George Packer is a staff writer for The Atlantic, where this article appears.
To assess the legacy of Donald Trump’s presidency, start by quantifying it. Since last February, more than a quarter of a million Americans have died from COVID-19—a fifth of the world’s deaths from the disease, the highest number of any country. In the three years before the pandemic, 2.3 million Americans lost their health insurance, accounting for up to 10,000 “excess deaths”; millions more lost coverage during the pandemic. The United States’ score on the human-rights organization Freedom House’s annual index dropped from 90 out of 100 under President Barack Obama to 86 under Trump, below that of Greece and Mauritius. Trump withdrew the U.S. from 13 international organizations, agreements, and treaties. The number of refugees admitted into the country annually fell from 85,000 to 12,000. About 400 miles of barrier were built along the southern border. The whereabouts of the parents of 666 children seized at the border by U.S. officials remain unknown.
America under Trump became less free, less equal, more divided, more alone, deeper in debt, swampier, dirtier, meaner, sicker, and deader. It also became more delusional. No number from Trump’s years in power will be more lastingly destructive than his 25,000 false or misleading statements. Super-spread by social media and cable news, they contaminated the minds of tens of millions of people. Trump’s lies will linger for years, poisoning the atmosphere like radioactive dust.
Presidents lie routinely, about everything from war to sex to their health. When the lies are consequential enough, they have a corrosive effect on democracy. Lyndon B. Johnson deceived Americans about the Gulf of Tonkin incident and everything else concerning the Vietnam War. Richard Nixon’s lifelong habit of prevaricating gave him the nickname “Tricky Dick.” After Vietnam and Watergate, Americans never fully recovered their trust in government. But these cases of presidential lying came from a time when the purpose was limited and rational: to cover up a scandal, make a disaster disappear, mislead the public in service of a particular goal. In a sense, Americans expected a degree of fabrication from their leaders. After Jimmy Carter, in his 1976 campaign, promised, “I’ll never lie to you,” and then pretty much kept his word, voters sent him back to Georgia. Ronald Reagan’s gauzy fictions were far more popular.
Trump’s lies were different. They belonged to the postmodern era. They were assaults against not this or that fact, but reality itself. They spread beyond public policy to invade private life, clouding the mental faculties of everyone who had to breathe his air, dissolving the very distinction between truth and falsehood. Their purpose was never the conventional desire to conceal something shameful from the public. He was stunningly forthright about things that other presidents would have gone to great lengths to keep secret: his true feelings about Senator John McCain and other war heroes; his eagerness to get rid of disloyal underlings; his desire for law enforcement to protect his friends and hurt his enemies; his effort to extort a foreign leader for dirt on a political adversary; his affection for Kim Jong Un and admiration for Vladimir Putin; his positive view of white nationalists; his hostility toward racial and religious minorities; and his contempt for women.
The most mendacious of Trump’s predecessors would have been careful to limit these thoughts to private recording systems. Trump spoke them openly, not because he couldn’t control his impulses, but intentionally, even systematically, in order to demolish the norms that would otherwise have constrained his power. To his supporters, his shamelessness became a badge of honesty and strength. They grasped the message that they, too, could say whatever they wanted without apology. To his opponents, fighting by the rules—even in as small a way as calling him “President Trump”—seemed like a sucker’s game. So the level of American political language was everywhere dragged down, leaving a gaping shame deficit.
Trump’s barrage of falsehoods—as many as 50 daily in the last fevered months of the 2020 campaign—complemented his unconcealed brutality. Lying was another variety of shamelessness. Just as he said aloud what he was supposed to keep to himself, he lied again and again about matters of settled fact—the more brazen and frequent the lie, the better. Two days after the polls closed, with the returns showing him almost certain to lose, Trump stood at the White House podium and declared himself the winner of an election that his opponent was trying to steal.
This crowning conspiracy theory of Trump’s presidency activated his entitled children, compliant staff, and sycophants in Congress and the media to issue dozens of statements declaring that the election was fraudulent. Following the mechanism of every big lie of the Trump years, the Republican Party establishment fell in line. Within a week of Election Day, false claims of voter fraud in swing states had received almost 5 million mentions in the press and on social media. In one poll, 70 percent of Republican voters concluded that the election hadn’t been free or fair.
