The pathological endgame

The hurricane of disinformation threatens to consume everyone in its path

One of the jarring developments of the past few weeks of the campaign has been the sight of Republican officials begging their own to stop spreading lies that will directly harm the communities over which they preside. This happened in September after Donald Trump repeated the preposterous claims about pet eating, which resulted in the town of Springfield, Ohio being inundated with bomb threats and other disruptions.

More lethally, it’s happening now, involving alleged government plots to manipulate the weather for one insane reason or another. Such demented fabrications are imperiling efforts to assist the swathes of western North Carolina that have been decimated by Hurricane Helene. And they now threaten more lives as Hurricane Milton, one of the fiercest storms ever recorded, bears down on central Florida.

Here’s one among many GOP officeholders in an imperiled area begging for it to stop:

As David Corn wrote this morning, what we’re seeing from Trump isn’t the usual campaign tendency to spin, distort and exaggerate. The Trump/Vance campaign is taking Trump’s penchant for repeated, outright lying and calumny to newly sinister depths. The falsehoods themselves have been catalogued in mind numbing detail for many years now. At this point, fact checking Trump (and Vance) just amounts to using the thesaurus to find different words to describe the same thing - virtually every assertion of consequence is a distortion of one kind or another. All of this is in service of Trump’s attempt to draw as many people as possible into a parallel universe in which Americans are, to quote Corn, “living in a dangerous hellhole in which they’re imperiled by barbarians, who happen to be people of color.” And this firehose of disinformation, as so many have described it, has us all bailing water, flailing furiously just to stay afloat in reality. It’s unnerving, depressing and exhausting.

As I started putting together this post, I thought back to a column I wrote for INDY Week five years ago, during Trump’s presidency. I am going to reprint most of it below, as a reminder to myself and you all of how long we’ve been living with this. Since then, it’s only gotten worse, with the Big Lie of the 2020 election now the tentpoles of the whole edifice of Trumpian reality bending. But the structure and foundation of Trump’s approach to truth is much as it was when he was President, which most of you know. And the end of the piece can perhaps be seen as a form of advice for the proper way to cover Trump - not to take his words literally, or seriously, but always to keep firmly in mind the deeply menacing motives driving him.

Here it is:

Language is structured by countless rules. Mostly, we don’t have to think about them. We just know what makes sense and what doesn’t. If someone asks, “How tall are you?” you respond with a range of heights. But you wouldn’t, for example, say “purple” or “tomorrow.” 

Well, you could, but those would be nonsense answers. And if you kept giving nonsense answers like that—Q: What did you do today? A: “57”—pretty quickly, people would stop taking you seriously.

Which brings us to today’s Republican Party. In defending Donald Trump, they’re no longer playing by the ordinary rules of language. One sentence flatly contradicts the next. Exaggeration is replaced by fabrication. Sometimes, there’s no obvious connection between questions and answers. They’re just spewing nonsense.

GOP elites have been trending in this direction for a long time. In 2004, an anonymous White House official, presumably Karl Rove, derided liberals who lived in the “reality-based” community while conservatives forged ahead by “creating their own reality.”….

Since the beginning of the Trump era, however, nonsense has become the standard form of communication. Discussing Trump’s inauguration, then-press secretary Sean Spicer made the preposterous claim that it was substantially bigger than Obama’s. Trump adviser Kellyanne Conway defended Spicer’s claim because, she said, he was just citing “alternative facts.” 

It’s a nonsense statement that has become the leitmotif for the Trump regime.

The Washington Post has been tirelessly cataloging all of Trump’s false and misleading statements since he became president. As of mid-October, Trump had uttered more than thirteen thousand of them. The Post’s database doesn’t merely document the president’s repeated falsehoods, however. It portrays a presidency built on a foundation of nonsense.

Trump is facing the real prospect of impeachment as a result of a now well-documented plot to extort Ukraine’s president to promise to investigate a fabricated claim about Joe Biden’s alleged interference in a nonexistent Ukrainian corruption probe. The plot’s pivotal moment was the now-infamous July 25 phone call in which Trump made clear his demands. 

Trump’s go-to explanation for that call: It was “perfect.” 

As CNN’s Chris Cilizza has wondered, what exactly constitutes a “perfect” phone call? The words used? The clarity of the connection? 

Trump’s response can’t even be described as false, since it doesn’t engage the premises of the issue. 

It’s just nonsense. 

Republican efforts to defend Trump from impeachment are foundering because the facts themselves are so damning. So they, too, have resorted to nonsense. Witnesses are “never Trumpers” or have a “pro-Ukrainian” agenda, whatever that means. Elected officials are storming secure facilities to decry “secretive testimony,” even when they have access to that testimony.

Since Trump is a never-ending font of lies and nonsense, defending him at all costs requires in-kind utterances. In early November, Trump’s daughter Ivanka suggested that the Trump appointees now testifying against him were evidence that her father had assembled a Lincolnesque “team of rivals.” Thus, Ivanka concluded, this is just “history repeating itself.” 

Explaining why this is the most ridiculous historical comparison imaginable gives it too much credence. After all, it’s not intended to be a factual statement. Indeed, had Ivanka been asked which president’s cabinet the impeachment inquiry reminded her of, it would have made as much sense for her to have answered, “purple.” 

In Trumpworld, they’re not even trying anymore. Nonsense is the whole game. And the consequences are utterly sinister. 

Any engagement with their words should begin with the understanding that the goal is to subvert the ordinary rules of language—to spew nonsense to defend the indefensible.