Notes on the nature of Trump's bullshit
You will believe what you are told to believe. You will know what we allow you to know. You will say what we allow you to say.
This weekend’s newsletter was supposed to be an overview of the unnoticed, underreported and misreported facts about the crashing and burning of America as a force for good in the world. But an historical event has occurred that requires immediate notice.
Let’s just get straight to Friday’s obscenities in Washington, D.C.
From the wall of noise emanating from Trump consigliere Elon Musk’s algorithmically manipulated megaphones on X, and from the more vulgar elements of the Republican Party’s congressional caucus and its auxiliaries in the Fox News commentary bloc, there came an especially clear and helpfully ungarbled signal on Friday.
The noise: Ukraine’s ungrateful Volodymyr Zelenskyy insulted America and he had his ears boxed and it served him right. That is what we are instructed to believe. You will disregard the evidence of your own damn eyes, broadcast live. And millions of Americans, and others, will do just as they’re told.
After being subjected to President Donald Trump’s ad nauseun ramblings for most of a surreal 40-minute reality-television production filled mostly by Trump presenting himself as a peacekeeper and a lover of children “aligned with the world,” Zelenskyy was allowed to get a word in edgewise to press home the point that Putin cannot be trusted to hold to the ceasefire Trump says he wants, so long as Ukraine is unprotected by the effective military “backstop” that Trump has refused to guarantee.
Zelenskyy has been here before. After Putin invaded Eastern Ukraine and annexed Crimea in 2014, Zelenskyy was strongarmed into a ceasefire agreement, five years later, during Trump’s first presidency. It was a concoction of Germany’s Angela Merkel and French president Emmanuel Macron. After Putin’s numerous violations of that agreement, Putin eventually launched his full-on invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
This is the line of reasoning that caused Trump and his vice-president JD Vance to blow their stacks, hectoring and browbeating and baiting Zelenskyy, and it went downhill from there. At one point Trump was shouting at Zelenskyy at the top of his lungs. While the whole world watched.
The root note of the ensuing chorus was sounded in Moscow. It came straight from Vladimir Putin’s own Foreign Ministry mouthpiece, Maria Zakharova: "How Trump and Vance held back from hitting that scumbag is a miracle of restraint.” And it came from lifelong Putin ally and former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev, now deputy head of Putin’s Security Council: “The insolent pig finally got a proper slapdown in the Oval Office.”
And while the leaders of world’s liberal democracies expressed shock and disgust, Moscow was well pleased. Only a few days earlier, Trump was ventrilorquizing Putin, calling Zelenskyy a “dictator” and declaring that it was really Ukraine that started Russia’s war of conquest, which began three years ago this past week.
Postnational Liberals, the Postmodern Left, the Post-truth Right
The mass imbecility required for millions of people to actually believe this sort of thing is a subject Canadians should be familiar with, owing to the “postnational” decade of Justin Trudeau’s national demoralization policies having just ended.
I’m referring to the flag-lowering, the knee-taking, the statue-toppling, the renaming of streets and schools and universities, the cancellation of Canada Day and its later substitution as a day of reflection on Canada as an Islamophobic, systemically racist white colonial settler state, the torching of churches from one end of the country to the other, and so on.
Not quite as dramatic as the MAGA insurrectionists that stormed the White House on January 6, 2021, roughly 1,000 of whom were release from prison a few weeks ago after Trump issued pardons or commuted their sentences. But you get the idea.
TruAnon is dead, but its cultish underpinnings persist in the slandering of lawyers and the public shaming of shadow-cabinet members who notice it when they’re told to accept falsehoods as facts, and so on.
And Trumpism is very much alive, here in Canada. It tends to be concentrated among chronically online millstones around the necks of Pierre Poilievre’s Conservative Party.
What the hell did you think The Real Story was about?
