Friday, August 17,
2018
The Enigma of Orwellian Donald Trump: How
Does He Get Away with It so Easily?
By Dr. Rodrigue
Tremblay
(Author of the
books “The
Code for Global Ethics”, and “The
New American Empire”)
“Just stick with us, don’t believe the crap
you see from these people [journalists],
the fake news…Just remember, what you’re seeing and
what you’re reading is not what’s happening.”
Donald Trump (1946- ), American President, (in remarks made during a campaign rally
with Veterans of Foreign Wars, in
Kansas City, July 24, 2018)
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your
eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
George
Orwell (Eric Arthur
Blair) (1903-1950), English novelist, essayist, and social critic, (in ‘1984’,
Ch. 7, 1949)
“This is a White House where everybody lies.”
Omarosa Manigault Newman (1974- ), former White House aide to President
Donald Trump, (on Sunday August 12, 2018, while releasing tapes recording
conversations with Donald Trump.)
“I am a mortal enemy to arbitrary government and
unlimited power.” Benjamin
Franklin (1706-1790), American inventor
and US Founding Father, (in ‘Words
of the Founding Fathers’, 2012).
In
this day and age, with instant information, how does a politician succeed in
double-talking, in bragging, in scapegoating and in shamefully distorting the
truth, most of the time, without being unmasked as a charlatan and discredited?
Why? That is the mysterious and enigmatic question that one may ask about U. S.
President Donald Trump, as a politician.
The most obvious
answer is the fact that Trump’s one-issue and cult-like followers do not care
what he does or says and whether or not he has declared a war
on truth and reality, provided he delivers the political and financial
benefits they demand of him, based on their ideological or pecuniary interests.
These groups of voters live in their own reality and only their personal
interests count.
1- Four
groups of one-issue voters behind Trump
There are four
groups of one-issue voters
to whom President Donald Trump has delivered the goodies:
• Christian religious right voters, whose
main political issue is to fill the U. S. Supreme Court with ultra conservative
judges. On that score, Donald Trump has been true to them by naming one such
judge and in nominating a second one.
• Super rich Zionists and the Pro-Israel
Lobby, whose obsession is the state of Israel. Again, on that score,
President Donald Trump has fulfilled his promise to them and he has unilaterally
moved the U.S. embassy from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem, in addition to attacking the
Palestinians and tearing up the ‘Iran Deal’.
• The one-percent Income earners and some
corporate owners, whose main demand to Trump was substantial tax cuts and
deregulation. Once again, President Trump has fulfilled this group’s wishes
with huge tax cuts, mainly financed with future public debt increases, which
are going to be paid for by all taxpayers.
• The NRA and the Pro-Gun Lobby, whose
main obsession is to have the right to arm themselves to the teeth, including
with military assault weapons, with as few strings attached as possible. Here
again President Donald Trump has sided with them and against students who are
increasingly in the line of fire in American schools.
With the strong
support of these four monolithic lobbies—his electoral base—politician Donald Trump can count on the indefectible
support of between 35 percent and 40 percent of the American electorate. It is
ironic that some of Trump’s other policies, like reducing health care coverage
and the raising of import taxes, will hurt the poor and the middle class, even
though some of Trump’s victims can be considered members of the above lobbies.
Moreover, some of
Trump’s supporters regularly rely on hypocrisy and
on excuses to exonerate their favorite but flawed politician of choice. If any
other politician from a different party were to say and do half of what Donald
Trump does and says, they would be asking for his impeachment.
There are three
other reasons why Trump's rants, his record-breaking lies, his untruths, his deceptions and his dictatorial-style
attempts to control information, in the eyes of
his fanatical supporters, at least, are like water on the back of a duck. (— For
the record, according to the Washington Post, as of early
August, President Trump has made some 4,229 false claims, which amount to 7.6 a day, since
his inauguration.)
a- The first
reason can be found in Trump’s view that politics and even government business
are first and foremost another form of entertainment,
i.e. a sort of TV reality show, which must be scripted and acted upon. Trump
thinks that is OK
to lie and to ask his assistants to lie.
In this new immoral world, the Trump phenomenon could be seen a sign of post-democracy.
b- The second one
can be found in Trump’s artful and cunning tactics to unbalance and manipulate
the media to increase his visibility to the general public and to turn them into his own tools of
propaganda. When Trump attacks the media, he is in fact coaxing them to give
him free coverage to spread his insults,
his fake accusations, his provocations, his constant threats,
his denials or reversals, his convenient changes
of subject or his political spins. Indeed, with his outrageous
statements, his gratuitous accusations and his attacks ‘ad hominem’, and by constantly bullying and insulting adversaries
at home and foreign heads of states abroad, and by issuing threats in
repetition, right and left, Trump has forced the media to talk and journalists
to write about him constantly, on a daily basis, 24/7.
