Donald Trump and Gaslight Fascism

By David Corn  September 7, 2022

Donald Trump at a rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, on September 3, 2022. Mary Altaffer/AP

Last issue, I wrote about the “snowflake fascism” of Republicans and conservatives. As I explained, Donald Trump and his cultists have long demonized liberals and Democrats, often calling them fascists (or subversives and enemies of America), but now they clutch pearls and express outrage when President Joe Biden warns that baselessly challenging and refusing to accept election results and inciting (or downplaying or dismissing) a violent insurrectionist attack that attempted to overthrow democracy should be seen as “semi-fascism.” This is obviously a disinformation tactic adopted by MAGA Republicans, and it is being deployed in tandem with another propaganda tool: gaslight fascism.

This is when authoritarians deny their own efforts to impose an authoritarian regime. The GOP has been engaged in gaslight fascism since the January 6 riot, refusing to fully acknowledge the assault for what it was: a rampage of domestic terrorists who had been directed by Trump toward the Capitol and who tried to obstruct the peaceful transfer of power. With Biden raising the stakes by calling out MAGA Republicans as a fascistic force, these gaslighting efforts appear to have intensified. Which makes sense: The raid on the Capitol and the GOP’s subsequent refusal to disavow the man who sparked this violence (and who this past week said he would consider “full pardons” for convicted January 6 rioters, should he again be elected to the White House) are key components of Biden’s compelling case for labeling the MAGA GOP a threat to the nation. To counter Biden and to claim that he (not Trump) is the divisive force in American politics—Trump called Biden an “enemy of the state” at a rally in Pennsylvania this weekend—MAGA-ites cannot admit the reality of January 6 and Trump’s various schemes and actions to sabotage the 2020 election.

I encountered this directly on Thursday night, after Biden delivered his speech at Independence Hall blasting MAGA Republicans, when I got into a Twitter dust-up with Ric Grenell, the combative and nasty (and apparently misogynistic) Trumpster who served as Trump’s acting director of national intelligence for three months in 2020, despite his lack of experience in the intelligence community. Grenell contended that criticism of Trump and the Republicans for January 6 and the 2020 Big Lie was nothing but a Democratic attempt to “crush dissent.” He insisted that Trump had done no wrong on January 6 and only had called for a peaceful protest. He asserted that the fact-based description of Trump’s misdeeds—Trump declaring victory with no basis for that claim, subsequently plotting secretly to overturn the election results, and then doing nothing when his mob attacked the Capitol—was “fake” history.

This was full-scale denialism—so extreme as to be absurd. But this is how fascists and authoritarians debate. There is no real truth; there is only the self-serving truth they can concoct and enforce. George Orwell knew this. In 1984, what is the apotheosis of the Party’s desire to create a false reality? “In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it,” Orwell wrote. “It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it.”

Trump fascists have been trying to do the same with the 2020 election: conjure an alternative reality untethered from confirmed facts and declare it to be the party’s truth. And in a two-plus-two-equals-five way, they transform a democracy-threatening authoritarian force into patriotic defenders of democracy. Grenell was casting the Big Lie brownshirts as heroic dissenters, not fascist thugs. More disturbing was that a pack of Grenell’s tweeps chimed in with assorted lies and distortions about the 2020 election and January 6. They were drowning in the Kool-Aid served by Trump, Grenell, and their co-conspirators.

This was not surprising coming from Grenell. Days after the 2020 election, he claimed that there had been widespread voter fraud in Nevada but refused to provide evidence to back up his assertion. (This allegation was judged a pants-on-fire lie by Politifact.) And now he was presenting a clear example of the MAGA playbook: insist Trump’s attack on democracy was no attack on democracy. With such a denial, it is far easier to blast Biden as a mean-spirited and divisive hater of MAGA. As former South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley did, complaining of Biden’s speech, “It's unthinkable that a president would speak about half of Americans that way.” You can only get away with this line if you ignore the fact that Trump has for years been accusing Democrats of seeking to destroy the United States. As I noted previously, during the 2020 campaign, Trump accused Biden of pushing “far-left fascism.” Did anyone get their knickers bunched over that? (By the way, Biden did not apply his warning to half of Americans. The number might be closer to a tenth of the population.)

