Trump’s Orwellian Propaganda Is Now In Full Bloom, and It Is Delusional
Donald Trump’s takeover and takedown of rules, law and culture are only widening, furthering deep divisions and putting U.S. intelligence capabilities, democratic principles and independence, the supremacy of law and even elections at risk of irrelevance to his unending demand for power.
For those who have feared autocracy and abuse of power, the era has already arrived. For those who see cruelty in this administration’s actions, and elements of “fascism” that parallel other autocracies and Naziism in the 1930s, Trump is delivering on a near-daily basis now — including public acknowledgement that Americans want a dictator, which he says he isn’t, to lower street crime.
The redistricting madness combined with attacks on voting laws, mail-in ballots, and state conduct of elections is not only supposed to be beyond Trump’s authority but attack the republic itself.
Trump’s attacks on businesses, colleges, museums, the constant need to rewrite history, the widening of immigrant deportations and the presence or promise of military in the streets now being honed to stop civil protest all are setting off screams of dissent.
Even Trump fans are starting to react as they recognize ill effects of policies that are cutting public health care benefits while consumer prices rise, and Trump oversteps protected First Amendment rights, extorts ownership positions in private companies and covers up whatever ill information is being hidden in the Jeffrey Epstein files.
If you were writing to a faraway friend, you would be describing a nation caught in constant tension, of fraught effects and feelings as embers of ethnic hate are enflamed and identity populations are turned against one another. The message: In a time of growing chaos, there is one Dear Leader to heed, and that’s why we should recognize huge Trump portraits being unfurled on the sides of federal buildings and the constant turn to Trump Social posts for daily announcements as signs of growing dictatorship.
Daily Challenges
The daily specifics hardly seem to matter — to Trump and, increasingly to a numbed public. Each bleeds into the next, along with the inevitable court challenges that start strong and get watered down through appeals months later.
Using a public White House meeting with the president of ally South Korea to praise the dictator of North Korea only makes sense in a Trump-ordered world. Declaring flag burning a crime as desecration but putting Trump campaigns on flags would be hypocrisy writ-large outside of this White House.
Of course, Trump crossed the law by firing Lisa Cook from the Fed board; it’s beyond his legal power to do so, even if Trump sees the move as pressuring for lower interest rates. But as with tariffs, immigration orders, federalizing National Guard troops, Trump doesn’t hesitate. Trump simply dares the rest of us to stop him. There are enough justices on the Supreme Court to let him do most whatever he wants in his count.
For sure, putting masked federal agents on the streets of Washington and placing 2,200 armed National Guardsmen and their equipment is a public relations show and not an effective crime stopper. But Trump is telling us what is happening and threatening the licenses or economics of any news organization that says different.
Threats, fear, extortion, pressure are prime tools for Trump. It turns out he needs the world’s most lethal military not because we have actual enemies overseas, but because he wants to aim those weapons at Black mayors and Democratic mayors. In Trump World, optics are everything, and the resulting absurdity of (illegally) renaming the Department of Defense as the Department of War makes perfect sense to ensure that his political foes recognize that they are targeted enemies. Unable to win his own Kennedy Center honors for being a reality show figure, he has needed to take over the whole complex and show, pick loyalists as winners, and name himself the host.
Scrambling Aftermath
What we do get from news reports is the sense of scramble among states, agencies, and localities to clean up the aftermath of Trump executive order bombardments that may be based on little relevant information. So we’re smashing FEMA emergency responders and National Weather Service capabilities just as we enter hurricane season in a climate-changing environment. We are canceling wind and solar energy production just as we are hearing of huge gaps coming for electric grids to meet the needs of Artificial Intelligence and Trump’s newly converted love and personal investment in cyber trading. Moving against vaccines as a new Covid outbreak lurks seems nuts.
Trump is so busy telling us about the wars he has settled that he misses the point that almost none of the claimed settlements is working. Worse, he refuses to face down Russia in Europe, or to either force Hamas to release hostages or for the Israeli government to deal with the starvation it is causing in Gaza or the land-grabbing in the West Bank.
Trump may aspire for greatness but only offers solutions that fit on hats. He solves nothing.
Lest the day pass without Trump declarations, he is telling us that slavery is less important and less distressing for our history than our museums tell us, and that it somehow is the job for all Americans to look past job numbers or prices to recognize the bright new day on the horizon.
Trump’s Orwellian propaganda is now in full bloom, and it is delusional.
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