Executive Orders: All Part of the Trump Propaganda/Brand-Building Machine
I’ve been hoping to see an article like this latest in Politico, describing all the ways in which Trump’s executive orders sound like he’s doing a lot when in truth things are not so simple either practically or politically:
When news came out last night that Trump plans to potentially violate international treaties, I thought, “I don’t think he can just do that….” and yet the NYT article included no discussion of whether and how the contemplated orders could be operationalized. These executive orders are all terrible —for example, even if you completely oppose the TPP, the EO is terrible because there’s no indication whatsoever that Trump knows a goddamned thing about it or that he or his brand-new team have spent one second analyzing its provisions to determine whether it can/should be improved or renegotiated, or have any conception whatsoever of what withdrawal will do to American influence in the Asian-Pacific, or of the domestic economic implications of that decision.
But here’s the thing about these executive orders — while they are 100% substantive, they are not actually about substance. They are about narrative and the furthering of an alternative reality in which Trump has near-absolute power:
1. Trump is not writing these executive orders; all or most were dreamed up even before the transition by people like Steve Bannon. The New Yorker’s article from September gives a good flavor of this.
2. These EOs are drafted for the purpose of brand-building. They send a powerful message to supporters and resisters that he has the power to do whatever he wants, and he will do it; truth, facts, Constitution, laws, treaties, wisdom, efficacy can all be damned.
3. The strategy seems to be classic Bannon/Conway/Rove; construction of a false narrative; creation of “alternative reality.” Here, the only narrative Trump cares about, or will ever care about, is one of his own personal strength, dominance, invincibility, power — and the bragging rights that he thinks come with those. These EOs transporting supporters into glee and resisters into paroxysms of fear and rage both create and reinforce this narrative.
4. I think it’s essential to understand that while the EOs are exceptionally disturbing, and he will use them to further his agenda, we must get underneath the individual policies and look at the over-arching narrative, because it is part and parcel of his assault on democracy itself. What the Trump team is about is co-opting facts, lying about them, and then reinventing lies as truth — the ultimate propaganda machine. Successful propaganda begets more lies and more horrible policies, feeding the dominant narrative with the goal of building support among the true believers and breaking down the will to resist among the rest of us.
5. To get back to it: these EOs, rushed through without consideration or consultation (including with political allies and appointees), are designed to allow Trump and his collaborators to claim that he is keeping his campaign promises and to create a sense of steam-rolling momentum. They are further designed to create the illusion of near-absolute power in the presidency, to reinforce the “I alone can fix it” narrative, and to slake the American public’s unfortunate thirst for a savior. For his supporters, Trump is a savior and they don’t care if he “saves” them by turning this country into a kingdom or dictatorship, or even if he attains his power with the help of a hostile foreign government. The Constitution, of course, is expressly designed to prevent one-person government (I reject the term “rule”) and it apportions power across three branches of the federal government as well as across the 50 states.
Trump’s candidacy was built around the fundamental lie that all it takes to address our problems is a “strong” leader like him. That lie is itself built upon lies that Constitutional and other constraints do not exist or can be ignored, and that the world is not, in fact, full of inter-related and increasingly complex problems that are difficult to solve. And the public’s willingness to embrace an “I alone can fix it” mentality, which is anti-democratic, is itself built on the dystopian Trump fiction that we currently live in a festering hellhole — and the reason we are in this hellhole is that everyone but him (those people with experience and qualifications who think about things before they take action) is incompetent or a coward, lacking his businessman’s boldness. These executive orders and the speed with which they are coming are a political calculation designed to feed the false narrative of the Trump brand.
6. The EOs will be used by Trump and his Liars Cabal to further ever more lies. When he cannot accomplish what he wants because a court stops him, he will vilify the judges as liberal judicial activists and vow to remove them and to appoint even more rightwing idealogues — even when the judges ruling against him under the Constitution or other precedent are Bush or Reagan appointees. His supporters will believe this because we have seen this playbook before. It is the same playbook that was used by the right during the Obama Administration to challenge the Affordable Healthcare Act with laughable legal theories, so that when John Roberts, about as rightwing a conservative justice as you can get, had to follow the law and not make a mockery of it, conservative ideologues who know better nevertheless attacked the decision as a liberal travesty visited upon the country by “liberal” justices.
