Two New Yorker writers obliterated Trump and his partner in crime Steve Bannon yesterday in reaction to Bannon’s recent inflamed comments to the New York Times about “the opposition party,” and Trump’s pro forma idiocy over “fake news” with Sean Hannity Thursday night on Fox. Their takedown is a thing of beauty and a joy to behold. John Cassidy starts:
To repeat what I’ve said many times before: Trump is a menace. And Bannon is his eager accomplice. Even Richard Nixon at his most demented never leveled the sort of charges that Trump hurls on a daily basis. And as far as I know, there is no precedent for a senior White House official telling the press to “keep its mouth shut.”
In the months and year to come, if the Trump Administration goes beyond merely berating reporters, and tries to restrict their activities, journalists might well have to fall back on the foundations of a free media, starting with the First Amendment, which says that “Congress shall pass no law . . . abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press.” However, as two law professors—RonNell Anderson, of the University of Utah, and Sonja R. West, of the University of Georgia—pointed out in a recent Op-Ed in the Times, the Constitution provides “only limited protection for the press,” which doesn’t necessarily include the ability to gain access to information or to protect the anonymity of sources.
Moreover, public confidence in the press has fallen to a historic low, many lower courts have become less favorable to reporters, and the Supreme Court hasn’t taken on a major press case in more than a decade. “Like so much of our democracy, the freedom of the press is only as strong as we, the public, demand it to be,” Anderson and West wrote
You may have heard that George Orwell's book, "1984" is once again, for the first time since 1948, the top selling book in the United States, in the wake of Kellyanne Conway making her iconic "alternative facts" quip. In Orwell’s “1984” and Trump’s America Adam Gopnik, also of the New Yorker, unabashedly compares Trump's bullying and lying to Orwell's antagonist, Big Brother:
There is nothing subtle about Trump’s behavior. He lies, he repeats the lie, and his listeners either cower in fear, stammer in disbelief, or try to see how they can turn the lie to their own benefit. Every continental wiseguy, from Žižek to Baudrillard, insisted that when they pulled the full totalitarian wool over our eyes next time, we wouldn’t even know it was happening. Not a bit of it. Trump’s lies, and his urge to tell them, are pure Big Brother crude, however oafish their articulation. They are not postmodern traps and temptations; they are primitive schoolyard taunts and threats.
The blind, blatant disregard for truth is offered without even the sugar-façade of sweetness of temper or equableness or entertainment—offered not with a sheen of condescending consensus but in an ancient tone of rage, vanity, and vengeance. Trump is pure raging authoritarian id.
And so, rereading Orwell, one is reminded of what Orwell got right about this kind of brute authoritarianism—and that was essentially that it rests on lies told so often, and so repeatedly, that fighting the lie becomes not simply more dangerous but more exhausting than repeating it. Orwell saw, to his credit, that the act of falsifying reality is only secondarily a way of changing perceptions. It is, above all, a way of asserting power.
When Trump repeats the ridiculous story about the three million illegal voters—a story that no one who knows, that not a single White House “staffer,” not a single Republican congressman actually believes to be true—he does not really care if anyone believes it, even if, at some crazy level, he does, sort of. People aren’t meant to believe it; they’re meant to be intimidated by it. The lie is not a claim about specific facts; the lunacy is a deliberate challenge to the whole larger idea of sanity. Once a lie that big is in circulation, trying to reel the conversation back into the territory of rational argument becomes impossible.
Joseph Goebbels, Hitler's Minister of Propaganda, was quoted as saying that, "Once a lie is told a thousand times it becomes the truth." This is vintage Trump behavior. Trump started back in 2011 telling the birther conspiracy lie that Barack Obama was born in Kenya and that lie eventually caught hold when repeated enough on main stream media and social media. A woman of my acquaintance, who otherwise is quite rational, said to me on the subject, "Is there even a possibility that Obama was born in the United States?" because she unwittingly had bought into what she "heard somewhere" probably Facebook, without bothering to ever check out the facts.
Now, Trump has been on television twice in the past forty-eight hours saying that, "most of the media is very dishonest," and that the dishonest media is engaged in the production of "making things up, fake news." That is the Trump quotation which is now gaining traction and he and Steve Bannon both know it and depend upon it happening consistently, whether the interviewer is the all-too-accomodating Sean Hannity or the considerably more reasonable George Stefanapoulous. Same framework, different day.
Again to quote Goebbels, Goebbels said that for propaganda to be effective, "the phrases must be short," and "consistently and constantly repeated, both in writing and speaking." The two main "stories" and stories is just what they are, currently being distilled down for propaganda purposes are, "dishonest media/fake news," and "three million illegal voters." It shouldn't even take Trump and Bannon more than a couple of dozen repetitions, much less a thousand ones, to implant the suggestion firmly in the consciousness of the American public -- unless of course people fight back and refuse to be brainwashed. There is that option.
And of course it goes without saying that one hand washes the other in the Republican party, and while the right hand of Trump and Bannon is greasing the propaganda skids of the more pliable media outlets, the left hand of the party is busy gerrymandering and suppressing the vote. This is the key to Republican victory, two fronted, endless aggression and duplicity. They’re not winners, they’re highly coordinated thieves.
In Bannon's "opposition party" speech to the New York Times he famously stated that, "the media doesn't even know why Donald Trump is president now." Au contraire. Gopnik succinctly spoke to that issue:
it’s vital that everyone who is trying to maintain sanity understand that this is so—that it is a myth that reason, as normally undertaken, is going to affect this process or that “consequences,” as they are normally understood, will, either. Whenever there is an authoritarian coup rooted in an irrational ideology, well-meaning people insist that it can’t persist because the results are going to be so obviously bad for the people who believe in it, whether it’s the theocratic revolution in Iran or the first truly autocratic Administration in America.
Tragically, terribly, this is never the way it works. There is no political cost for Trump in being seen to be incompetent, impulsive, shallow, inconsistent, and contemptuous of truth and reason. Those are his politics. This is how he achieved power. His base loves craziness, incompetence, and contempt for reason because sanity, competence, and the patient accumulation of evidence are things that allow educated people to pretend that they are superior. Resentment comes before reason.
“Resentment comes before reason. “ That's what got levers pushed in voting booths, resentment coming before reason. The cadence sounds Orwellian, doesn’t it? Hate over goodwill, passion over prudence, oligarchy over democracy. In "1984" Winston Smith said that, "sanity is not statistical," and Gopnik has a few more aphorisms to leave us with. Commenting on the efficacy of the womens' marches he said, "Community is the only cure for catastrophe. Action is the only antidote to anger." I like progressivism over panic and activism over apathy because more than anything else we cannot afford to be passive in the days and weeks ahead or we will let the republic slip right through our fingers. Some members of the press are not just lying down for the Trump juggernaut to roll over them, and it is fundamental that the press is only as strong as we, the people, demand that it be.