Trump wants to be sole arbiter of truth ... just like a real dictator

3 months ago 18

There is absolutely nothing unusual in Donald Trump’s decision to sack the US official statistician. For a dictatorship. Dictators can’t abide any reality other than their own. Trump’s compulsion to make up his own numbers is nothing new. Whether it was the size of the crowd at his first inauguration or the scale of his own wealth.

He’s spent years promising to turn “American carnage” into a “golden age”, so when the official scorekeeper on Friday (US time) reported the weakest jobs market in five years, what did we expect?

He immediately removed the scorekeeper – under the pretext that the jobs figures were “rigged” to make him look bad. He’ll eventually handpick a statistician he judges to be politically loyal.

Of Trump’s many defenestrations, the firing of the national statistician is particularly revealing. Because it exposed a fascinating presidential priority.

Which is? Trump has been waging a pressure campaign against the Federal Reserve chair, the man who sets official interest rates, Jay Powell, from day one of this term. He’s frustrated that Powell won’t cut rates hard and fast to spur economic growth. Moronic, fool, disaster, Trump has called him. Powell, who Trump has nicknamed “Mr Too Late” for his monetary policy, doggedly stands by his mission to contain inflation, not please the president.

Trump has the power to sack him, but Powell was winning the credibility contest on Wall Street; Trump hadn’t dared fire him for fear of shattering investor confidence and bringing down the sharemarket. Enter the weak jobs data. “The July jobs report didn’t just disappoint – it detonated,” as the US news outlet Quartz put it. “Markets immediately reacted: Stocks tumbled, Treasury yields plunged and rate-cut odds for September jumped from coin-flip to near-certainty territory.”

Trump is desperate to get rid of the Fed Chair Jerome Powell, who he has dubbed “Mr Too Late”.

If Trump needed a pretext to sack the chair of the Fed, he now had it. Powell evidently had waited too long to cut interest rates. Trump was vindicated. He could have removed Powell and announced a new appointment immediately. Provided it were someone with some credibility, he could have got away with it.

But instead of firing the economic player, he fired the scorekeeper. Faced with a choice between attempting control of the economic outcome or the economic narrative, he chose control of the narrative. The higher priority, he signalled, was having someone who’d tell his story rather than someone who’d accelerate America’s growth. Narrative is all. The Chinese Communist Party calls it “discourse control”.

But without an objective scorekeeper, how can we know the score? That’s the point. Trump wants to be the sole arbiter of truth. As the name of his social media company, Truth Social, implies.

So part of Trump’s agenda is about silencing competing voices, especially expert ones.

That’s one of his key motives for intimidating America’s elite universities, for pursuing media companies for outlandishly large sums, for shutting down America’s public broadcasters PBS and NPR, for unleashing an anti-science health secretary, RFK Jr, against the US National Institutes of Health and the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention.

But Trump’s goal is much bigger than merely strangling voices speaking inconvenient truths. All dictators are censors. Xi Jinping, for example, has instructed the Chinese Communist Party that “control over the internet is a matter of life and death for the Party”.

Trump goes further. His original campaign mastermind, Steve Bannon, famously set out the MAGA philosophy. Rather than conduct endless debates with the enemy in a contest to win an argument, simply “flood the zone with shit”. Not with counterarguments or factual rebuttals. Just shit.

It’s a method uniquely suited to the age of the conspiracy theory, which is not new, amplified by “social” media, which is.

Trump is perhaps the world’s most effective creator and promoter of conspiracy theories. There’s a Wikipedia entry titled “List of conspiracy theories promoted by Donald Trump”. As of Monday, it contained 87 separate theories. It has an addendum of other conspiracy theorists whom Trump has either supported, endorsed or hired.

The conspiracy theory that first brought Trump to mainstream political attention was the “birther” claim that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, and therefore disqualified from the presidency, and a secret Muslim, to boot.

He accused the “mainstream media” of refusing to report the theory. To the conspiratorially minded, this confirmed that the media must be part of the conspiracy. Such internal consistency is key to the conspiracy theory; it’s self-confirming.

“The function of conspiracy theories,” writes Yale professor of philosophy Jason Stanley, “is to impugn and malign their targets, but not necessarily by convincing their audience that they are true,” he writes in his 2018 book How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them.

Hannah Arendt, he points out, argued in her work The Origins of Totalitarianism that a characteristic of modern masses is that “they do not believe in anything visible, in the reality of their own experience; they do not trust their eyes and ears, but only their imaginations”.

Stanley suggests that the birther claim was obviously far-fetched, but that it was nonetheless effective even among people who didn’t fully believe it. Because conspiracy theories “provide simple explanations for otherwise irrational emotions such as resentment or xenophobic fear in the face of perceived threats”.

This is comforting for an anxious people, and once the comfort is accepted by a public “its members will cease to be guided by reason in political deliberation”. Amplified by the staccato cognitive bombardment of “social” media, this is a people ripe for mass confusion, delusion and doubt.

The leader, in this epistemology, becomes the sole source of truth. Is unemployment going up or down? Is it American carnage or the golden age? Who knows any more?

The Washington Post’s slogan is “democracy dies in darkness”. But Bannon and Trump aren’t trying to make America’s screens go dark; they are lighting them up with disorienting flashes of non-stop nonsense. Democracy, they believe, dies amid induced dementia.

Bannon promised a reporter in 2016 that the coming era would be “as exciting as the 1930s”, the time of tyrants rising. So far, so good.

Peter Hartcher is international editor.