The reality of Trump’s conniving to subvert the republic cannot be recognized by leading Republicans. Doing so would create a dilemma for them. They would then have to explicitly declare themselves in favor of or opposed to this Trumpian war on democracy. They realize an outright expression of support for autocracy would not be good for the GOP, yet a declaration of opposition to the Trumpist assault on the Constitution would alienate any Republican from the party’s cult-like base. (See Liz Cheney.) To survive within the GOP, they must deny. They must say black is white. War is peace. Authoritarianism is democracy. That is the only way the party can now exist. The logic of their position demands it.

Got anything to say about this item—or anything else? Email me at ourland@motherjones.com.

The Conservative Crazy Gets Crazier

For years, we’ve all been waiting to see if Trump crazy will bottom out. But the painful lesson is that there is no bottom. Not even January 6 slowed down insanity on the right. In fact, you could argue that horrific event led to more of it. Here are two examples of right-wing lunacy that caught my attention this past week. There are certainly many more. First, a Tulsa businessman and conspiracy theorist named Clay Clark hosted on his talk show Michael Flynn, Trump’s first national security advisers (who resigned when it was discovered he had lied about his contacts with the Russian ambassador). Clark raised the nutty conspiracy theory that the Covid vaccine contains pathogens that can be unleashed by a 5G signal and cause widespread epidemics of horrendous diseases and even turn humans into zombies. Yes, zombies. “It’s a terrifying time to be an America,” Clay said to Flynn. The former national security adviser who once ran the Defense Intelligence Agency confirmed Clay’s concern, noting there were some “great articles” about “this pathogen you just talked about” and “how it relates to 5G technology that is being input basically globally.”

Eh, WTF, former lieutenant general? Here is the fellow who once headed the military’s intelligence operation and who was the most senior adviser to the president on national security essentially backing up a Covid-vaccine-cell-tower-zombie-apocalypse conspiracy theory. Hard to beat that for batcrap idiocy.

But then there was David Horowitz, the onetime ‘60s leftist radical who flipped in the 1980s and became a Reaganite conservative. He runs several right-wing shops that spew out a never-ending flow of virulent emails that accuse the left of a myriad of nefarious plots designed to bring about the downfall of the United States. But a recent one zeroed in on a new target: Mike Pence. The solicitation, responding to the FBI raid of Trump’s lair at Mar-a-Lago, assailed the FBI and all “three letter” government agencies, claiming they are “partisan henchmen” and “don’t care about you or me or our Constitution.” Horowitz’s full wrath, though, was directed at the former vice president for having condemned the recent Republican attacks on the FBI. “These attacks on the FBI must stop,” Pence had said in a recent speech, adding that “calls to defund the FBI are just as wrong as calls to defund the police.” Noting these statements, Horowitz asked, “Is Mike Pence [the] Deep State”? That could explain for Trump cultists why Pence did not go along with Trump’s unconstitutional scheme to block the certification of the 2020 election. But this is more nonsense. Pence, an operative of the Deep State? Such BS might bring in bucks for Horowitz’s outfit. Yet it’s another sign of how far gone the right is. And good luck with that presidential campaign of yours, Mr. Pence.

American Psychosis: The First Review

As readers of this newsletter know, my new book, American Psychosis: A Historical Investigation of How the Republican Party Went Crazy, will be published next week, though you can preorder copies now. When I set out to write this book, which chronicles the seven-decade-long effort of the GOP to exploit and encourage extremism, I had no idea how relevant it would be. As a debate ensues over the hold that MAGA extremism has on the Republican Party and whether Trump has led the GOP toward fascism, American Psychosis vividly details the larger historical context for this conversation about far-right fanaticism and the Party of Lincoln. The history it presents is rich and often hard to believe, and the book shows that the question of the Republican Party’s reliance on extremism, conspiracism, bigotry, and tribalism is nothing new.

