THE SURREALISM OF TRUMP'S WORLD

"Never apologize, never explain" - author unknown

A note to my readers: When I began writing these essays more than three years ago, my hope was to create a community of correspondence among readers with shared interests. To my great satisfaction, the number of substantive readers continues to steadily grow. Though sharing my thoughts is my primary purpose, and writing is a labor of love, some readers have availed themselves of the opportunity to financially support my work, for which I am very grateful. Your contribution will help offset some expenses in maintaining the site. But whatever your choice, I greatly cherish your continued interest. My heartfelt thanks.

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I begin a political essay with a recent personal experience.

A few weeks ago, during a stay at my partner's apartment in the Gramercy Park neighborhood in Manhattan, I innocently bent down for a book under her lamp table. The result was excruciating pain. I dislocated my artificial hip that had been inserted 13 years earlier.

The emergency medical technicians arrived and carefully proceeded to carry me down five flights of stairs in her building, whose elevator is no larger than two telephone booths. It was a long ride to Columbia Presbyterian Hospital and its huge, chaotic emergency room. Despite the raucous disorder of the place, I was met by three residents who awaited my arrival, were aware of my extensive medical history (the hospital is the site of my six orthopedic surgeries), and had a plan of action to recombine the components of my dislocated hip.

The procedure required my undergoing anesthesia, which I was told would be a combination of propofol and ketamine. I have been under anesthesia almost a dozen times, and it has been totally uneventful. Once the drug takes hold you are out, only to later awaken without thoughts, memories, or dreams.

Not this time. The ketamine induced an unexpected full-blown psychedelic experience that I found more frightening than fascinating.

The experience was both brightly vivid as well as sensate. I felt as if the coordinates of reality disappeared and the realm I was in was melting in on itself, engulfing me as if I were drowning in a giant blender. There was grotesque imagery. I recall a row of faces in the form of stick figures, stolid and austere. As reality folded in on itself, my ego was swept along with it and I experienced its diminishment. But I retained enough ego to be able to say to myself, with palpable fear, “This is really happening to me and there is no way I can get out of it. I am being swept away and have no traction.” It was an experience that landed me in a bizarre realm and I was utterly powerless to affect or escape it. So it was until the anesthesia wore off.

I conclude that my ketamine trip serves as a very apt metaphor for the surreal condition that Donald Trump and Trumpism have created. They are sweeping up and transforming reality in the real world. The fundamental pillars that have framed our reality and have ordered our lives have been uprooted and are being quickly destroyed, leaving chaos in the wake.

At the most basic level, Trump's relentless substitution of lies for truth is destroying the trust which is the mortar of society and enduring social relations. Without an appreciation for truth and a commitment to truthfulness, there can be no trust. And without trust, democracy is weakened, and society is held together by authority emanating from the top. In short, authoritarianism becomes hegemonic.

With Trump, the lesson learned by his followers is that the distinction between truth and falsity is of no consequence. With the Big Lie, Trump was on his way to creating a counter-world. In the Trump world, there is no place for expertise for authority that legitimately emerges from knowledge grounded in experience and guided by reason. The opinions of the uninformed are elevated in alleged stature, while the knowledge of those committed to the established traditions of research is debased. Out of this relativism, unmoored to truth and a broad- based commitment to it, the epistemology that has taken hold is based on such factors as charisma and loyalty to Donald Trump. The closer to Trump's predications one's pronouncements are, the “truer” they must be. Such is the standard. The door is opened to fantastic ideas and conspiracy theories flourish. Without a common standard of consensually agreed-upon facts and the authority of reason, the underpinnings of reality are dissolved. As the historian, Timothy Snyder, has written in his On Tyranny,“To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis upon which to do so.” Moreover, without the objective claims of reason to adjudicate disputes and differences, there is no amicable way to resolve them. We are immersed in a rudderless epistemic realm without moorings. We are left afloat in the realm of power struggles and ongoing strife. We are caught up in a surreal whirlwind, and society is left vulnerable to an authoritarian takeover.

