Donald Trump Has Constructed a World in Which He Cannot Lose
There was a moment after last night's debate when MSNBC switched over to a room full of Ohio voters. Asked to raise their hands, 11 people thought Hillary Clinton won. Ten people thought Donald Trump did. It's easy to wonder what world the latter are living in. And the answer is: probably the one that was built for them.
These debates were not contests. In tennis terms, yes, Donald Trump scored some points, but Clinton still won the match in straight sets, 6-0, 6-0, 6-0. Even that undersells her dominance: If you put them on a football field, the debates were like Ohio State vs. a barber college. Yet Trump came a hair's breadth from winning in that room and will likely take home roughly 40 percent of the vote on November 8. And to understand how something like that could be so, you have to go back to the pre-debate theatrics.
TV news enjoyed depicting Trump's "oooh, gotcha!" guests at the last two debates as attempts to throw Clinton off her game. But it was never clear how seeing a few accusers would distract a woman who is quite likely the most harassed and kangaroo-court prosecuted candidate in American history. If you view Trump's surprise guests (the mother of a man killed in Benghazi, Barack Obama's half brother, an email server, Monica Lewinsky's blue dress, a death panel, and the Clinton Kill List brought to life by a genie) as props for the audience, though, suddenly everything makes sense.
The trouble with viewing these debates as actual rhetorical contests is that it presumes they take place in the same universe and that the candidates are talking to each other. Candidates refer to each other by name-zingers are even zung-but they occupy the same space out of phase with each other. One is in the real world, the disappointing neoliberal one where left-wing policies enacted by pro-labor governments in OECD nations decades ago are dismissed as dangerously insane, and the other is in Donald Trump's world, which actually is dangerously insane.
But within the world Trump inhabits, things make sense relative to each other. In his world, where Clinton was not repeatedly cleared of wrongdoing over Benghazi, a Benghazi mom appearance is just a reminder that literally nothing Clinton says on stage is legitimate.
The right wing came up with a pretty sweet gig in the 1960s when it lamented the lack of a conservative media to cosset ideas vulnerable to the scientific method and recorded events. In the short term, making things up takes no time at all; refuting fabrications takes orders of magnitude more. Ginning up bullshit tailors the discourse while forcing opponents to spend so much time trying to prove a negative that their own message gets lost in the outrage that, say, ACORN is running a white-slavery ring.
In the short term, making things up takes no time at all; refuting fabrications takes orders of magnitude more.
In the long term, though, that systematized mendacity creates its own hermetic history of the United States and selectively perverted science immune to criticism. Things become true because you believe them, and debunking becomes illegitimate because the debunkers are outsiders-a suspect people living outside the big beautiful wall that Mexico will pay for. To quote one Bush administration official:
"Everyone else is in the reality-based community... [where] solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality. That's not the way the world really works anymore... We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality-judiciously, as you will-we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."
That was 12 years and one Kenyan-born President Barry Soetoro ago.
This is not a world in which Donald Trump has to work very hard, because it was designed a long time ago with the revanchist bigotry of the lowest expectations. Clinton's policy nuance is immaterial when she is a murderer married to a rapist and hell bent on ushering in full communism, which is fascism. There was stronger inverted science in Stranger Things.
But this is how a rambling diatribe wins: Where the ecosystem sets the stakes so high for the opposition and so low for the loyal patriots, getting around to a few keywords invokes all the boogeymen of an entirely internally consistent worldview. For a political wing so dependent on the dog whistle, it's an awful lot like the Far Side cartoon about what dogs hear: Blah blah blah blah BENGHAZI blah blah blah blah EMAIL blah blah blah LEWINSKY.
The long-term implications for governance in this scenario should have become clear somewhere around day two of the Obama administration. Consensus politics, equitable bargaining, and reliable favor-trading can't grease the wheels of government when we're starting from two different versions of the past that don't contain the same sets of events.
It's a problem that will haunt both parties, as Republicans increasingly come under fire for not doing more to stop events that did not occur or enact policies to realize promises of the impossible. And it is something that Democrats have no answer for other than patience and repeating themselves.
Already, Republican voters are being told that any Trump/Pence loss will constitute proof of a rigged election, and while Trump's refusal to pledge to honor the election results scandalizes political analysts as immediately disqualifying, their outrage misses the point. Donald Trump's rejection of essentially the entire of American history is disgusting, but talk show panelists don't have to live in that hell; they just cash checks for reporting on what the screams sound like.
We are a few weeks away from watching the Republican Party find itself immured behind a wall and haunted by phantasms of its own making, anxiety and despair only increasing as real, lived experience grows more terrifyingly distant from what it thought was true. This is a world that cannot be bargained with, because you cannot build a bridge between this one and the imaginary. You cannot compromise with an epistemology that rejects your existence.
Donald Trump and the party that abets him have succeeded more than they could ever have imagined. They won this debate, and now it's on to November 8. They have constructed a world where they cannot lose, and in so doing have made ours a place where no one else will win for a very long time.
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