So a stab-in-the-back narrative was buried in the minds of millions of Americans, where it burns away, as imperishable as a carbon isotope, consuming whatever is left of their trust in democratic institutions and values. This narrative will widen the gap between Trump believers and their compatriots who might live in the same town, but a different universe. And that was Trump’s purpose—to keep us locked in a mental prison where reality was unknowable so that he could go on wielding power, whether in or out of office, including the power to destroy.
For his opponents, the lies were intended to be profoundly demoralizing. Neither counting them nor checking facts nor debunking conspiracies made any difference. Trump demonstrated again and again that the truth doesn’t matter. In rational people this provoked incredulity, outrage, exhaustion, and finally an impulse to crawl away and abandon the field of politics to the fantasists.
For believers, the consequences were worse. They surrendered the ability to make basic judgments about facts, exiling themselves from the common framework of self-government. They became litter swirling in the wind of any preposterous claim that blew from @realDonaldTrump. Truth was whatever made the world whole again by hurting their enemies—the more far-fetched, the more potent and thrilling. After the election, as charges of voter fraud began to pile up, Matthew Sheffield, a reformed right-wing media activist, tweeted: “Truth for conservative journalists is anything that harms ‘the left.’ It doesn’t even have to be a fact. Trump’s numerous lies about any subject under the sun are thus justified because his deceptions point to a larger truth: that liberals are evil.”
How did half the country—practical, hands-on, self-reliant Americans, still balancing family budgets and following complex repair manuals—slip into such cognitive decline when it came to politics? Blaming ignorance or stupidity would be a mistake. You have to summon an act of will, a certain energy and imagination, to replace truth with the authority of a con man like Trump. Hannah Arendt, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, describes the susceptibility to propaganda of the atomized modern masses, “obsessed by a desire to escape from reality because in their essential homelessness they can no longer bear its accidental, incomprehensible aspects.” They seek refuge in “a man-made pattern of relative consistency” that bears little relation to reality. Though the U.S. is still a democratic republic, not a totalitarian regime, and Trump was an all-American demagogue, not a fascist dictator, his followers abandoned common sense and found their guide to the world in him. Defeat won’t change that.
Trump damaged the rest of us, too. He got as far as he did by appealing to the perennial hostility of popular masses toward elites. In a democracy, who gets to say what is true—the experts or the people? The historian Sophia Rosenfeld, author of Democracy and Truth, traces this conflict back to the Enlightenment, when modern democracy overthrew the authority of kings and priests: “The ideal of the democratic truth process has been threatened repeatedly ever since the late eighteenth century by the efforts of one or the other of these epistemic cohorts, expert or popular, to monopolize it.”
Monopoly of public policy by experts—trade negotiators, government bureaucrats, think tankers, professors, journalists—helped create the populist backlash that empowered Trump. His reign of lies drove educated Americans to place their faith, and even their identity, all the more certainly in experts, who didn’t always deserve it (the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, election pollsters). The war between populists and experts relieved both sides of the democratic imperative to persuade. The standoff turned them into caricatures.
Trump’s legacy includes an extremist Republican Party that tries to hold on to power by flagrantly undemocratic means, and an opposition pushed toward its own version of extremism. He leaves behind a society in which the bonds of trust are degraded, in which his example licenses everyone to cheat on taxes and mock affliction. Many of his policies can be reversed or mitigated. It will be much harder to clear our minds of his lies and restore the shared understanding of reality—the agreement, however inconvenient, that A is A and not B—on which a democracy depends.
But we now have the chance, because two events in Trump’s last year in office broke the spell of his sinister perversion of the truth. The first was the coronavirus. The beginning of the end of Trump’s presidency arrived on March 11, 2020, when he addressed the nation for the first time on the subject of the pandemic and showed himself to be completely out of his depth. The virus was a fact that Trump couldn’t lie into oblivion or forge into a political weapon—it was too personal and frightening, too real. As hundreds of thousands of Americans died, many of them needlessly, and the administration flailed between fantasy, partisan incitement, and criminal negligence, a crucial number of Americans realized that Trump’s lies could get someone they love killed.
