The model of an authoritarian leader that the 20th century instilled in the Western imagination is a master of lies. Big Brother commands a machinery of propaganda that bombards his subjects with relentless projections of strength, combined with savaging of enemies real or imagined.
Donald Trump resembles this archetype in many ways, both superficially (the obsession with building new monuments to his greatness or renaming existing structures after him) and substantively (pressuring media and business into capitulating, turning the power ministries into organs of vengeance). But he differs in one key aspect: The president is a recipient and victim of propaganda as much as he is an originator of it.
Trump’s strange, symbiotic relationship with the world of lies was in evidence last night, when he experienced one of his periodic social-media crashouts. From 10:15 to 10:53 p.m. EST, he shared more than two dozen posts on his Truth Social account alleging a blizzard of conspiracies. Roughly half of them centered on Barack Obama, whom the posts accused of having committed treason, having attempted a coup, having personally used Hillary Clinton’s email server under a pseudonym, and having personally collected $120 million from the Affordable Care Act.
[Vivian Salama: Trump has gone from unpredictable to unreliable]
The rest of the messages contained attacks on various targets—such as Mark Kelly, James Comey, Jack Smith, and Hillary Clinton—whom Trump wishes to be arrested, including demands that the Justice Department move more quickly to apprehend these or other targets, as well as a handful of random videos that appear to show Black people misbehaving in public.
These messages, collectively, do not alter our understanding of Trump’s mindset. His accusations against Obama, as is typical, seem like reflected confessions. Obama never ordered investigations of his rivals, tried to overturn an election, or used the presidency as a vehicle of profit (the ACA charge, which appears new, seems to originate from a satirical website). Trump has done all of these things.
Trump’s fixation on Black Americans as a source of crime is long-standing, though he may be growing more uninhibited about expressing his prejudices. His undisguised intention to target his enemies with prosecutions is also by now familiar. As he has said many times, including yesterday, “I was hunted by some very bad people. Now I’m the hunter.”
The subject matter of his posts also confirms Trump’s boredom with the Iran war. In recent weeks, he has used his social-media accounts to attempt to scare Iranians or reassure oil markets (while often having the reverse effect). Yet his overnight posting binge ignored the war that he is currently waging, the economic effects of which have turned into his party’s biggest political liability.
Only one message in this series of posts was written by Trump himself. The rest are reposts of messages written by apparent supporters.
[Tom Nichols: Trump’s latest meltdown]
These posts feed Trump’s paranoia and desire to criminalize his opponents. But he leaves it to others to fill in the daffy specifics. Trump has communicated the broad idea that his political rivals are all crooks and traitors, and these social-media accounts fill in the picture for him with imagined treason investigations, computer servers, sums of cash, and fake quotes. Trump then consumes the fan fiction and attempts to turn it into concrete policy by ordering his compliant staff to produce legal charges matching the claims, periodically firing them when they fail to make reality conform to his fantasies.
Given the importance that he has always placed on locking up his enemies, it is striking that he is so willing to abdicate the details to random social-media followers. Trump has cultivated a cadre of professional authoritarian legal warriors eager to corrupt the legal process on his behalf, yet he is outsourcing the work of ginning up charges to random social-media users such as @Shelley2021, @YouWishUwere4US, and @Real_RobN.
Trump is using social media not as Big Brother or Stalin would have employed this technology, but the way a depressed teenager would: as a source of fantasies that provide him with validation, comfort, and escape from the frightening realities of the outside world. He appears to be a lonely man with few true friends, compulsively scrolling the night away, not so much a social-media influencer as a social-media influencee.
The post Big Brother Is ReTruthing You appeared first on The Atlantic.