Some of this newsletter’s subscribers seem to think I’ve lately taken quite a turn in my way of seeing things. I haven’t. What I’m on about in the matter of Trumpism involves the same deep epistemic crisis - the collapse of consensus about how to go about the work of determining what’s true and what isn’t - that has engulfed much of the Anglosphere in recent years.
That crisis is directly related to the increasing tendency across journalism, academia and government policy to conflate knowledge with belief. It’s fatal to the functioning of liberal democracy. That’s the socipathology that was the primary concern of the Real Story newletter when I launched it, right around the time columns of Russian tanks were rumbling towards Kiev three years ago.
It’s obvious that I am disgusted with Trump’s cowardly abandonment of Ukraine. I have been as harsh a critic of Joe Biden’s disingenuous approach to supporting Ukraine as anyone, right from the beginning, but that’s not what this is about. My point is this, or at least you can think of it this way: Trumpism is an American iteration of the TruAnon phenomenon that has taken up so much of my damn time in recent years. It’s functionally indistinguishable.
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist,” Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.”
In Canada, God help you if you dissented from a belief in the “narrative” that allowed Justin Trudeau to incite a wave of hysteria without precedent in the history of religious bigotry in Canada. In conversation with my National Post colleagues John Ivison and Sabrina Maddeaux (here’s a video) I put it this way. If ‘narrative’ is all that matters, then at the end of the day the ‘narrative’ that will prevail will be the ‘narrative’ with the loudest voice, the deepest pockets, the shiniest boots and the sharpest knives.
Well, here we are. As I’ve noticed more than once, as in When White People Lose Their Minds: It’s not just that the facts don’t matter anymore. It’s that it doesn’t matter that the facts don’t matter anymore. And that’s the entire organizing principle of Trumpism and Putinism right there.
“Most liars care enough about the truth to try to conceal it,” writes Brock University’s Tim Keynon. “But simply not caring either way is a different vice.” Keynon calls it bullshitting. “Bullshit targeted at Audience A can be a big hit with Audience B, if B thinks A deserves it. Then it becomes a display of power over A, with B enjoying the spectacle. This overt bullshitting lends itself to authoritarian politics for someone cultivating a strongman image. It marks an opponent for disrespectful treatment, and advertises that the bullshitter cannot be held to account.”
That’s what happened on Friday in the Oval Office. A bullshit display of power over Zelenskyy, with the MAGA rabble enjoying the spectacle.
The work of sorting out facts from fiction and helping people arrive at an evidence-based consensus about what the truth is used to be the most important purpose of what people still call the mainstream media.
After years of tumult the legacy media lies bleeding on the ground, and it’s been largely replaced by a digital autocracy that is rapidly evolving through the use of Artificial Intelligence. It’s the thing people still call “social media”, and Trump consigliere Elon Musk now looms large over the entire “mainstream” ecosystem.
Trumpism, like TruAnon, is a belief system.
It’s a strangely religious phenomenon with its own catechism and its own prophets. The ritualized rhetorical gymnastics and circumlocutions required to ballustrade that propaganda is quite the study, as Tim Keynon’s work at Brock University shows.
Lying about Ukraine and Volodymyr Zelenskyy is a central motif of Trumpism and Putinism. This is partly because Zelenskyy is an archetypal hero, leading his country in a righteous people’s war against a vicious tyrannical terrorist regime, and Trump and Putin both know they can never be half the man Zelenskyy is. It’s also because Putin is determined to wipe Ukraine from the face of the earth.
Lying about Ukraine comes from the left and from the right. Take your pick, by all means. There’s no functional difference. Before I provide some examples of what I mean, a quick note.
Lately I’ve noticed that bedlamers from Musk’s X have been showing up here to use this newsletter’s comments section as a billboard to advertise their lunatic beliefs. I apologize to my regular subscribers. I appreciate criticism, corrections and dialogue. But I’ve decided that if I notice anyone lowering the tone I’ll delete their abusive contributions and ban them outright, and they can fight with Substack to get their subscriptions reimbursed.