The second event came on November 3. For months Trump had tried frantically to destroy Americans’ trust in the election—the essence of the democratic system, the one lever of power that belongs undeniably to the people. His effort consisted of nonstop lies about the fraudulence of mail-in ballots. But the ballots flooded into election offices, and people lined up before dawn on the first day of early voting, and some of them waited 10 hours to vote, and by the end of Election Day, despite the soaring threat of the virus, more than 150 million Americans had cast ballots—the highest turnout rate since at least 1900. The defeated president tried again to soil our faith, by taking away our votes. The election didn’t end his lies—nothing will—or the deeper conflicts that the lies revealed. But we learned that we still want democracy. This, too, is the legacy of Donald Trump.
Props to the guy who hung a “Trump Presdiential Library and Museum” sign on a Porta Potty.
It houses the pieces of the Constitution that Trump shredded for use as toilet paper in short supply because of his utter nonresponse to the pandemic.
LOL — I never liked Trump — but I hate the lying corrupt globalist agenda loving establishment more —- AMERICA and Americans First is what these country needs. TRUMP ripped the mask off the oligarchy — and millions woke up, they won’t go back to sleep. Lying media and propagandists shills like Packard expose who they are – disgusting.
Kathleen T Smith . . . . sigh . . . . CBK
So you hate Trump but bought his propaganda hook, line, and sinker…
Packer says, “we learned that we still want democracy”. Unfortunately, that’s only partly true. We learned that half of us still want democracy, while the other half of Americans despise democracy and would trade it for a corrupt, tin-pot dictator. Fully half the country would gleefully overthrow an election, and toss out the Constitution. They’d rather have Trump, than democracy.
Based on polls, if America was a democracy, the rich would be taxed.
Corporate owned media and conservative religious leaders refuse to inform Americans that the U.S. is an oligarchy. As a result, the people flounder in their lives which have become a crap shoot in terms of survival and, they cling to preserving the little they have from the class they perceive is below them. The appeal of Trump’s message didn’t occur in a vacuum.
The average Republican doesn’t read Picketty.
Economists got all persnickety
When reading Thomas Picketty.
“Capital return outstrips
economic growth,” Tom quipped,
“so the system has this glitch,
making the rich more rich,
and what is worse, therefore,
making the poor more poor.”
With their knickers all in a twist,
Picketty they dismissed,
“He soils,” they said, “like a pigeon
our pure free market religion!
Picketty tells the wrong story,” (they said),
“for everything’s hunky-dory.
If you squint and look away,
it’s all getting better each day!
Just mind not those who are hurtin’
or that man behind the curtain!
And yours is not to ask, ‘Why?’
There’ll be pie in the sky when you die!”
Seeing through the prism
of unchecked capitalism
is like an obstruction entopic
that makes the seer myopic.
Oops! entoptic, ofc
My response, Linda, alas, is in moderation. Happy New Year!
cx: furthermore, not therefore. Better, i think.
Picketty is, of course, a highly respected economist. Here is a list of his NBER working papers:https://www.nber.org/people/thomas_piketty?page=1&perPage=50
Some might also be interested in Russ Robert’s interview of Thomas Piketty on Inequality and Capital in the 21st Century: https://www.econtalk.org/thomas-piketty-on-inequality-and-capital-in-the-21st-century/
Bob-
Excellent poem. It should be published in a business, finance or economics magazine or posted at one of their sites.
The originality of the rhyming is very impressive. Thanks for creating and sharing the poem.
You nailed it, Mr. Ranta. And this is the grave danger that we face. The next Trump wouldn’t be as inarticulate and incompetent but much, much younger, more charismatic, slicker, more able, while harboring the same wannabe fascist views. And he or she won’t make the same amateurish mistakes that Donnie Doolittle made but will, early on, get like-minded fascists into the key positions for enforcing the transition via violence–in intelligence, defense, the AG office, Homeland Security, etc. I’ve been wondering who Vlad is grooming to take over the 49.6 percent of the electorate (plus the morons who will join them). So many contenders for Don the Con v2.0–Rubio, Scott, Hawley, Cotton, Governor DeSatan, Donnie Jr., Ivanka.
