Trump instinctively understood the power of such wishful thinking — perhaps because he himself lived in a fantasy world, in which everything he touched turned to gold and he was always a “winner”, despite numerous bankruptcies. So those Americans who could not bear the idea that they had a Black president were fed the emotionally satisfying lie that Barack Obama was not born in the United States and was therefore not a legitimate president. Trump loyalists who could not accept the idea that he had lost the 2020 election were told instead that their hero had been the victim of electoral fraud. Senator Ted Cruz, who had once accurately called Trump a “pathological liar”, ended up defending Trump’s biggest and most consequential lie, about a stolen election, from the floor of the Senate.
— The Age of the Strongman, Ch. 7, p. 127
Tag: politics
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I was today years old when I read (thanks, Gideon Rachman!) about a favored strategy of Putin called “firehouse of lies” (Chapter 7 of The Age of the Strongman)
According to Rachman, a “firehose of falsehoods” is a “fundamental political tool. The idea is to throw out so many different conspiracy theories and ‘alternative facts’ (to use the phrase of Trump’s aide, Kellyanne Conway) that the truth simply becomes one version of events among many. For strongman leaders, a ‘firehose of falsehoods’ can serve important purposes. Importantly, it makes it easier to evade responsibility. All the evidence might suggest that Covid-19 originated in China or that Russian missiles shut down flight MH17, but Chinese and Russian spokesmen will spin out a variety of alternative theories to obscure the reality of what actually happened . . . There will always be takers for these theories among loyalists who want badly to believe the best of their leader or their country. This is a phenomenon that psychologists call ‘motivated reasoning’: a form of biased thinking that leads people to the conclusions they find most emotionally satisfying, rather than those that are justified by the evidence.”
In other words: Gaslighting DOES work!
I am so glad I decided to read this book!
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From the very beginning of his run for the presidency, and throughout his four years in office, Trump’s instinct was to govern like an authoritarian strongman rather than a democratically elected president . . . As president, Trump quickly made it clear that his appointees should be loyal to him personally, rather than to the law. When James Comey, the director of the FBI, was invited to a one-on-one dinner with the new president, Trump repeatedly asked him to proclaim his “loyalty.” Comey demurred and was fired a few months later. The letter sacking him was hand-delivered by a man who understood what the president meant by loyalty — Keith Schiller, Trump’s former bodyguard. At his first full Cabinet meeting, Trump extracted embarrassing pledges of loyalty from his cabinet members in front of the television cameras. Mike Pence, the vice president, set the slavish tone by proclaiming: “The greatest privilege of my life is to serve as vice president to the man who’s keeping his word to the American people.” Reince Priebus, Trump’s chief of staff, thanked the president and called it a “blessing to serve your agenda.” “It’s an honor to be able to serve you,” declared Jeff Sessions, the attorney general.
— The Age of the Strongman, Chapter 7: Donald Trump, American StrongmanQuestion: Chris Krebs was fired by tweet. Why does Comey get the special treatment (letter hand-delivered by Keith Schiller)
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This chapter is fascinating, simply fascinating. According to Rachman, both David Cameron and Boris Johnson expected Yes Leave to lose. When it won instead, David Cameron resigned that very day, and the path for Johnson to become prime minister was suddenly wide open. That was the moment when, according to Steve Bannon, who was managing Trump’s campaign, he “knew” Trump would win. Nigele Farage was the first foreign politician to meet with Trump after his improbable victory.
The Boris Johnson/Donald Trump synchronicity:
- Melania, Trump’s third wife, was 24 years younger than him. Johnson’s third wife, Carrie, was twenty-three years younger than Boris.
- Johnson’s most important policy was to take Britain out of the European Union, while “Trump made it clear that he regarded NATO as biased against American interests and toyed with withdrawing from the Western alliance.”
- Both Trump and Johnson capitalized on hostility to mass immigration.
- Johnson believed that he alone “had the strength to deliver Brexit,” echoing Trump’s assertion that “only I can fix it.” He also brought up the “deep state,” a vast conspiracy to overturn the Brexit vote in the referendum.
