“I also want to speak to you without the filter of the fake news. The dishonest media which has published one false story after another with no sources, even though they pretend they have them, they make them up in many cases, they just don't want to report the truth and they've been calling us wrong now for two years. They don't get it. By they're starting to get it. I can tell you that. They've become a big part of the problem. They are part of the corrupt system....
They have their own agenda and their agenda is not your agenda. In fact, Thomas Jefferson said, “nothing can be believed which is seen in a newspaper.” “Truth itself,” he said, “becomes suspicious by being put into that polluted vehicle,” that was June 14, my birthday, 1807.”
Donald Trump: February 18, 2017
Up to now we have focused on the type of person who would make the statement quoted above, who would call out specific television news networks as “enemies of the people,” who would single out reporters during his campaign rallies for violent threats and abuse. Senator John McCain rightly pointed out that this is how dictators start. And most of us agree that Trump and Stephen Bannon, his white supremacist Svengali, would prefer dictatorship and absolute rule to the messy processes of Democracy.
But we do live in a Democracy, at least so far, and that requires a constituency. It requires crowds, supporters and followers. Yesterday about 9000 of Trump’s supporters and followers gathered in Melbourne, Florida to hear Trump attack the media and lavish praise on himself. It’s not clear whether they represented, in fervor or commitment, the tens of millions who voted for Trump in the last election. What is clear is that every single one of them nodded in knowing agreement with the statements quoted above.
And that is an alarming problem, one that can’t be solved by Democratic “outreach” or “messaging,” or by any amount of “talking and listening” to such people. Once you have internalized the belief that everything our traditional media says is a lie—with no basis except that it disturbs your worldview--you’ve really crossed a Rubicon of sorts. Your existence is now dependent on someone else filling that vacuum of information. You have allowed your most precious asset—your ability to think critically--to become co-opted by someone else’s ideology and manipulation. From that point forward, you have succumbed—the Leader and the Leader alone has the answers, and anyone who provides a contrary narrative is not only lying, but a dangerous threat.
This is the mentality of book-burning. It’s the mentality of Nuremberg rallies. And it’s the mentality that Trump is successfully cultivating in his core supporters. Right now it’s directed at the media, an amorphous target, and it looks like most of Trump’s supporters are internalizing it. Despite what has been an abysmal record of stumbles over the past month, his popularity remains high among the people who voted for him. That's because they are either ignoring or totally discounting the news media, just the way he has urged them to. In his speech yesterday, Trump also assured them that they and they alone are the only "patriotic”-- and thus the only "true”-- Americans:
I'm here because I want to be among my friends and among the people. This was a great movement, a movement like has never been seen before in our country our probably anywhere else. This was a truly great movement And I want to be here with you, and I will always be with you. I promise you that. I want to be in a room filled with hard working American patriots who love their country, who salute their flag and who pray for a better future.
It's significant that this part of the speech followed the perverse spectacle of Melania Trump reciting the Lord’s Prayer, and that it immediately preceded his all-out assault on the press. By invoking a “religious" subtext to his words at the outset, Trump is, in effect, allying himself with God and placing the press and those who oppose him in the exact opposite position, that of the Devil.
If this is the type of rhetoric we are seeing at the outset of the Administration, then it is bound to become much sharper as institutional obstacles to Trump’s more draconian and socially disruptive plans begin to present themselves. A dictator must always have an “enemy” to explain why he can’t get things done. For now the enemy is the press and journalists, and Trump’s supporters have eagerly accepted that formulation.
But the “Press” and the “media” are abstractions. They are easy to discount and ignore, just by clicking a switch. As Trump proceeds to other goals, such as the implementation of mass deportations of immigrants, ordinary citizens who oppose these policies are going to find themselves increasingly in the crosshairs of his rhetoric, and ultimately, of his supporters. It’s no accident that Trump’s speech yesterday also heaped praise on law enforcement and the military. He wants to enlist their assistance in combating what he knows will be public opposition and outcry as he and Bannon try to tear our civil society apart:
And I can tell you, the military and law enforcement they stood up. I don't say for me. I'm the messenger folks. I'm the messenger. They stood up for us in this last election. We got numbers that nobody believed were possible from law enforcement and from military. Basically people they wear uniforms like us. Isn't that nice. I saw this man on TV just now, you. I just saw him on television. He said I love Trump. Let Trump do what he has to do. That's my guy right there. Come here. Come here. No, I just. I'm coming in. That's okay.