And certain commentators will go onto blogs like this one and try to convince people that since the Democrat (Harris?) in 2024 won’t deliver paradise, we should all vote for that person who will end the fraught Democratic experiment on these shores.
cs: whom Vlad is grooming, not who, ofc
Sadly true. I was raised in part by a rabidly conservative grandfather with racist and abusive tendencies, who broadcast his political views on the family at every opportunity. He was a smart and educated man, with a good amount of logic at his command, so I listened. It didn’t take long into my teens before I grasped that he would have been happy with a dictator to implement his fave policies.
The only thing that held that man in check was that he was an outlier in the clan he adopted when he married my grandmother— their “norms” restrained his worse impulses (mainly by fear he’d be ejected). I will continue the simile by noting that my grandmother’s clan were not only learned, but opinionated—equal to his provocations and protective of their turf. We could use more of that in the Dem party.
I loved this article . . . but found at least one red line gone missing: The most obvious line in the sand to me was not a particular moment or date, but rather EVERY TIME a Trump lawyer walked into a Court of Law, where reasonable evidence is still king, they had to leave their populist fantasies outside in the hallway trashcan with the rest of the toxic cultural junk. CBK
I was wondering how to make the number of deaths, now at around 344,000, more real to people. We should go state by state and point out what could be wiped out. Pittsburgh was one city I noticed could be utterly devastated. How would we react if a bomb took them out? Would people in Wyoming care? Would they care if 64% of their own population disappeared? How about over half of Vermont or a third of Montana? How do we make these deaths real?
People don’t care about large numbers. They care about individual stories.
Too often people don’t care unless it is their story.
Not even individual stories. My brother is recovering from a terrible case of Covid. He was in ICU from two days before Thanksgiving until Christmas Eve. He nearly died several times and is now in a rehab center. He has permanent heart and lung damage.
The day after Christmas the local news did a story on him. He has 8 kids and they had to do Christmas over Zoom because the only person allowed to visit is my sister in law. I didn’t read the comments, thankfully, but a couple of my cousins did, and the comments about how the story was “fake,” or that “it doesn’t matter because he didn’t die,” or that the “family just wants attention,” were horrifying.
People don’t care about each other. Period.
Threatened So sorry to hear. Please pass on my heartfelt good wishes for his recovery and for his and your family. Also, the messages you received inspired a sense of horror in me . . . as I am sure they did in you.
About those who sent them, however; and in most general terms: germane to my sorrow and genuine good wishes is that I actually trust that what you have written is true. And I think, from what you say, not only is a sense of trust absent from those messages, so they seem to say the writers don’t even WANT to trust any more.
It’s a severe reaction to having trusted and been “burned” by it, over and over again, that generates the kind of severe skepticism that resides there; and, where hope is concerned, even an active pessimism that seems evident.
How sad for us all. Perhaps we have become so numerous, so technologically free, and so “democratic,” that we have left open the doors to every level of human development, lacking, and degeneration of it in our communications venues, but without a way to curb that degeneration in terms of some discerning principle that won’t destroy democracy along the way. I think education hasn’t really caught up with it . . . yet? CBK
Mention Covid and the Trumpeteer crazies come out. If the paper had just talked about the father of eight who had permanent heart and lung damage from a recent month long hospitalization where he was near death more than once, strangers would be raising money for a GoFund me effort to pay off his bills and support his family.
TOW,
That is terrible. I bet all the nasty comments were anonymous. That’s the danger of social media and even letters to the3ditor that are unsigned. People say horrible things that they would n3ver say to your face. Over the years that ihav3 blogged here, I have deleted many, many vicious comments. I’ve also seen the same bile on Twitter. The Internet accustoms us to meanness, especially when people have a fake name.
Diane . . . and where one person or a small group can duplicate with many different names further corroding our trust in anyone but those we have experienced as authentic. CBK
Beautifully put, Catherine! Thank you.
Really, I shouldn’t be so cynical. The only “good” thing about this whole ordeal is the people coming from everywhere–friends, family, family of family, friends of friends–to do what they can to support my brother (he’s only 45) and his family. Prayers, candles lit, whole congregations of many religious groups praying, donations, his job helping with insurance and other financial needs, people calling me, my mom, my sister in law, the whole family, to check on us all and how my brother is doing, have been the only decent thing that has happened in this situation.