So, too, when bureaucrats or even Congress thwarts or questions Trump, he will attack them. When his “orders” cannot be carried out for whatever reason, he will still take the credit and get the credit with his supporters for pushing his agenda. Or when nothing changes, he and the Liars Cabal will lie and say that he caused the change, as we have already seen and will continue to see — such as when he falsely claims to have caused jobs to remain in the United States. And so, if the Affordable health Care Act is repealed, and ultimately “replaced” with something essentially identical or nearly identical, they will claim the ACA was a failure and the new law is a “success.” Or if it is replaced by something far worse, they will still claim theirs is better. Trump and the Liars Cabal lied about crime statistics throughout the election; when the numbers come in for 2017, Trump will falsely claim to have decreased crime even if crime has stayed the same or gone up, and his supporters will believe him.
Remember: he and the Liars Cabal have already questioned the federal government’s numbers under President Obama. Does anyone think that these agencies will be permitted to report accurate numbers under Trump? We already saw the National Park Service’s account shut down for accurately reporting Trump’s pathetic inaugural numbers. These EOs are part of an active strategy of propaganda and disinformation that’s never before been seen in this country, but Bannon takes his lessons from the Karl Rove of Trump’s own personal hero, Vladmir Putin, and he, Trump, and Conway know how the game is played. That the game is in the toolkit of authoritarians actively seeking to undermine democracy, and is antithetical to democracy itself, doesn’t bother them in the least.
7. This is all about “alternative reality” and “alternative facts.” But there’s only so long that people can be told 250,000 inaugural attendees is the largest ever, and that CIA employees cheered Trump’s words when they did not, and be willing to stand for it. Trump can issue an EO saying that starting tomorrow, the sun rises in the West, but that won’t make it magically so. And Kellyanne Conway repeating that lie with her tight smile as she threatens the press for calling it a falsehood won’t change reality either. Six days in, and the brazenness is gobsmacking.
8. There’s also only so long that more experienced elected Republicans will stand for this man’s lunacy and sweeping ignorance, and the sick — and I do mean sick — eagerness of his inner circle and concentric circles of wannabes to pretend otherwise. Look at this ABC News interview of Trump (and I recommend you read the whole transcript):
It’s hard not to reach the conclusion, if you have not already, that it borders on treason for anyone to do anything except their level best to impeach him as quickly as possible, though I lack the words to express just how utterly staggering his unfitness for office is. I have never seen such self-obsession in any context by any human being in my life — virtually every question David Muir asks is met with a wall of shatteringly narcissistic blather, the lies so absurd, the need for praise so transparent and pathetic, that it’s hard to believe that there is a person in the world who could not figure out how to manipulate him: he would have won the popular vote by if he had wanted to, his inauguration had the biggest audience in history and the photos of the crowds were manipulated (lies), his election win was “one of the greatest victories ever” (lie), everyone thought his speech to the CIA was great (lie) and everyone praised that speech (lie), his inaugural speech was “extraordinary” and everyone loved it (lie), the only reason Hillary Clinton won the popular vote was through undocumented immigrants voting illegally (lie), accurately reporting on the crowd size at the inauguration is intended to “demean” him and his supporters (lie).…Here’s one exemplary excerpt:
DAVID MUIR: Let me just ask you, you did win. You’re the president. You’re sitting …
PRESIDENT TRUMP: That’s true.
DAVID MUIR: … across from me right now.
PRESIDENT TRUMP: That’s true.
DAVID MUIR: Do you think that your words matter more now?
PRESIDENT TRUMP: Yes, very much.
DAVID MUIR: Do you think that that talking about millions of illegal votes is dangerous to this country without presenting the evidence?
PRESIDENT TRUMP: No, not at all.
(OVERTALK)
PRESIDENT TRUMP: Not at all because many people feel the same way that I do. And …
DAVID MUIR: You don’t think it undermines your credibility if there’s no evidence?
