Tucker Carlson's Ministry of Truth: It seems that 1984 came 35 years late
Carlson begins by acknowledging the obvious fact that Trump supporters, in general, are in such deep denial about: that Donald Trump is a compulsive liar. He even acknowledges the Washington Post's catalog of over 13,000 false or misleading statements Mr. Trump has made while in office, beginning with his boast that the crowd at his inauguration was the largest in history. Carlson acknowledges that it was not, and frankly and honestly states the simple facts:
Why did the president claim it was? Well, because that’s who he is. Donald Trump is a salesman. He’s a talker. He’s a boaster, a booster, a compulsive self-promoter. At times, he’s a full-blown BS artist. If Trump hadn’t gotten rich in real estate, he could have made a fortune selling cars. Most people know this.
Wow.
And exactly. Despite claiming otherwise, Donald Trump is not only anything but stable; he is a genius in only in the area of self-promotion. It's his single talent. He's a terrible businessman; literally, every company he has ever headed has gone into bankruptcy. He's a lousy negotiator who is regularly taken advantage of by other world leaders. His ignorance of history, of the Constitution, of the law, and of most other subjects he engages daily is appalling and unprecedented. His powers of logical reasoning are even less effective than those often displayed by his supporters. And virtually every talking point Trumpworld has in its arsenal is rooted in some grotesque distortion of the facts Mr. Trump has come up with to make himself look good.
And he has a trick that throughout history has proven effective. Josef Goebbels once said that to insulate yourself from being accused of something damaging and of which you are obviously guilty, the smartest thing is to accuse the other side of that very thing. Hence, a man with a decades-old reputation for corruption and the cutting of ethical corners has his followers convinced that he is trying to "drain the swamp." People who have spent their lives in the service of their country and actually know an impressive amount about subjects on which Mr. Trump is conspicuously ignorant are discredited by being characterized as "the Deep State" and made into some sort of sinister, anti-democratic, oligarchic conspiracy.
Mr. Trump, after all, loves conspiracy theories as much as his core supporters do.
And it's only natural that following exactly the path Goebbels recommended, the biggest BS artist ever to occupy the Oval Office should insulate himself from being confronted with the actual facts by dismissing literally any news story critical of him as "fake news." Here, he takes advantage of a long-standing problem with American journalism, as well as many other American professions: the uniformity of educational background, political outlook, values, and social associations which completely without any conspiratorial or deceptive intent distorts the impressions and perspective of individual reporters without any possibility that these distortions can be corrected by colleagues with different backgrounds and convictions. The left-wing bias of the American media, while in no way conscious or intentional, is very real. Leave it to a master propagandist like Mr. Trump to exploit that fact in such a way as to discredit them so completely in the eyes of his followers that they are unable to confront his constant barrage of exaggerations, distortions, and outright lies.
And then things start to warp into the distorted form with which the Trumpian mind is most comfortable. The left claims, Carlson says, that his dishonesty is the reason why they are so opposed to Mr. Trump. But is that really the case, he asks? "Or could the problem really be, as is so often the case, the exact opposite of what they claim it is?" Do they really get upset, not when Mr. Trump lies, but when he "tells the truth?"
Truth is the real threat to their power... there is an unspoken agreement among the people in charge of our country not to talk about what has happened to it.
They are personally implicated in its decline, for one thing. Often, they’re profiting from it. The last thing they want is a national conversation about what went wrong, and so they maintain an increasingly strict policy of mandatory reality avoidance.
Double wow! Mr. Trump's critics don't dislike him because he's a pathological liar who is out of touch with the truth. They dislike him because he tells the truth!
Wait. Didn't you just say...
It takes a great deal of chutzpah for a Trump supporter to complain about anyone else's "reality avoidance." It takes even more paint Mr. Trump as a truth-teller immediately after admitting that he is a pathological liar. And I'm afraid that Carlson's poorly-reasoned examples don't help his implausible argument much.
Mr. Trump is, after all, a president whose former National Security Advisor has recently suggested that he is making foreign policy decisions based on his personal financial interests, and whose bizarre pattern of foreign policy interests seems to accord better with those financial interests than with America's national interest; who rather than divesting himself of massive overseas investments often in unfriendly countries his decisions often seem to unaccountably favor took the ludicrous and transparent step of merely putting them into a "blind" trust administered by his children; the first president in modern history to refuse to make his income tax returns public, and who gives a ludicrous explanation for that fact rejected by the IRS, tax attorneys, and history (Richard Nixon released his returns despite the fact that he, too, was under audit). And Carlson is defending him by claiming, without evidence, that it's Mr. Trump's opponents have engaged in corrupt and self-aggrandizing policy decisions! Talk about unmitigated gall! Goebbels would be proud!
I would be the last to defend every foreign policy decision the United States has made in recent years. But Carlson might be well advised to pay heed to Hanlon's Law: "Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity." The assumption that errant decisions on the part of one's opponents were the result of corruption or evil motives rather than stupidity is a chronic disease in American politics these days. To explain the positions of one's opponents by attacking their motives is a great way to rally the base, but it is highly unlikely to promote dialog, honest debate, or consensus. It's precisely what fuels our nation's ongoing polarization- a polarization this president has weaponized.
Now comes the fun part.
