The Terror of the Unforeseen. Henry Giroux
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 the historian Cedric J. Robinson once called the “rewhitening of America.”92
Moreover, such racially charged language points to the growing presence of a police state in the United States and its endpoint in a fascist state where large segments of the population are rendered disposable, incarcerated, or left to fend on their own in the midst of massive degrees of inequality. There is more at work here than an oversized, if not delusional, ego. Trump’s authoritarianism and nativist desires are also fueled by elements of narcissism, braggadocio, and misdirected rage. There is also a language that undermines the bonds of solidarity, abolishes institutions meant to protect the vulnerable, and wages a full-fledged assault on the environment.93 Trump is truly the embodiment of what Robert J. Lifton has called in another context a “death-dealing age.”94
In addition, Trump’s ceaseless use of superlatives models a language that encloses itself in a circle of certainty while taking on religious overtones. Not only do such words pollute the space of credibility, they also wage war on historical memory, humility, and the belief that alternative worlds are possible. The threat such language poses for the future is telling and correlates with Trump’s ongoing attempts to make “the past a burden that must be shed in order that a new kind of life can come into being.”95 For Trump and his followers, there is a recognizable threat and danger to their power in the political and moral imperative to learn from the past so as to not repeat or update the dark authoritarianism of the 1930s. Trump is the master of manufactured illiteracy and his obsessive tweeting and public relations machine aggressively engages in a boundless spectacle of self-promotion and distractions — both of which are designed to whitewash any version of the past that might expose the close alignment between Trump’s language and policies and the dark elements of a fascist history.
Trump revels in an unchecked mode of self-congratulation bolstered by a grandiose, though limited, vocabulary filled with words like “historic,” “best,” “the greatest,” “tremendous,” and “beautiful.” As Wesley Pruden observes, “Nothing is ever merely ‘good’ or ‘fortunate.’ … Everything is ‘fantastic’ or ‘terrific,’ and every man or woman he appoints to a government position, even if just two shades above mediocre, is ‘tremendous.’ The Donald never met a superlative he didn’t like, himself as the ultimate superlative most of all.”96 Trump’s relentless exaggerations suggest more than hyperbole or the self-indulgent use of language. This is true even when he claims he “knows more about ISIS than the generals,” “knows more about renewables than any human being on Earth,” or that nobody “knows the US system of government better than he does.”97 There is also a resonance with the rhetoric of fascism. As the historian Richard J. Evans writes:
The German language became a language of superlatives so that everything the regime did became the best and the greatest, its achievements unprecedented, unique, historic, and incomparable … The language used about Hitler, Klemperer noted, was shot through and through with religious metaphors;