Most people really are good. You’re right–the ones making those comments from behind the anonymity of social media aren’t the majority. It’s just been a really hard month.
Thank you for your wise and kind words.
Threatened You’re welcome . . . I think ultimately the people you speak of in your last note have the upper hand. CBK
Thank goodness.
The last couple weeks have been darkly hilarious. The Repugnican Party has been absolutely groveling toward Trump. In return, Trump has absolutely no loyalty to it. If he isn’t going to be benefited, he will burn it all to the ground.
I bet today that those people who live in Trumplandia wouldn’t believe it if Putin pulled a “Pearl Harbor Day” type attack because Trump would believe Putin if he said he didn’t do it.
TRUMP: Fake news. Grass is pink.
TRUMPETEERS: It is!
Trump’s presidency and his fascist tendencies revealed how willing the Republican Party to was to ride on his dirty coattails. They were willing to blow up norms and civility, ignore the rule of law and explode the deficit as they had made a deal with the devil. Republicans showed that they serve only the 1% and corporations. The GOP came to stand for “greedy old patriarchs.”
On a positive note, the horror of the Trump administration awakened a sleeping giant, the black and brown people of America who helped deliver the election to Joe Biden. We have seen an increase in the number female and people of color in politics. They came to the realization they had to step up or continue to get stepped on. Our country is better off when our representatives truly understand the issues facing working people in this country.
It’s too early to talk about “legacy”. Because while we talk about “legacy”, Trump and his minions are planning to keep him in office another 4 years. Trump isn’t leaving a legacy of fascism. He IS a fascist, and at this moment that fascist is in power and has control of many arms of the government. That fascist can stage a military takeover and Glenn Greenwald will rile up his followers to blame the democrats. That point in the circle where the far left and far right join together to ignore truth and say whatever keeps the fascist in power.
Propaganda and fascism go hand in hand. Lies and fascism go hand in hand. That is why Bernie and AOC understand why Trump is so dangerous, but Glenn Greenwald and his legion of uncritical worshippers normalize Trump.
The next fascist could be on the left. A thoughtful and decent politician like AOC who tells the truth gets defeated by a lying Glenn Greenwald-type who gets his followers riled up with lies, just like Trump.
Truth matters.
We really need to start worrying more about the terrible start to the vaccine rollout than Donald Trump.
The whole Covid crisis has been an example of government malfeasance. From the anti-mask, anti-science rhetoric and actions to turning the bulk of the response over to cash strapped states has been a disaster. Instead of better using more efficient federal resources, the pandemic response has been and continues to be an epic fail. So many people are barely able to feed their children while virus rages. Trump plays golf while people die. This is a tragic failure of government.
I just am really tired of blaming Trump for this. I’ve written off Trump. We should write off Trump. We need to solve problems. Vaccines were developed and are being distributed in an astonishingly short amount of time. We need to get needles in arms yesterday.
FLERP Unfortunately, the fallout from Trump’s incompetence coupled with his malevolence is going to be with us for a long time to come. CBK
I have a suspicion that Biden’s crew is as well prepared as they can be under the circumstances. As soon as he takes the oath, things will move.
FLERP!,
How exactly should that be done while Trump is still in control of the White House?
The first step to making this better is getting out the incompetent people at the top.
The vaccines are in the states and cities’ possession. We need to get needles in arms. The states and cities can do that now, if they can rise to the challenge. Forget about Trump. He won’t help you. Maybe Biden can but he’s 20 days from office. The virus doesn’t take year-end holiday vacation. This shouldn’t be a time for ruminating about Trump. It should be a time for solving problems.
Perhaps this article explains the logistical nightmare: https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2020/12/what-we-know-about-u-s-covid-19-vaccine-distribution-plan.html
I’m not just blaming Trump. The states’ rights mentality of conservative leaders is part of the problem. It makes no sense to force states to compete for PPE. There is no national Covid policy. I heard one of Trump’s generals say,”I’m not going to invade Texas and tell them what to do.” It is provincial thinking in a global health crisis. With coordinated effort and federal support the whole process should have gone much more smoothly. The vaccine rollout in Florida is a mess. Why is there not enough vaccine available? Why is there so little information?
