A recent New York Times piece recounts President Trump’s insistence that televisions on Air Force One be uniformly tuned to Fox News. He made this requirement known after apparently throwing a fit when discovering that Melania Trump’s TV was showing CNN. Perhaps most disconcerting about this episode is the suggestion that Donald Trump, rather than just employing the term “fake news” to discredit legitimate coverage of him and his administration, may actually himself believe that only Fox reports the truth. To attempt to deceive the American people about the nature of a free press in service of an authoritarian agenda is chilling enough; the possibility that he believes his own propaganda is a whole other layer of crazy piled atop the proto-fascist mindset. I would expect even the most cold-blooded propagandist to keep one eye on what actual reporters are reporting and what the truth actually is, if for nothing else than to effectively craft a twisted and tendentious response to the facts.
Intriguingly, Andrew Sullivan argues that in Trump’s taped 2016 conversation between him and Michael Cohen that was leaked last week, we heard a Trump who behind closed doors is far different from the one we see on TV and reflected in his tweets. Sullivan remarks on how in control and in his element Trump sounded, “a world-weary operator in sleaze and outright deception, dealing with an item of everyday business.” This is hardly the only time people have pointed out the distance between the buffoonish version of Trump easily inferred from his media appearances and the actual man.
But in light of the Times report about his CNN-Air Force One air rage incident, I wonder if I’ve too readily discounted the argument that Donald Trump is as out of control as so much of his public persona would suggest. Has the man changed since the tape was made in 2016? A possibility arises: that the pressure of the presidency, and particularly, the pressure of facing the consequences of his likely collusion with the Russian government, is beginning to drive the man a little batty. After all, keeping all the lies straight must in itself be a full-time job, right?
In the Sullivan piece noted above, he frames Trump’s frantic behavior through a parallel or possibly alternative explanation: Trump is essentially a con man, and is stuck in the unenviable position of keeping his con going long past the point of good sense, at a level higher than he’s played at before: the presidential stage. Apart from a measurably increased rate of lying, Trump also recently made his most far-reaching statement about “fake news” to date, telling supporters that “Just remember, what you are seeing and what you are reading is not what’s happening [. . .] Just stick with us, don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news.” Sullivan is a great fan of George Orwell, but he interprets Trump’s statement as less reflective of a totalitarian mindset and more the evidence of a “con man getting a little rattled, as his trade war is beginning to wreak havoc in the Midwest.”
Of course, even someone who might fundamentally just be a con man out to grift the American people can still do immense damage when he’s found that the best way to make a killing is to rally his base via an authoritarian nationalism. The situation is compounded a hundred-fold when we remind ourselves that the problem is not simply Trump, but a GOP that has decided to embrace him more or less wholesale, and which has already long embraced anti-democratic approaches to governance, from gerrymandering to voter suppression to covering up the Russian attack on the 2016 election. But any insight into Trump’s mindset is important, because it can be used to fashion an appropriate response to him. And if we are beginning to understand that the president has embarked on a multi-layered scam — encompassing collusion with the Russians, an effort to shower the 1% with more riches than ever, and of course an overarching effort to aggrandize his own family’s wealth — then it is useful to understand the problems that any con man begins to encounter when he’s forced to run his scam past its expiration date.
As chilling as I found Trump’s exhortation to essentially ignore reality and only believe him, making the case that his reasoning is indistinguishable from that of a grifter may be a way to start breaking his rapport with his base supporters, and to encourage less determined supporters to take a more critical perspective. Sullivan notes the tug of war between the grifter’s con and reality; when Donald Trump begins to ask his backers to ignore a reality that includes the very reasons they supported him to begin with, a crack in the foundations of his support begins to appear, even if it’s not immediately obvious. The president can ask them to ignore everything but his own words all he wants, but he has no way to ask them to block out their daily experiences of the world. No con is that good. One day, you wake up, and can’t ignore that fact that despite the president’s words, your pay still hasn’t gone up, and your health insurance still hasn’t come back.