The first review of American Psychosis, published by Kirkus Reviews, makes this point. It notes:

The veteran political journalist connects the authoritarianism and White supremacism of yore with the Trumpism of today. At the 1964 Republican National Convention, liberal Republicans tried to introduce a resolution to condemn the extremism of the John Birch Society and Ku Klux Klan and were shouted down by supporters of Barry Goldwater, who said that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” Corn’s vivid narrative starts there, but it goes back much further, to the anti-immigrant Know-Nothingism of the 1850s, where the author locates the beginnings of a recurrent theme: Just as Abraham Lincoln could not disavow the nationalists because he needed their vote, Richard Nixon had to ally with racist Southerners, and George W. Bush had to pal around with Christian fundamentalists to win the 2000 primary against a more principled John McCain. In turn, McCain turned to Sarah Palin to placate far-right, tea party supporters, a group that morphed into the Trumpists of today. It’s a zigzag line indeed, but Corn makes important connections. “Nixon attained the presidency by exploiting the paramount divisive force in American society—racism—and the sense of fear and dread spreading through much of the nation,” he writes, and substituting Trump for Nixon makes that sentence scan without a hitch.

Much of the “psychosis” of recent years has hinged on a long pattern of lies. While the author makes clear that Trump is master of the form, he had plenty of predecessors, from Joseph McCarthy to Palin’s winking insinuations that Barack Obama was a Muslim, the latter yielding what Corn calls Palinism, “a combination of smear politics, conspiracism, and know-nothingism.” Since then, it’s only gotten worse. “Formed 168 years earlier to save the nation from the expansion of slavery,” writes the author, “the Republican Party, now infected with a political madness, [is] a threat to the republic.” [This is a] sobering look at the ideological destruction, born of cynicism and opportunism, of a once-principled party.”

That nails it.

Many Our Land readers took advantage of a special offer (which has expired) and preordered American Psychosis. If you haven’t yet, please check out the book. (Here’s an issue of Our Land that compiled several sneak peeks.) And to all those who have preordered, please recommend American Psychosis to others who would like to know the strange and disturbing history that has brought us—and the GOP—to the crisis of today. You can help spread the word by forwarding this email and talking up the book on social media, including by retweeting, liking, and sharing my posts on Twitter and Facebook. My deepest thanks to the Our Land community for helping to launch the book.

P.S. I will be at the Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, DC, on September 15 at 7:00 pm, to discuss American Psychosis. If you live in the area, please come by. 

The Watch, Read, and Listen List

The Sympathizer, Viet Thanh Nguyen. For years, Apocalypse Now has been one of my favorite movies. But I don’t think I can watch it again, now that I’ve read Viet Thanh Nguyen’s 2015 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Sympathizer, which HBO is reportedly adapting for a series (co-starring Robert Downey Jr.). In Nguyen’s highly textured novel, the unnamed narrator tells (that is, confesses) his story as a communist agent who served as a top aide to a South Vietnamese general.  At the end of the Vietnam war, he flees to the United States with the general, finds a clerical job at a college in Los Angeles while continuing to work for the general (who leads a rag-tag expatriate force aiming to recapture Vietnam from the Reds), and as part of that doomed-to-fail resistance returns to Vietnam, where things do not go well for him and his comrades.

The book is an impressive spy story that explores the inner conflicts of the narrator’s double life and captures the duality and challenges of the immigrant experience. What happens when a communist pretending to be a South Vietnamese loyalist starts to become Americanized in the land of Disney and bigotry? He is separated from his homeland and alienated from but still committed to revolution, while he continues to spy on the general. To keep his legend alive, he must do dreadful and despicable deeds for the general. It’s all rather complicated for him. Nguyen, a professor at the University of Southern California who was born in Vietnam and came to the United States in 1975 with his family as a refugee, masterfully conveys the dilemmas this spy confronts, as the double agent casts a caustic but sometime envious eye on American society.

After landing in the United States, the narrator stumbles into a job advising a famous film director who is shooting a movie in the Philippines about the Vietnam War. The model is obvious: Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now. Nguyen’s protagonist justifies the assignment for his handlers by telling them he will be able to influence the production so that the Vietnamese in the film are depicted more positively—that is, less negatively. It doesn’t work out that way, and he’s nearly killed in the climactic battle scene. Though the fictional movie is quite different than Coppola’s—it focuses on virtuous American soldiers combatting the vicious Viet Cong—the narrator’s concerns about the dehumanizing representation of the Vietnamese applies to a wide swath of American war movies. (In one scene, he informs the director that the Vietnamese in the film are not screaming the way a Vietnamese person would scream.) With just this chunk of the book, Nguyen opens eyes. A spy thriller, a (fictitious) memoir of immigration and assimilation—The Sympathizer deftly covers the terrain of identity and acceptance. I hope HBO and Downey do it justice.