(OVERTALK)
PRESIDENT TRUMP: No, not at all because they didn’t come to me. Believe me. Those were Hillary votes. And if you look at it they all voted for Hillary. They all voted for Hillary. They didn’t vote for me. I don’t believe I got one. Okay, these are people that voted for Hillary Clinton. And if they didn’t vote, it would’ve been different in the popular.
Now, you have to understand I — I focused on those four or five states that I had to win. Maybe she didn’t. She should’ve gone to Michigan. She thought she had it in the bag. She should’ve gone to Wisconsin, she thought she had it because you’re talking about 38 years of, you know, Democrat wins. But they didn’t. I went to Michigan, I went to Wisconsin. I went to Pennsylvania all the time. I went to all of the states that are — Florida and North Carolina. That’s all I focused on.
DAVID MUIR: Mr. President, it does strike me though that we’re relitigating the presidential campaign, the election …
(OVERTALK)
PRESIDENT TRUMP: No, no. We’re looking at it for the next time. No, no, you have to understand, I had a tremendous victory, one of the great victories ever. In terms of counties I think the most ever or just about the most ever. When you look at a map it’s all red. Red meaning us, Republicans.
This is a man utterly obsessed with himself, unable to speak in sentences beyond a 9 year-old’s, with no grasp whatsoever of the magnitude of the office, and no concern at all with the effect of his words on millions, or even billions, regardless of their damage.
This is a man who seeks to undermine the election that he won, flat-out fabricating that his popular vote loss was due to fraud, and justifying the lie because “people believe it.” Let’s unpack this for one second: he will repeat a lie, knowing it’s a lie, essentially admitting it’s falsehood, and do so because his supporters already believe the lie, because furthering the lie — despite the patent injury this lie does to the public faith in the integrity of our elections, and of course to truth itself — is salve to his wounded ego. We have seen this many times before, particularly in the context of his racist birther lie against President Obama. He revived the birther conspiracy in 2011 on similar grounds, purporting to justify his own lies on the ground that people already believed it, and so it warranted “investigation” — all in service of Trump’s brand and ego. This is a man who has never put his country before himself and who appears to be incapable of doing so.
Then there is his insistence that we “should have taken the oil” from Iraq. The stupidity of this statement — both its practical impossibility and the fact that doing so is a war crime — has been widely reported and Trump knows that. He dismisses this criticism as the words of “fools.” He insists that “our country is falling apart” — and while that may have seemed to be true in 2009 when President Obama took office in the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression and when we were still mired in Iraq and Afghanistan, it most certainly is not true now.
The executive orders spilling out of the White House must be assessed in the context of what we saw during the election and the transition, and what is confirmed yet again by his ever-embarrassing Twitter feed and this latest interview: any appearance of “not winning” drives him insane. (He is Joffrey from Game of Thrones, except less emotionally developed.) Everything is about appearances; all is in service to the fiction that he is in charge and competent and should be admired. Criticism and resistance are unacceptable to him because they are inconsistent with dominance and the admiration he craves and believes he deserves.
Just he as invented lies about the state of the country to justify voting for him, he will continue to use lies to justify everything he does, and to claim improvements he did not make.
He rejects virtually all expertise (with the merciful exception of General Matthis, one of his few decent appointments). He cannot bear public criticism. He life is built on lying about himself, fostering the illusion among the credulous that he is a success; and he will co-opt the entirety of the federal government into the lying process for one purpose only: the continued building of his personal brand. Never mind that the entirety of it is a fraud, like Trump University and the hundreds of contracts he knowingly breached; he’ll lie until the day he dies that up is down to promote himself, and lash out at anyone and everyone who dares call out the would-be emperor for his nakedness.
The Liars Cabal knows this. They repeat and amplify his lies, look reporters in the face when they say them, and threaten to cut off access when challenged. “Alternative facts.”
But the Politico article posted above, and others reporting on the leaks already coming out of White House (not to mention @Whitehouseleaks on Twitter (if it’s real) and the @altnational parks and other accounts) and elsewhere show that as he purports to build momentum, the momentum against him is also building just as rapidly, and it will continue to build.
