Nowhere To Turn, No One To Trust: Trump Is Destroying Public Faith in Any Reality

In the past, The Muckrake has examined the relentless post-political campaign by Donald Trump to destroy government by refusing to govern and only offering the illusion of good-faith. This tactic has done unbelievable damage, as post-politics tend to do, by relying on the public perception and anticipation of a president at least attempting to do good by the people in protecting them and pursuing their interests while using that cover to steal, plunder, and consolidate power.

It is an ingenious, insidious, postmodern ploy that has done wonders for decades now in places like Russia and beyond. It is the politics of a new era of corporate/hypercapitalistic domination where businesses and oligarchs want to reap all of the reward without ever so much as approaching anything resembling consequence or risk.

Now, going on four months of pandemic crisis, we are seeing the starkness of this strategy as the United States of America struggles to even come to the beginnings of an understanding as to what exactly is happening. Reports contradict each other consistently. There are still new symptoms to digest, new rumored mutations to fear, and no one has any idea what the government is doing to fight this virus, protect us, or even go as far as properly calculating the toll.

As America continues to stumble in the dark, Trump has returned to his old friend hydroxychloroquine, claiming again that the drug has magical powers that have been disproven by science. The new wrinkle is that Trump is claiming to take the drug himself as a precaution against the virus, which doesn’t even fit the lie he originally told that it was useful in treating people with the virus. His claim is dubious, both from the standpoint of whether he’s taking it all and what its effects would be, but on Tuesday he forced members of his cabinet to criticize scientific studies showing the drug actually killed people and labeled the scientists responsible as opponents out to hurt him politically.

This farce played out with a backdrop of an America where even the actual infection rate and death count are now in dispute. Trump and allies claim the number has been inflated while in Florida a data manager responsible for the state’s Covid-19 information publicly said she was fired for refusing to doctor the numbers. In Georgia, my current home, The Atlanta Journal Constitution reported the state had apparently intentionally misrepresented its own data by switching dates to show the pandemic was under control and business was ready to resume.

It’s hard to properly state the effect of these actions, from the president’s hawking of a snake-oil tonic to states apparently doctoring their public information. As an American living in the crisis, I can only offer to others who might read this in other countries that it feels like a bad dream, the kind of paranoid nightmare where every door hides another danger and every turn around every corner could mean doom. There’s nowhere to turn, no one to trust, which is how post-political authoritarians like their politics.

By destroying objective reality, authoritarians are free to operate and remake society to their whims. When people cannot trust their government or each other, they play upon the mistrust and paranoia by plucking their worst instincts and prejudices like the strings on an instrument. This is, as Steve Bannon has termed it, a zone flooded with shit, where no one can tell reality from fake reality, and so it is ripe for manipulation.

Just as we have entered a new political era, we have entered a new stage of the pandemic. We will watch the people we love get sick and die, not to mention suffer unnecessary economic ruin, all as those tasked with protecting and informing us continually tell us what we see, hear, and experience isn’t real. It is maddening and infuriating, and it is intended to break our will.

Like sailors lost in a storm, we have to keep something of a fixed point. We have to remember that none of this is normal. That none of this is right. We have to keep repeating to ourselves that something is being done to us, that a plot is unfurling, that the problem is with them, not with us. Or else we could be lost completely.

Jared Yates Sexton is the author of American Rule: How A Nation Conquered The World But Failed Its People, available for pre-order from Dutton/Penguin-Random House. His work has appeared in The New York Times, The New Republic, The Daily Beast, Politico, and elsewhere. Currently he serves as an associate professor of writing at Georgia Southern University and is the co-host of The Muckrake Podcast.