line of thought is a nightmare world in which the Leader, or some ruling clique, controls not only the future, but the past,” Orwell wrote.
Arendt analyzed the huge lies and reversals of language associated with the Holocaust. Arendt understood the function of an avalanche of lies to render a populace powerless to resist, the phenomenon we now refer to as “gaslighting.”
“The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lie will now be accepted as truth and truth be defamed as lie, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world — and the category of truth versus falsehood is among the mental means to the end — is being destroyed,” Arendt wrote.
Arendt wrote in her 1951 “Origins of Totalitarianism,” that a “mixture of gullibility and cynicism… is prevalent in all ranks of totalitarian movements”
“In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and nothing was true… The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness,” Arendt wrote.
Václav Havel, the Czech statesman, author, poet, playwright and dissident wrote about how underlings to tyrants manage to survive all of the lies. Havel’s political activities brought him under the surveillance of the communist Czechoslovakia secret police, and he was jailed for multiple periods as a political prisoner, the longest of his imprisoned terms being nearly four years, between 1979 and 1983. Havel was a major player in the Velvet Revolution that toppled the Communist system in Czechoslovakia in 1989.
“[T]hey must live within a lie. They need not accept the lie. It is enough for them to have accepted their life with it and in it. For by this very fact, individuals confirm the system, fulfill the system, make the system, are the system,” Havel wrote.
Havel biographer, John Keane wrote that Havel was hopeful that the oppressed always contain “within themselves the power to remedy their own powerlessness…” Havel argued that by an individual “living in truth” in their daily life “they automatically differentiate themselves from the officially mandated culture prescribed by the State; since power is only effective inasmuch as citizens are willing to submit to it,” Keane wrote.