In recognition of the tremendous impact that Greta Thunberg has had on accelerating a necessary global uprising to take on climate change — in her case, by directly inspiring climate action by millions of youth, not to mention millions of others of slightly older generations — Time magazine has named her its Person of the Year for 2019. Despite knowing better, I did not brace myself for President Trump’s inevitable tweet in response, and so felt unfiltered a surge of hatred towards him that is a great part of the tweet’s purpose.
Because this particular tweet is so vile — insulting a child with the power of the presidential megaphone, with all the grotesque power disparity and smashing of basic human decency that conveys — and so clearly designed to provoke a backlash, it can provide a lesson in how Trumpism works, and how we can work to destroy him and the authoritarian GOP movement he heads up. First, the sense of outrage that I and millions of people are feeling is the flip side to the tweet’s other main emotional purpose, which is to provoke from his base feelings of hatred toward Thunberg and feelings of solidarity and approval toward the president. The overall point and effect is to break the country into two irreconcilable camps: those the president considers to be his enemies, and those who are loyal and sympathetic to the president. This is the great dynamic of this presidency, and of his authoritarian impulses: to split the country into aggrieved, loyal supporters and everyone else, in the hope that his enraged base will be enough to secure his power, all the while distracting everyone from a more direct consideration of the actual issues before us and disseminating falsehoods that make actual debate difficult if not impossible. This is his one big play. It’s all he’s got: divide, distract, and dissemble.
From this perspective, we would do well to take a step back and stay in touch with a basic truth: this is a strategy rooted in the president’s weakness, not strength. He has no faith in being able to persuade, only manipulate and lie; and he lacks the support of a majority in this country. This is not to say his strategy cannot be frighteningly effective; to fight back effectively, we need to recognize its basic precariousness and origins in weakness. In this particular case, his weakness is highlighted by the fact that he has brought to bear the power of the presidency against a 16-year-old girl, which reveals that the weakness is not simply one of power but of basic morality.
It is always important to be conscious of these dynamics behind Trump’s tweets and other like pronouncements, in order to decline his invitation to tear our country in two, avoid being consumed by hate, keep our eye on the substantive issues of our time, and always remember the fundamental weakness that makes this absurd figure eminently beatable in 2020.
But seeing through the manipulation and inevitable outrage also allows us to understand that this is no ordinary tweet, but represents what can only be described as a clash of realities that Donald Trump is, perversely enough, right to be scared of. Whether he fully realizes it or not, Thunberg, and the mass mobilization on climate action she is helping to catalyze, is exactly the sort of grassroots, radical movement that Trump should fear, because these movements will scour plutocrats and autocrats like Trump out of power and into the proverbial dustbin of history. The fight against climate chaos is quickly emerging as the dominant struggle of our time, bound up with the global crisis of economic inequality, and it has the virtue of being both irreducibly real and undeniably an existential threat to human life as we know it.
In a terrific and terrifying column out this week, Paul Krugman writes of how climate denialism “was in many ways the crucible of Trumpism [. . .] Long before Republicans began attributing every negative development to the machinations of the ‘deep state,’ they were insisting that global warming was a gigantic hoax perpetrated by a vast global cabal of corrupt scientists.” Ironically but fittingly for Trump and the GOP, climate chaos is now a major reason why both will be pummeled into political oblivion, as their lies can no longer stand up to the horrifying evidence of climate disruption around the world. Substantial numbers of GOP voters, particularly among the young, now view climate change as real and as a threat. The crisis that the GOP helped bring to fruition is a wedge that can crack apart Trump’s base.
In other words, Trump’s tweet is a trifle in the face of the forces that Thunberg is helping to unleash. In fact, we can see that in fact Trump’s tweet is a weapon to be added to our collective arsenal. Whether the cruelty and stupidity of it can persuade 10 voters or 10,000 to vote against the president is entirely up to how boldly we, collectively, are able to wield it.