Dark Winds. Bring together Game of Thrones author George R.R. Martin, actor/director Robert Redford, and Tony Hillerman, the writer of acclaimed detective novels that featured two Navajo police officer, and expectations ought to be high for the project that emerges. And Dark Winds, an AMC series executive produced by Martin and Redford and based on Hillerman’s novels, delivers. During the six-episode series, set in 1971, Joe Leaphorn, a Navajo cop working on the Navajo reservation that stretches across Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah, is on the hunt for the brutal murderers of two reservation residents, and he’s also trying to solve a daring helicopter-assisted heist of an armored truck in nearby Gallup. The two crimes may be connected, though the FBI agent pursuing the robbers doesn’t give a damn about the killings. He’s just after the money. Leaphorn, portrayed exquisitely by Zahn McClarnon (whose mother’s family was Lakota), offers a world-weary mix of street smarts, cynicism, and devotion to doing the right thing. He navigates both the world of FBI machinations and the tribal community shaped by ancient traditions, rituals, and superstitions, while he is still haunted and emotionally hindered by the death of his son in a drilling accident. (Was it really an accident?) Chasing after the bad guys, he’s joined by Jim Chee (Kiowa Gordon), a new deputy who grew up on the “rez” and who’s hiding a big secret. The series is a well-crafted crime story that incorporates indigenous politics and the history of the injustices visited upon Native Americans. (Leaphorn was raised in a forced-assimilation boarding school.) But it doesn’t preach; it shows.

The series took decades to make and required the combined star-power of Redford and Martin, who are both fans of Hillerman’s work, to get a green light from Hollywood. (Hillerman died in 2008.) The cast and writers for Dark Winds were Native Americans and the production obtained permission to shoot on Navajo lands in New Mexico. Though the producers tried to get it right, some Navajos have challenged the authenticity of the show and complained that the use of Diné, the Navajo language, is botched throughout the series. But Dark Winds shows far more respect for Native Americans than most popular culture fare. Moreover, Leaphorn is a fascinating character, a man who strives to enforce the law within a community that has been screwed by the law. McClarnon is riveting in the role. As he serves and protects, Leaphorn must confront micro- and macro-aggressions. His burdens are many—political, personal, and historical—but, as is true for all great TV cops, they don’t stop his pursuit of justice. 

Read Recent Issues of Our Land

September 2, 2022: Snowflake fascists and the GOP politics of rubber and glue; American Psychosis tease of the week; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Blake Masters); Michael Ondaatje’s The Cat’s Table and Sara Watkins’ “You and Me”; the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

August 26, 2022: In praise of preaching to the choir; American Psychosis tease of the week; J.D. Vance and the podcaster who said “feminists need rape”; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Mitch McConnell); comparing The Old Man, Westworld, and For All Mankind; the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more

August 19, 2022: Has Biden learned from Obama’s big #fail?; American Psychosis tease of the week; conflicted feelings about Liz Cheney; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Ted Cruz); Better Call Saul’s magnificent finale; MoxieCam™; and more.

August 5, 2022: The January 6 Rudy Giuliani mystery; American Psychosis tease of the week; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Alex Jones); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

July 29, 2002: We need to worry about Christian nationalism; American Psychosis tease of the week; Stranger Things jumps a ghoulish shark; Steve Earle honors his forebears; Joni Mitchell’s glorious return; MoxieCam™; and more.

July 23, 2022: Trump’s trap for the GOP; American Psychosis update and tease; Dumbass Comment of the Week (John Cornyn); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.  

July 19, 2022: Announcing the forthcoming release of American Psychosis; Breitbart gets something right; The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent and The Player (three decades later!); Simon Winchester’s The Map That Changed the World: William Smith and the Birth of Modern Geology; and more.

July 16, 2022: Does Steve Bannon buy his own BS?; Dumbass Comment of the Week (Catherine Glenn Foster, Lauren Boebert, and Dave Yost); the Mailbag; MoxieCam™; and more.

July 12, 2022: It’s about sex; Iran-contra flashback: the day reality died; a dangerous state Supreme Court decision; and more.

Got suggestions, comments, complaints, tips related to any of the above, or anything else? Email me at ourland@motherjones.com.