9. The print media is really starting to step up and I hope that we will see more articles that challenge the false narrative that Trump has “done” X or Y, and recognizing the propaganda machine for what it is. That machine is fronted by Trump but it is devised and manned by Bannon, Kushner, Pence, Gingrich, and others. There is a difference between the attacks on the Constitution and democratic norms through which these viciously rightwing policies are being pushed, and the vicious rightwing policies themselves. They constitute different, albeit overlapping, threats, to this country and to the world. A rightwing politician has a right to push for and attempt to achieve his rightwing agenda, however hateful to the rest of us. (Just as we have the right to resist it.) But it must be done democratically. The Liars Cabal and other collaborators — including the Republican senators — have been willing to jettison basic norms of governance, democracy, and decency to achieve their rightwing goals. Trump will jettison and anything and anyone to feed his narcissism; it is the only god he knows or is capable of worshipping, and only interest to which he gives fealty. Everything he does is in service to this, even his crude and simplistic policy notions. The lying propaganda machine is essential to the Trump branding apparatus because the man is a know-nothing, a fraud, and a disaster. The lying propaganda machine is necessary to the illusion of success, the suppression of dissent, and the preservation of power.
10. We need to keep the pressure on him because he cannot take it. The greater the pressure, the more likely it becomes that he crosses a line that the Republicans who control Congress who are willing to keep him in power cannot ignore, so that even they will not accept his dangerous prescriptions (e.g., defunding NATO, torture) or to go along with the preposterous drivel spewing from the mouths of the Liars Cabal to try to justify them. And some of these EOs seem like they will push these Republicans toward that line. Many of us believed Trump crossed that line early in his campaign and then repeatedly thereafter, as he continued to move the line further and further into the territory of degradation, cruelty, and grotesqueness, but since then we have seen, and we know, that this man’s need for dominance and adulation is bottomless and incapable of satisfaction because he is deeply mentally ill. And every person in the White House or Congress or in any part of government who has covered for him and who continues to do is morally and ethically culpable — because they know it too.
11. We also need to keep up the pressure because even though we will experience many disheartening and even deadly setbacks, without pressure we will experience only setbacks. We also need to realize that Trump doesn’t remotely act alone; he’s nothing without the Liars Cabal and the GOP apparatus. (Never forget that the principal way the GOP has maintained power is through through voter suppression and gerrymandering.) I am aware that the GOP establishment rejected him and only fell in line when they felt they had to, so perhaps you disagree; but our Constitution is not set up to allow a dictator and he cannot enact legislation without Congress. This Republican-controlled Congress is rushing to confirm his mostly horrendous nominees and to push through vicious anti-female, anti-immigrant, and anti-regulatory legislation, among other things, and the culprit is not only Trump. This Republican-controlled Congress is for now looking the other way at his abrogation of the Constitution and democratic and governing norms because it serves their interests, and when we fall into the trap of simply blaming Trump, we fall into the bigger traps of believing that he has power he does not actually have, and of letting the GOP off the hook.
And so keeping up the pressure on these elected officials — some of whom are refusing to hear from their constituents or hold town halls, or are meeting petitions with security guards — is critical.
Remember too: the women’s marches drove him crazy. Never mind that the Liars Cabal and other Republicans in advance of those marches came up with the false narrative that the marches were about “sour grapes” and whining liberals, in a predictable and deliberate attempt to subvert the reality that these were the largest protests in U.S. history and were joined by millions of men and women around the world, because we know we are in a fight for our rights, our lives, our country, and our planet. Indeed, the speed with which the new Administration — supported by U.S. senators like Chris McDaniel, who wants to defund birth control and abortion — has used its EOs to telegraph its open hostility to the well-being of women, immigrants, refugees, people of color, and the environment, not to mention Trump’s absolute refusal to divest his conflicts of interest or release his tax returns, is a ratification of the need for those marches. His actions are a ratification of the need, and a call to arms for, our continued, sustained, and increased resistance. He will get to the point of no return sooner or later; it’s imperative that we make it come sooner. Keep marching, keep writing, keep speaking, keep criticizing — and keep your eyes open. #resist
