In a divided country, the one constant is Trump’s ubiquity. Even in sports or entertainment, President Trump’s presence lurks. He’s so entrenched in the minds of the celebrity community—a group that roundly rejects him—that Oscar host Jimmy Kimmel tried to get a rise out of Trump by tweeting at him in the middle of the show.
The tweets were meant as pointed nod to Trump’s small-mindedness. They ostensibly implied that Trump was glued to his TV, waiting to combat Hollywood’s next insult like a petulant adolescent. But Kimmel’s gag had the reverse effect. It implied that Hollywood yearns for Trump’s recognition more than the other way around. Despite the voluminous material Trump provides, they still beg for more. Kimmel is obviously a world-class agitator. But in that moment, he seemed like the archetype for all Americans.
There have been numerous suggestions that Trump is marching the country toward authoritarianism, for good reason. His unilateral executive action banning travel from seven Muslim countries mirrored his campaign promise to curb individual freedom in the name of, at best, overblown security threats. Perhaps worse, he only perceives other government institutions as viable insofar as they support him personally. His favorite punching bag, of course, is the independent press which he has labeled “the enemy of the American people.”
Despite this chatter, very little has been said about Trump as a totalitarian. Totalitarianism differs from authoritarianism in that the reign is all-encompassing. The ruler not only controls governmental institutions but social and economic ones, as well. Totalitarians like Mussolini or Castro did not simply rule with an iron fist. They used charisma and a cult of personality to entrench themselves in their subjects’ collective psyche.
Some might suggest that Trump’s pervasiveness is primarily a media creation—a vicious cycle where the need for 24-hour content perpetuates a craven president’s thirst for attention, and vice versa. They would point to American institutions, like major businesses or religious organizations, whose loci of control are, at least, partially impervious to media and Trump influence. I suspect, however, that many in the Washington area have found this explanation observably false.
For example, I recently found Trump’s influence stamped all over a major Defense Department consulting firm’s new-hire orientation. In the middle of class, a white ex-military male attendee in his late-30s offended an African-American woman in her mid-20s by stating that men specifically are “innate problem solvers.”
Of course, the insertion of gender politics into professional training would have been unwarranted whether we had a divisive president or not. However, Trump’s implied presence already animated the discussion, making tangential polemical exchanges like this one far more likely. The instructor had made several snide comments about Trump’s leadership team, which the young woman thoroughly enjoyed, and the white male spent much of the class glued to his computer screen, watching Fox News’ CPAC coverage.
And yet, the class’ most forceful discussion actually brought the presumably conservative male and liberal woman together.
The male student took umbrage to a presentation slide that read “[when providing advice to clients] distinguish fact from opinion.” He claimed that a fact’s veracity depended on context and point of view. Another student disagreed, stating that facts, by their very definition, are indisputable and thus, should serve as the baseline for any debate or new discovery. Similarly, an apparent fact generated only to serve an opinion is a product of backward logic and precisely not fact at all.
For her part, the liberal woman interceded on behalf of the conservative male, stating that she could “disprove” the idea of incontrovertible facts. The third student struggled to understand how the nature of facts or anything else could be disproven without the support of actual facts.
Finally, a more senior member of the firm ended the debate by stating, “We now live in a world without objective truth. Thus, we as consultants have to occupy our client’s mind-space.” In other words, we have to tell them what truth is.
In a Trump-obsessed country, discussions like these—where defenders of facts are cast aside by a driveling horde—will likely be commonplace. For liberals like the young woman in class, this may seem like a comfortable space. After all, they’ve peddled intellectually dubious moral relativism for decades. But Trump and his associates have turned this line of reasoning on its head, becoming so nihilistic that nothing is beyond utterance, whether it’s denying Russia’s depravity, concocting electoral conspiracies, or proffering actual “alternative facts.”
Trump’s ideological comrade, Vladimir Putin, has been labeled not only an emerging geopolitical totalitarian, but also the world’s ultimate nihilist. If Americans want to ensure Trump doesn’t occupy their collective “mind space,” they should start by affirming the basic idea that facts indeed exist.
Jack King is a former United States Army Intelligence Officer and graduate of Cambridge Judge Business School. He currently works as a Defense Department consultant.
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