Self remembers attending a talk about Trump’s dementia (That was the actual topic: Trump’s dementia, it was printed in the conference programme and everything, har har har). Who knew that Trump’s dementia would turn into accusations of “Joe’s dementia” the following year! The talk took place in a 12th century church in the picturesque Cornwall seaside town of Fowey. It was May 2019.
The speaker said he didn’t think England would go the authoritarian route because “England has the BBC; America has Fox News.” The bashing went so hard that, after the presentation, an English couple next to self felt compelled to apologize for all the “bad things” the speaker had said about Trump. Self said: “Don’t apologize. I agree with him!” Only a few months later, in August 2019, Johnson would “prorogue parliament . . . to prevent it from getting in the way of Brexit.” And the rest is history!
Unfortunately for Johnson, the same day that Britain left the EU (end of January 2020) was also the “day that Britain announced its first case of coronavirus.” And Johnson’s rhetoric could not get around this new reality. Both Trump and Johnson mis-handled their respective country’s national response to the virus.
Stay tuned, dear blog readers. Stay tuned.
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Chapter 2 of The Age of the Strongman: How the Cult of the Leader Threatens Democracy Around the World is about Turkey’s Erdogan.
Apparently, while Erdogan was mayor of Istanbul, he was forced to step down “for reciting a poem that judges said had incited religious hatred.”
The lines in question:
The mosques are our barracks
the domes our helmets,
the minarets our bayonets
and the faithful our soldiers.Rather than ending his political career as Turkey’s secular establishment had intended, Erdogan’s four and a half months behind bars in 1999 helped to catapult him to national power.
— The Age of the Strongman, p. 43I wonder if there is the possibility of something like this happening to Trump if he were arrested? Would he, like Erdogan, become regarded as a martyr? Since Joe is no slouch, does this enter into his thinking at all? Might there be a point after all to Merrick Garland’s deliberate plodding? You see how easy it is for my thinking to get tied up in knots?
Stay tuned.
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In the US, Trump lost in almost all of America’s big cities in both 2016 and 2020. He also split the American electorate on educational lines, losing heavily among college graduates but winning almost 80 percent of the votes of non-college-educated white men. Little wonder that he remarked in 2016: “I love the poorly educated.”
— The Age of the Strongman: How the Cult of the Leader Threatens Democracy Around the World, by Gideon Rachman, p. 14
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from the Introduction:
Joe Biden has made the global promotion of democracy a central goal of his presidency. But he has come to power in the midst of the Age of the Strongman. Populist and authoritarian leaders are now shaping the direction of world politics. They are riding a tide of resurgent nationalism and cultural and territorial conflict that may be too powerful to be turned back by Biden’s reassertion of liberal values and American leadership.
Even in the US itself, Biden’s victory has not definitively turned the page on strongman politics. Donald Trump did well enough in the 2020 presidential election to spark immediate talk of him running for the presidency again in 2024. Even if Trump himself pulls back from frontline politics, future Republican contenders are likely to embrace the political formula he has identified.
- About the author: Gideon Rachman is chief foreign affairs commentator for the Financial Times. He joined the FT in 2006, after fifteen years at The Economist, where he served as a correspondent in Washington DC, Brussels, and Bangkok.
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John Roberts has voiced concern: “Simply because people disagree with an opinion is not a basis for questioning the legitimacy of the court.”
It is all a bit passive-aggressive. It is also somewhat insulting to the intelligence of Americans who feel they are past the stage when the parents must spell out to each other the words they hope will not be understood. What the judges are talking about, when they talk about the court’s legitimacy, is whether the court is acting like just another political branch of government. And everyone knows the answer: of course it is. When Mitch McConnell, then Senate majority leader, refused for 294 days to grant even a hearing to President Barack Obama’s last pick for the court, calculating that doing so might help elect a Republican who would choose someone else, he did not protect anyone’s legitimacy. He advanced ideas of jurisprudence that, by happy coincidence, matched his political objectives. He got what he wanted — not just once, as it turned out, but three times, locking in the conservative majority. Can Americans really be expected to pretend that was not a political act, with a political outcome?
Kanlaon 