Soon afterwards, they banned books and the critical intellectuals who wrote them. They then imprisoned those individuals who challenged Nazi ideology and the state’s systemic violations of civil rights. The endpoint was an all-embracing discourse of disposability, the emergence of concentration camps, and genocide fueled by a politics of racial purity and social cleansing. Echoes of the formative stages of fascism are with us once again and provide just one of the historical signposts of an American-style neo-fascism that appears to be engulfing the United States after simmering in the dark for years.
Under such circumstances, it is crucial for anyone concerned about the dangers of fascism to chart how the texture of life changes when an autocratic demagogue is in charge of the government. That is, it is crucial to interrogate as the first line of resistance how this level of systemic linguistic derangement and corruption shapes everyday life. It is necessary to begin with language because it is the starting point for tyrants to promote their ideologies, hatred, and systemic politics of disposability and erasure. Trump is not unlike many of the dictators he admires. What they all share as strongmen is the use of language in the service of violence and repression as well as a fear of language as a channel for identity, critique, solidarity, and collective struggle. None of them believes that the truth is essential to a responsible mode of governance, and all of them support the notion that lying on the side of power is fundamental to the process of governing, however undemocratic such a political dynamic may be.
Lying has a long legacy in American politics and is a hallmark of authoritarian regimes. Victor Klemperer in his classic book, The Language of the Third Reich, reminds us that Hitler had a “deep fear of the thinking man and [a] hatred of the intellect” and that his “Mein Kampf preaches not only that the masses are stupid, but also that they need to be kept that way and intimidated into not thinking.”83 Trump displays a deep contempt for critical thinking and has boasted about how he loves the uneducated. Not only have mainstream sources such as The Washington Post and The New York Times published endless examples of Trump’s lies, they have noted that, even in the aftermath of such exposure, he continues to be completely indifferent to being exposed as a serial liar.84
In fact, there is something delusional if not pathological about Trump’s indifference to his propensity to lie endlessly even when he is constantly outed publicly for doing so. For instance, in a 30-minute interview with The New York Times on December 28, 2017, The Washington Post reported that Trump made “false, misleading, or dubious claims … at a rate of one every 75 seconds.”85 Daniel Dale, a writer for The Toronto Star who documents Trump’s lies, claims that in the first week of August 2018, he made “132 false claims … 19 per day, almost five times his average. That shatters his previous record of 103 false claims in a week, which he set in June.”86 According to The Washington Post Fact Checker, Trump “has surpassed 10,000 false or misleading claims since his inauguration on Jan. 20, 2017,” further stating: “It’s an incredible feat of serial mendacity.
Trump’s language attempts to infantilize, seduce, and depoliticize the public through a stream of tweets, interviews, and public pronouncements that disregard facts and the truth. This is about more than Trump’s well-publicized desire to blur the lines between fact and fiction. His more serious aim is to derail the architectural foundations of truth and evidence in order to construct a false reality and alternative political universe in which there are only competing fictions and the emotional appeal of shock theater. Within this ongoing tsunami of lies and misrepresentation, the distinction between fiction and reality collapses as does the ethical foundation for recognizing criminal behavior, corruption, and systemic violence. State legitimized deceit both normalizes intolerance and ignorance and undermines the foundation and formative culture necessary to create critical and informed subjects and collective agents.
I think the artist Sable Elyse Smith is right in arguing that ignorance is more than the absence of knowledge or the refusal to know — it is also a form of violence that is woven into the fabric of everyday life by massive disimagination machines, and its ultimate goal is to enable us to not only consume pain and to propagate it but to relish in it as a form of entertainment and emotional uplift.87 Ignorance is also the enemy of memory and a weapon in the politics of disappearance and the violence of organized forgetting. It is also about the erasure of what Brad Evans calls “the raw realities of suffering” and the undermining of a politics that is, in part, about the battle for memory.88
Trump, within a very short time, has legitimated and reinforced a culture of social abandonment, erasure, and terminal exclusion. Justice in this discourse is disposable along with the institutions that make it possible. What is distinctive about Trump is that he defines himself through the tenets of a predatory and cruel form of gangster capitalism while using its power to fill government positions with deadbeats and at the same time produce death-dealing policies. Of course, he is just the overt and unapologetic symbol of a wild capitalism and dark pessimism that have been decades in the making. He is the theatrical, self-absorbed monster that embodies and emboldens a history of savagery, greed, and extreme inequality that has reached its endpoint — a poisonous form of American authoritarianism that must be stopped before it is too late.89 Trump’s actions make clear that democracy is tenuous and has to be viewed as a site of ongoing contestation, one that demands a new understanding of politics, language, and collective struggle.
However, the language of fascism does more that normalize falsehoods and ignorance. It also promotes a larger culture of short-term attention spans, immediacy, and sensationalism. At the same time, it makes fear and anxiety the normalized currency of exchange and communication. Destabilized perceptions in Trump’s world are coupled with the force of an inane celebrity culture and the war against all ethos of reality TV. In this environment, the notion of credibility is attacked, and vulgarity and crassness now become a substitute for civic courage and measured arguments. Masha Gessen rightly asserts that Trump’s lies are different from ordinary lies and are more like “power lies.” In this case, these are lies designed less “to convince the audience of something than to demonstrate the power of the speaker.”90
Trump’s prodigious tweets are not just about the pathology of endless fabrications — they also function to reinforce a pedagogy of infantilism designed to animate his base in a glut of hate while reinforcing a culture of war, fear, divisiveness, and ignorance in ways that often disempower his critics. How else to explain Trump’s desire to attract scorn from his critics and praise from his base through a never-ending production of tweets and electronic shocks that transform politics into a pathology marked by an infantilism one associates with a petulant child. Peter Baker and Michael Tackett sum up a number of bizarre and reckless tweets that Trump produced early in his presidency. They write:
President Trump again raised the prospect of nuclear war with North Korea, boasting in strikingly playground terms on Tuesday night that he commands a “much bigger” and “more powerful” arsenal of devastating weapons than the outlier government in Asia. “Will someone from his depleted and food starved regime please inform [North Korean Leader Kim Jong-un] that I too have a Nuclear Button, but it is a much bigger & more powerful one than his, and my Button works!” It came on a day when Mr. Trump, back in Washington from his Florida holiday break, effectively opened his new year with a barrage of provocative tweets on a host of issues. He called for an aide to Hillary Clinton to be thrown in jail, threatened to cut off aid to Pakistan and the Palestinians, assailed Democrats over immigration, claimed credit for the fact that no one died in a jet plane crash last year and announced that he would announce his own award next Monday for the most dishonest and corrupt news media.91
Trump appropriates crassness as a weapon. In a throwback to the language of fascism, he has repeatedly positioned himself as the only one who can save the masses, reproducing the tired script of the model of the savior endemic to authoritarianism. In 2016 at the Republican National Convention, Trump stated, without irony, that he alone would save a nation in crisis, captured in his insistence that “I am your voice, I alone can fix it. I will restore law and order.” Trump’s latter emphasis on restoring the authoritarian value of law and order has overtones of creating a new racial regime of governance, one that mimics what
