In his planned colonization of the Washington, D.C. 4th of July celebrations, President Trump has inadvertently recharged a welter of questions about this dark age and his role in it. Is he a dictator in waiting, or simply a draft-dodging pudding-for-brains who likes big tanks because they remind him of a long-lost toy truck, a la Kane’s Rosebud? Is he merely ridiculous, or a mortal threat to the republic? Is he self-defeating, or growing his power with every norm he knocks over? Is he a solitary threat, or inseparable from a complicit and equally illiberal GOP? Is the key to defeating him ignoring him, or engaging with every last provocation? Will public opinion ever reach a decisive turning point against him, or are we stuck in a Western Front-style stalemate in which every new fact and circumstance reinforces pre-existing convictions all around?
Until the past few days, this last pair of questions had been my framework for viewing Trump’s decision to stake a beachhead at the Lincoln Memorial from which to convert the nation’s birthday into a campaign rally. This felt so obviously self-serving, such an obvious distortion of the holiday, that it didn’t seem so much different from Trump dressing up as Santa Claus come Christmas and inviting Christians everywhere to worship him as the second coming of you-know-who. You’d either see it for the travesty it is, or you wouldn’t.
In this, I was clearly also falling on one side of another of the set of questions I started with, opting to ignore rather than engage this specific violation. I don’t live in D.C.; I want to enjoy my holiday on my own terms; I don’t want to think about Trump on the 4th. But a piece yesterday at the Plum Line blog, which I’ve been praising to the skies lately, has helped bring me fresh perspective, not only on why we should pay attention to the 4th of July shenanigans, but on how we need to talk about Trump if we want to stop him.
Plum Line writer Greg Sargent begins by describing how the president’s actions match those studied and documented by scholars of authoritarianism. This early paragraph contains the mini-thesis of the piece:
The historians tell us that this is what authoritarian nationalists do. As Harvard’s Jill Lepore puts it, they replace history with tried-and-true fictions — false tales of national decline at the hands of invented threats, melded to fictitious stories of renewed national greatness, engineered by the leader himself, who is both author of the fiction and its mythic hero.
Sargent goes on to describe how Trump’s application of this authoritarian principle has led him to try to make images of resurgent military might his own, as a token of how he’s delivered on his promise to make America great again; in doing so, he seeks to cover himself with borrowed glory while turning a unifying public celebration into a divisive personal rally that seeks to meld leader and state.
It is a fascinating and I think accurate read, but I want to share the larger revelation that it gave me: that time and again, the outrageous actions that Trump and the GOP take are not only reported and discussed without adequate context by the news media, but also by the president’s opponents. That is, the truly overwhelming number of assaults on American democracy are too often viewed in piecemeal fashion. In the first place, the president’s critics fail to connect them to each other. In the second, though, his offenses are simply not often enough discussed in the context of the authoritarian impulse that is their common thread.
Now, I realize how this might seem to contradict the reality of much coverage of Trump. It’s not just Sargent who gets it, after all — a LOT of people have been ringing the alarm about the anti-democratic GOP and Trump’s disregard for the constitutional order. But what I’m realizing with this Independence Day grotesquerie is that the need for context isn’t just important — it’s essential, because of the very nature of authoritarianism, which seeks to impress a sense of its own power on every aspect of society and every member of it, and whose advance is conducted by a multi-pronged strategy that overwhelms a democratic society, in part by preventing that society from comprehending the totality of the attack.
Rather than being a silly distraction from worse offenses, it now strikes me that Trump’s 4th of July plans are both an escalation and a desperate warning of how dangerous this moment is, and how important it is to respond in rhetorical force to his attacks on genuinely unifying traditions and our shared history. By providing essential context for how Trump is acting like other authoritarian nationalist leaders in the past (and in the present, too), Sargent is able to make us all reconsider the true and scary import of what the president is attempting to carry off. Talking about how Trump’s actions fit into familiar patterns of authoritarianism raises awareness of behaviors and ideas that in isolation seem merely worrisome, but collectively present a clear and present danger to the republic.
But the specifics of the authoritarian self-mythologizing that Sargent describes also suggest a pair of complementary reason for why this context is essential. As the authoritarian leader tries to tell a false story about himself and his role as the savior of the country, this totalizing effort to retell history and rebrand the present require a strong countering effort to remember our actual history and what constitutes true patriotism. The authoritarian has the advantage of pressing a unified story that flatters him and his followers; meanwhile, those who oppose him will inevitably possess competing and often contradictory notions of the country’s past and present, which is rightly the nature of a democracy. Rather than mirror the authoritarian in like fashion, the better option is to call out his lies and insist on the complex reality of our democracy, which of course involves not just warts and horrors, but a real-world magnificence, not least that it is a project in which all of us — not just the president and his adherents — can have a voice.
But something else came to mind as I wondered about my own initial resistance to paying closer attention to the president’s 4th of July plans. This is pretty speculative, but I’m wondering if part of my reluctance was due to an unconscious recognition of the power of what Trump was attempting to pull off; that some part of me knew that if I paid attention to his spectacle, I might actually be. . . impressed. This made me think of an extreme example: even if you hated Trump, there would be something awe-inspiring and intimidating if he were to marshall, say, a thousand tanks to the nation’s capital and draw all our attention to the unprecedented display he had created. Obviously, Trump is only putting on a fraction of such a scene, but aiming to overwhelm is the intent. As Sargent puts it, “what it all amounts to is larger than the sum of its parts. The naked audacity of the usurpation is itself the point.”
But I would add that this event “larger than the sum of its parts” is larger, partially, because the effect it achieves goes beyond rational thought. We are meant to be wowed, intimidated, overcome. This isn’t a merely incidental authoritarian tactic; it is key for anyone wishing to subvert the mutual respect and equality that are democracy’s ideal. Trump is not trying to provoke awe at how great our country is: he is attempting to identify himself with our country, through an identification with its military might, literally at the expense of every other American for whom the 4th is intended to be a celebration.
This is only more reason that explicitly identifying the president’s authoritarian project is so important — to combat its unconscious power and appeal to many people. This unconscious power is akin to, but not the same as, the general idea of normalization that has been much discussed in the Trump years: generally speaking, the way that outrageous behavior comes to seem acceptable or normal through repetition and because it is being carried out by the most powerful elected official in the country. There is a reason that someone like Trump deploys spectacle and seeks to identify himself with the state: because these symbolic moves affect people’s perceptions in ways that bypass rational thought. You might hate him; but the authoritarian makes you feel relatively powerless to do anything to change things. He has agency; you do not.
This unconscious angle got me thinking about the role of mockery in undercutting the pretensions of Donald Trump and other would-be authoritarians. We can defend ourselves by making ourselves more aware of what’s going on — in this case, picking apart what the 4th of July spectacle is intended to do can help drain it of its overwhelming power. But when it still happens, we have only partially protected ourselves; the “naked audacity of the usurpation,” as Sargent puts it, is inevitably a blow against the body politic. Here is where I think there is an incredibly powerful role for satire — but satire that doesn’t start simply with the premise that the president is a pathetic powerless man, but rather that acknowledges the real danger he presents as part of the reason for tearing him down. In other words, we make fun as a way of taking seriously, as opposed to making fun because we don’t take him seriously.