The real subtext of this wholehearted embrace of law enforcement is its flip side—that anyone who opposes is implicitly allied with criminal elements. Again, this is the message being internalized by Trump’s base of support.
In 1996, Daniel Goldhagen authored one of the most significant works in decades about the Holocaust. Titled, “Hitler’s Willing Executioners” the book created sensation, angst and bitter controversy because it explored the ways in which ordinary Germans --not just members of the Nazi Party—abetted the Holocaust by acquiescing in what Goldhagen termed an “eliminationist” attitude towards Jews. In Germany’s case Goldhagen traced back this latent anti-Semitism among the German people back for centuries.
To say the book sparked intense debate would be an understatement. Much of the criticism leveled at Goldhagen came from those historians who were unwilling to tar practically an entire nation with an “eliminationist” philosophy. However, Goldhagen defended his thesis fiercely with example after example. What Hitler and the Nazis did, in Goldhagen’s view, was to reinforce and cultivate what was already a homegrown impulse among the German people. And when the time came, they acted accordingly.
The idea that such evil could flow solely from a political ideology without the assent and assistance of the general population never made much sense. But to this day we still talk about the “Nazis” without mentioning the fact that their base of support were millions of ordinary German citizens. In the broadest sense, Goldhagen showed how that is a huge mistake. They were active, eager participants.
We are now facing the most significant internal challenge to the American Republic since the Civil War, with a President’s attacks on our institutions such as the Judiciary and a free press at levels and hysteria that few of us can recall in our lifetimes. But these attacks are not occurring in a vacuum—they have the wholesale support of a huge portion of our population. For the same reason it’s a mistake to focus solely on the Nazis when considering the massive crimes that culminated in the Holocaust, it’s shortsighted to focus solely on Trump. The real danger lies in the fact that he holds such sway among millions of Americans who have shown themselves to be incapable or unwilling to consider his glaring incompetence and venality, while wholly accepting his demonization of the institutions capable of thwarting him.
Today Trump’s target is the media. Tomorrow it’s likely to be anyone who opposes him, including progressives and Democrats of all stripes. Trump has already shown he has the demagogic skills to make people shut off their critical faculties and believe only what comes out of his mouth. He is now carrying that message every time he speaks. He has also shown he intends to inculcate into his followers the idea that anyone who opposes them is either lying or a criminal. His supporters have embraced this fiction as well.
We’re already past the point where attempts to “understand,” “empathize,” or create “policies” to “reach” this most rabid element of Trump’s base—lazily labelled by most pundits as the ‘white working class’-- are beside the point. As the Trump phenomenon has clearly illustrated, most are motivated by animosities that we as Democrats cannot accommodate without abandoning our values (or our constituents) as Democrats. We can’t suddenly “relate” to people who blame their problems on non-existent fictions. We can’t “agree to disagree” on such things as banning entire religions from our shores.
No, these people have crossed that Rubicon and are willing to do whatever it is their would-be Dictator says needs to be done. They know that everything they see in the media about Trump is a lie. Those who oppose his policies banning Muslims and deporting immigrants, led by the press, are the “enemy.” This same “enemy” is the cause of all of the country’s problems, this “enemy” left him nothing but a “disaster” to inherit, and this “enemy” is responsible for all obstacles to his plans. Ultimately only the destruction of the “enemy” will suffice.
And if that doesn’t sound familiar, it should.
Trump is cultivating his base in such a way as to take maximum advantage of a sudden crisis, a war, rapid economic collapse, or a terror attack. His supporters are being carefully primed to blame it on anyone who opposes him, mainly liberals and Democrats, and of course, the media. They fully expect law enforcement and the military to support them, and they may be right. But if they’re not satisfied with the support they receive, Trump has shown every inclination to tell them to take matters into their own hands. He did it during the campaign, with his reference to “Second Amendment remedies.”
We should spend less time thinking about ways to “accommodate” these people and more time thinking about how to protect ourselves against them.