“provincial thinking in a global health crisis,” got that right, retiredteacher. What we need yesterday is Army & National Guard, organizing vaccines in arms to the masses under tents in parking lots & arenas nationwide.
FLERP, some states may be capable of this kind of action sans fed military organization, but how many? Covid spreads across state borders. We lose 3 weeks between Trump & Biden before this could be underway. Hard not to “blame Trump.”
Flerp, my in-laws live in Florida and have been quarantining for months. They are trying desperately to schedule an appointment to get vaccinated and can’t even get the sign up site to work. I’m in MD and our rollout seems to be running smoothly. I think it all depends on how the Governor of each state has handled the pandemic from the get go. You’re right! Trump won’t help us, but it seems those Governors who are Trump cronies seem to have dropped the ball on public health issues in lieu of keeping the economy open.
Linda, it’s no better in NYC.
I heard much the same thing from a friend in Florida. People spending hours trying to get through to schedule an appointment only to finally get on to find all the appointments full.
There is provincial thinking, and then there is bias-driven fear and resulting policy made by those in power.
Also, my thought is that the States Rights argument for way-too-many is STILL Orwellian double-speak for both furthering racist/ classist/ misogynist/ homophobic ideology (racist fear and ideology never went away from before the Civil War, then Jim Crow . . . misogyny for eons) as well as “I’ll keep mine, thank you.”
BTW, Mitch McConnell said from the Senate Floor that he didn’t want to send out the $2000 checks because too many people would get it who didn’t really need it.
WHERE WAS THAT THINKING when they were passing legislation for the RICH? CBK
Who is in charge of distributing the vaccines? Anyone?
The states. Cuomo, for one.
Anecdote today from a friend who is a pharmacist in Ohio- the major retail drug chain who employs her sent their employees and vaccines to nursing homes. Fifty percent of the nursing home staff refused to take the vaccine. Since the shelf life of the vaccines, on site, was short, the pharmacists called family and friends over the age of 65 to get the shots before the drug’s efficacy was compromised. A person with cancer heard about it and complained it wasn’t fair. The retail chain’s new policy- dispose of the unused vaccines.
I can’t do anything about either one, so I guess what I b***h and moan about doesn’t really matter.
Packer’s distinction between Trump’s lies and those of Nixon and Reagan is interesting: “They belong to the postmodern era… assaults against… reality itself… dissolving the very distinction between truth and falsehood.”
I find it hard to connect Trumpism with scholarly tracts on postmodernism (which I was already running across pre-Nixon-era). To me, it45’s sort of lying, tho aptly described, connects more directly to the disinformation methods of fascists the world over, seen at least since the 1920’s. Also follows from his disorderly personality (shared by many totalitarian leaders). This is a far cry from post-modernism, which I see as a truth-cannot-be-known balance to modernism’s truth-exists-outside-man extension of the Enlightenment era.
But there’s value in this angle of analyzing “information” and its dissemination, in our ‘information age.’ Somewhere in my recent reading, here I think, was an excellent description of “news” obtained from social media and from MSM opinion. The former connects the reader to the most extreme “info” that falls within their spectrum of political beliefs (selected by algorithm). The latter is entertainment. Neither is news. Either easily leads to loss of touch with reality.
“ Trump spoke them [his thoughts] openly, not because he couldn’t control his impulses, but intentionally, even systematically, in order to demolish the norms that would otherwise have constrained his power. To his supporters, his shamelessness became a badge of honesty and strength. They grasped the message that they, too, could say whatever they wanted without apology.”
This is very insightful. Some have compared it45’s methods to those of the domestic abuser. Great similarity there. The abuser isolates his victim from other sources of input by overwhelming potentially balancing viewpoints, and uses that bully pulpit to tear down social norms that provide grounding in reality. When a president uses his bully pulpit in that fashion, that’s social approbation for anti-social tendencies. Others feel freed and justified to let loose abusive verbiage (or even behavior) normally repressed by social norms.