That suits him
perfectly well because he likes to be the center of attention. That is how he
can change the political rhetoric when any negative issue gets too close to
him. In the coming weeks and months, as the Special prosecutor Robert
Mueller’s report is likely to be released, Donald Trump is not above
resorting to some sort of “Wag
the Dog” political
trickery, to change the topic and to possibly push the damaging report off the
headlines.
In such a
circumstance, it is not impossible that launching an illegal war of choice, say
against Iran (a pet
project of Trump’s National
Security Advisor John Bolton), could then look very convenient to a
crafty politician like Donald Trump and to his warmonger advisors. Therefore, observers
should be on the lookout to spot any development of the sort in the coming
weeks.
That one man and
his entourage could whimsically consider launching a war of
aggression is a throwback to ancient times and is a sure indication of
the level of depravity to which current politics has fallen. This should be a
justified and clear case
for impeachment.
c- Finally, some
far-right media outlets, such as Fox
News and Sinclair
Broadcasting, have taken it upon themselves to systematically present
Trump’s lies and misrepresentations as some ‘alternative’ truths and facts.
Indeed, ever
since 1987, when the Reagan administration abolished the Fairness
Doctrine for licensing public radio and TV waves, and since a
Republican dominated Congress passed the
Telecommunications Act of 1996, which allowed
for the mass
conglomeration of local broadcasting in the
United States, extreme conservative news outlets, such as the Fox and
Sinclair networks, have sprung up. They are well financed, and they have
essentially become powerful political
propaganda machines, erasing the line between facts and fiction, and
regularly presenting fictitious alternative facts as the truth.
In so doing, they
have pushed public debates in the United States away from facts, reason and
logic, at least for those listeners and viewers for whom such outlets are the
only source of information. It is not surprising that such far-right media have
also made Donald Trump the champion of their cause, maliciously branding
anything inconvenient as ‘fake’ news, as Trump has done in his own anti-media campaign
and his sustained assault on the free press.
2- Show
Politics and public affairs as a form of entertainment
Donald Trump does
not seem to take politics and public affairs very seriously, at least when his
own personal interests are involved. Therefore, when things go bad, he never
volunteers to take personal responsibility, contrary to what a true leader
would do, and he conveniently shifts
the blame on somebody else. This is a sign of immaturity or cowardice. Paraphrasing
President Harry Truman, “the buck never stops at his desk.“
Donald Trump essentially
has the traits of a typical showman
diva, behaving in politics just as he did when he was the host of a TV
show. Indeed, if one considers politics and public affairs as no more than a
reality show, this means that they are really entertainment, and politicians
are first and foremost entertainers or comedians.
3-
Trump VS the media and the journalists
Donald Trump is
the first U.S. president who rarely holds scheduled press conferences. Why
would he, since he considers journalists to be his “enemies”! It doesn’t seem
to matter to him that freedom of the press is guaranteed in the U.S. Constitution
by the First Amendment. He prefers to rely on one-directional so-called ‘tweets’
to express unfiltered personal ideas and emotions (as if he were a private
person), and to use them as his main public relations channel of communication.
The ABC
News network
has calculated that, as of last July, Trump has tweeted more than 3,500 times,
slightly more than seven tweets a day. How could he have time left to do
anything productive! Coincidently, Donald Trump’s number of tweets is not far
away from the number of outright lies and misleading claims that he has told
and made since his inauguration. The
Washington Post
has counted no less than 3,251 lies or misleading claims of his, through the end of May
of this year, —an average of 6.5 such misstatements per day of his presidency. Fun
fact: Trump seems to accelerate the pace of his lies. Last year, he told 5.5
lies per day, on average. Is it possible to have a more cynical view of
politics!
The media in
general, (and not only American ones), then serve more or less voluntarily as
so many resonance boxes for his daily 'tweets', most of which are often devoid
of any thought and logic.
Such a practice
has the consequence of demeaning the public discourse in the pursuit of the
common good and the general welfare of the people to the level of a frivolous
private enterprise, where expertise, research and competence can easily be
replaced by improvisation, whimsical arbitrariness and charlatanry. In such a climate, only
the short run counts, at the expense of planning for the long run.
Conclusion
All this leads to this conclusion: Trump’s approach is not the way to
run an efficient government. Notwithstanding the U.S. Constitution and what it
says about the need to have “checks and
balances” among different government branches, President Donald Trump has de facto pushed aside the U.S. Congress
and the civil servants in important government Departments, even his own Cabinet,
whose formal meetings under Trump have been little more than photo-up
happenings, to grab the central political stage for himself. If such a
development does not represent an ominous threat to American democracy, what
does?
The centralization of power in the hands of one man is
bound to have serious political consequences, both for the current
administration and for future ones.
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Posted, Friday, August
17, 2018, at 8:30 am
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__________________________________________________________
© 2018, by Dr.
Rodrigue Tremblay, economist.