Mr. Trump once spoke of immigrants from Haiti, El Salvador, and certain African countries as coming from “shithole countries.” Carlson argues, in fact, that they are "shithole countries;" that everybody knows that they are "shithole countries;" that nobody sees Mr. Trump's critics moving to those countries; that "improving" America means that we instead should be promoting immigration from more advanced counties, discouraging immigration from "shithole countries." See, the problem they have with Mr. Trump is that he was telling an "uncomfortable truth!"
Well, no. The problem is, first of all, that even though this statement was made in what Mr. Trump thought was a private conversation with his advisors, it's just not the way Americans think. Granted, various racist assumptions have, at certain times in our history, allowed American immigration policy to be determined by the assumption that people from certain countries are inherently inferior to people from others, the underlying premise is that people are equal no matter what country they come from, what color their skin, or how poor they are, and that America is uniquely a place where people even from humble beginnings can prosper and make a contribution. The problem is not that Mr. Trump is somehow telling an uncomfortable truth here. The problem is that the comment reveals and underscores the small-minded, mean-spirited, cynical and thoroughly un-American mindset typical not only of Mr. Trump but of his most ardent supporters. If that's how Mr. Trump really sees the world (and I'm afraid it is), then he really ought to talk to Mitch McConnell about getting that statue with the torch in New York harbor blown up, or something, because it represents the diseased convictions of those responsible for the decline of America and a kind of thinking that can only be an obstacle to Making America Great Again.
The irony, of course, is that that statue represents everything that made America great in the first place and that Mr. Trump and his supporters reject. And Mr. Trump's rejection of that ideal it is a great illustration of how small a man Mr. Trump truly is, and how completely an enemy he is to the ideals for which America has traditionally stood. And that's precisely what his nativist and authoritarian core loves about him. They don't understand those ideals either, and they vehemently oppose them. They are delighted to find in Mr. Trump someone who speaks for their own prejudices.
Carlson goes on to defend Mr. Trump's trashing of Baltimore and the late Rep. Elijah Cummings. Leaving aside the fact that congressmen have very little to do with the administration of cities and thus are remarkably inappropriate targets for criticism about the condition they're in, it might well be that the decisions of fifty years of Democratic rule play a large role in that. I grew up in Chicago and I have always believed that a lack of a credible alternative for the residents of my home town's inner city on Election Day has disempowered them by depriving them of any way to hold the Cook County Democratic Party accountable. I am glad to see that in recent years the African American community and the Hispanic community in Chicago have begun to assert themselves politically and with the increasing breakdown of the Democratic machine as demonstrated by the election of Mayor Lightfoot have begun to take charge of their own destiny.
But Mr. Trump saw fit to trash Chicago too. My home town is a city in deep trouble for a lot of reasons.
I would love to move back home in spite of them. The irony is that I can't afford it. Taxes and the cost of living are just too high. True, city services have declined since the days of the Daley Machine, during which, just as in Mussolini's Italy, the trains ran on time and the garbage was collected regularly.
Chicago is no longer the City that Works. But neither is it the combat zone Mr. Trump, in his manifest ignorance and lack of filters, slandered it as being. Yes, it leads the nation in the number of murders committed there. But that's only because it's the third most populous city in the country. The violence is largely confined, as in most cities, to a few areas, and in any case, Mr. Trump has a great deal of company in not knowing that Chicago ranks not first but twenty-fourth in its murder rate. Would it surprise you to know that Elkhart, Indiana has a higher murder rate than Chicago? It ranks 29th in its violent crime rate.
As usual, Mr. Trump was talking through his hat in his criticism of Chicago. Nevertheless, when I posted the statistics on Facebook, Trump supporters tried to argue with them. Their arguments were literally incoherent; their arguments were logically incomprehensible. But people who have tried to engage the denizens of Trumpworld in rational discussion won't be surprised by that.
Mr. Trump's appeal is to emotion. Facts don't matter, which is why he makes them up as he goes along. He generally has no idea what he's talking about, and his supporters don't, either. And Tucker Carlson's piece is a case in point.
There are far too much poverty and crime and misery in Baltimore and Chicago and in a great many other cities. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure that out. But poverty and urban decay have a great many causes, including racism, a lack of education and employment opportunities, and- very frankly- the kind of cluelessness not only among government officials and journalists but among all too many voters who don't see how outrageous it is to blame them on which political party their voters tend to favor.
Especially given the lack of credible alternatives, the blatant ignorance, simplistic thinking, illogic, and implicit racism involved not only in Mr. Trump's comments about Baltimore and Chicago but in the defenses of them offered by Carlson and other Trump reporters offer the most devastating possible rebuttal of Carlson's bizarre premise possible. Yes, the President of the United States is a blowhard, a pathological liar, and a con artist. And that anyone could even think that opposition to him is based on his telling the truth- especially such "truths" as Carlson cites- is engaging in double-think that would appall even Big Brother and the government of George Orwell's Oceania.
Yes, Mr. Trump lies like no president we have ever had before. And he gets away with it because even when they recognize that fact, his supporters embrace those lies because they reinforce their prejudices and are what at the end of the day they want to think, regardless of the facts.
The President of the United States is a demagogue. He is a con man and even those who have allowed themselves to be conned by him can see that if they let themselves. But they continue to support him because they are the kind of marks conmen like most, and who are always their easiest prey: they are people who desperately want to be conned.
And people like that never have the slightest trouble believing lies even when they know that they're being lied to.
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