Here’s what CNN reporter Zachary Wollf recently said when describing why it’s hard to cover Donald Trump: "What does it mean when he says words?”
Clearly, Trump doesn’t mean what he’s actually saying. Facts are optional. They are fungible. For example his signature building, Trump Tower in Manhattan, is advertised as being 68 stories tall, but in reality is only 58 stories high. Select floors are missing in order for them to claim the 45th floor is really the 53rd floor—and get a much higher rate of return than he normally would when leasing office space or condos. This is just a perfect example of Trump’s reality warping field in effect. Things aren’t what they truly are: they are what Trump claims they are. This may be one of the key sources of Trump’s ability to succeed against all reasonable odds.
It’s also why his efforts are ultimately doomed to failure.
Much of this was recently discussed by John Oliver on his HBO comedy show.
Oliver describes perfectly how Trump picks up half-baked crackpot ideas from places like Alex Jones’ InfoWars, as he did with the rumor that there were "three million illegal votes” cast in this recent election. Then he repeats it on Twitter, it gets reported on Fox News, people who are inclined to believe such a conspiracy theory hear it and go “I knew it!”—then when asked about it Trump cites the “millions” that believe the claim is true in a perfect feedback loop of delusion.
He’s now gone to only calling on right-wing “news" sources like Breitbart during press conferences, ensuring that he’ll only get softball questions that will allow him to continue bragging about how awesome he and his administration are—all without being challenged or contradicted.
As Robert Reich has recently written, Donald Trump and his administration are playing a long con.
He allowed Michael Flynn to hang on until the last minute. In any halfway competent administration Flynn would have been gone the moment it became clear he lied to the vice president about his contacts with Russia.
Sean Spicer is a joke, literally. His vituperative, vindictive press conferences are already rich food for late-night comedy. In a White House that had any idea what it means to be an effective press secretary, Spicer would be out the door.
The Muslim travel ban was totally bungled—unclear, haphazard, badly thought out. Trump complains that “his people didn’t give him good advice,” but the people most directly responsible for it—Stephen Bannon and Stephen Miller—have only gained more power in the White House.
Meanwhile, Trump’s White House has sprung more leaks than any in memory. Aides are leaking news about other aides. They’re leaking examples of Trump’s incompetence and weirdness. They’re leaking the contents of telephone calls to other heads of state in which Trump was unprepared, didn’t know basic facts, and berated foreign leaders.
Chief of Staff Reince Priebus seems to have no idea what’s going on. A White House official complained to The Washington Post, “We have to get Reince to relax into the job and become more competent, because he’s seeing shadows where there are no shadows.” Trump’s buddy Chris Ruddy described Priebus as being “in way over his head.”
Infighting is wild. Rumors are swirling that Kellyanne Conway wants Priebus’ job, that Stephen Miller is eyeing Spicer’s job, that no one trusts anyone else.
On top of the confusion and palace intrigue reminiscent of Game of Thrones going on behind the scenes, you have the steady, dark hand of Steve Bannon, Trump’s chief strategist, gradually moving the pieces in a pattern of his own design. We may get distracted by the bread and circuses of the Trump train careening wildly off the tracks—but we do so at our peril.
Here is a clip of Bannon at a speaking engagement where he lays out his political philosophy before the Liberty Restoration Foundation. Rambling though it is, It’s worth a listen.
The reason the Tea Party came about, it’s the first time we had a center-right movement primarily led by women. If you were out there with Americans for Prosperity and all the guys, this was the first time that women were out there. Women are the chief operating officer of the American family. They know that every bag of groceries costs $100. And they know that buddy and sis are going off to a college and coming back $50,000 in debt to their room with the soccer trophies with no job prospects.
The reason I made the film Generation Zero, the generation in their 20s, we’ve wiped them out. This is the first time a generations been given over command to something, but we haven’t provided any positive increase in net worth. Right?
The sad thing about the Occupy Wall Street when you look those kids, is how ill-informed they are. That’s the product of the American education system. They have no more earthly idea of the fundamentals of our liberty, the fundamentals of free market capitalism, and they know absolutely nothing of our history. That’s why I call them Generation Zero. We’ve passed on zero net worth and we’ve really y’know ... I see part of that—my daughter’s part of that generation—that are fighting a war that’s tougher than anything our grandparents fought in Iraq and Afghanistan. So there is potential there.
Unless we can come together, but the political establishment is not going to do it. And people say “How can you say that?” Well lets look at the empirical evidence. Since the Tea Party revolt which the Republican establishment did not support, you can look back—go to Fox—and look a guys I respect tremendously Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol, George Will, David Frum, all of the Republican intelligentsia, they were mocking the Tea Party. They were mocking these grass roots organizations. The reason I made these films, my buddies on Wall Street kept saying “Oh, these women are a bunch of bimbos.” I said “Y’know, Gov. Palin and I know Congressman Bachman, I know these women in the Tea Pary are every bit as tough and smart as you are. If the elites are so good, how did we get in his jam?
If we don’t hang together we’re going to be very different. This is the fourth great crisis America has faced, we had the American Revolution, the Civil War, the great depression and this. We’re going to be very different on the other side of this.
And by the way this is so tough is because before we didn’t have competitors like China, or we weren’t in hock to guys that are our enemies. Or we had an education system of judeo-Christian values where a guy like Abraham Lincoln could read the King James Bible, Shakespeare’s plays and Plutarc’s “Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans” and that’s all he had. And he wrote the second inaugural address and the Gettysburg address because that’s all you needed.
If you look at it for a second the victory in 2010, because of Club for Growth, Americans for Prosperity, the Tea Party movement—grass roots movement —it was an unprecedented movement. Not only at the federal level, if you look at the state level, we eviscerated the Democratic party across the south and the midwest. We got basically no credit for that.
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As Rick Santilli said “They’re the ones who carry the water, not drink the water.” They’re the ones who hold our social organizations together, build our cities, run our little league, fight our wars, and they’re enraged. They understand we have system now where we have socialism for the very poor … and socialism for the very wealthy. The anger of the Tea Party is not racism, they’re not homophobes, they’re not nativists, what they are is common sense practical middle-class people that are paying for their own and their children’s destruction.
So while Trump may be a hilarious shit show, the real issue at risk is what Bannon is talking about here. He is a massive tea partier and his drive is to eviscerate the social safety net and the underpinning of our government on the theory that this will somehow benefit the middle class, when most likely the exact opposite is the truth.
He would yank up the ladders that allow us to climb upward out of poverty into the middle class and prosperity. He would massively, painfully, cut food programs, education, and investment into struggling communities.
As ridiculous as Trump may be, he has brought together a team of pathological ideologues starting with Bannon, but also with Stephen Miller, Reince Priebus, and others who are hellbent on ripping up the foundations of the Great Society, the New Deal—in fact most of the advances of the 20th Century—and letting the entire thing crumble to the ground.
And what’s even more frightening is they think they’re doing it for the “good of the nation” when exactly the opposite—the alternative truth—is the case.