Together with pervasive mendacity is an Orwellian transformation of language. Trump is at war with his enemies – liberals, Democrats, and those promoting values and world views he simply does not like. What he perceives as “wokeism” is a major target. Trump is a small and strange man who assumes as a matter of course that his personal peeves should become public policy. He is irked by wind turbines, the move to replace plastic straws, New York City bicycle lanes, and, more significantly, the rule of law and Constitutional strictures that limit his power. He doesn't recognize limits and he seeks to change, violate, or ignore what irks him in a manner that is binding on society at large. It is egoism inflated almost to infinity. He is also immensely uncomfortable with pluralism, reflected in changing American demographics and values, and with pluralism inherent in a liberal and progressive worldview. Trump seeks to restore an idealized version of society of the 1950s, a time characterized by authoritarian sensibilities reinforced by white male dominance, in which minorities knew their place and were effectively invisible. His is a type of monochromatic block universe coerced into shape from above. It is not the role of democratic governments to impose the values of leaders on society. That is the role of totalitarian governments.

Our sense of reality and culture are fashioned and framed by language. Trump's power-grabbing is vested in initiatives to purge language of what he perceives to be progressive values that threaten his archaic and illiberal worldview. It is censorship much beloved by despots. Hence, in accordance with Trump's values, government websites are being purged of such words and terms that seek to bend consciousness and reality. Trump is also attempting to influence school curricula. The New York Times has identified hundreds of these words and terms. Among them are “LGBT,” “transgender,” but also “women (!),” and “equality” (the Declaration of Independence?). Some of the exclusions are truly fantastical. According to a recent article in Newsweek,

“images of "Enola Gay," the aircraft that dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima in Japan are among those targeted by the U.S. Military in an initiative to eliminate content related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI).”

The military is set to remove thousands of photos and online posts in the DEI purge following an executive order issued by President Donald Trump.

The Pentagon's directive to remove DEI-related content has resulted in the flagging of more than 26,000 images across all military branches, though officials suggest the final count could exceed 100,000 as reviews continue.

The vast majority of the Pentagon purge targets women and minorities and it also removes a large number of posts that mention various commemorative months—such as those for Black and Hispanic people and women.

Images of historically significant military achievements or personnel, such as the Tuskegee Airmen and the first female Marine Corps infantry graduates, have been flagged for removal.”

The zeal with which this historical revisionism is undertaken is truly bizarre. It is also racist, though Trump would maintain that racism has found no place in American society or history. For a president who has proclaimed that he wishes to widen free speech, his commitment to rampant censorship is another Orwellian turn.

Generating fear and anxiety are other means by which to throw the public off balance and thus further distort our sense of reality. Fixed points that have rendered the American public relatively secure are being uprooted and destroyed. On the rationale of eliminating fraud, Trump and Musk are rapidly working to gut the federal government. Thousands of government workers have lost their jobs. Agencies have been diminished and crippled. Discomforted by higher education, he is cutting off funds to elite universities. Vital research is being curtailed. He is hollowing out the Department of Education as a prelude to totally dismantling it.

Cutting the government workforce has included massive layoffs within the Center for Disease Control, which is mandated to cope with the emergence and suppression of epidemics, and within the Food and Drug Administration which oversees food safety. We could feel readily secure and virtually take for granted that the food and medications we use have been safe. But this can no longer be assumed. The fundamental health of the American public is being jeopardized.

Then there are the major social service agencies that have been vital to the health and financial survival of large swaths of the American public. Medicaid, which provides health services for 65 million Americans of limited financial means, and especially Medicare, which guarantees health care for 80 million seniors, and Social Security, which enables financial viability for 70 million seniors and people with disabilities, are now in severe jeopardy. Seven thousand staff members have been eliminated from Social Security, regional offices have been closed, and phone service greatly curtailed, making access to services very difficult. These programs were thought to be political lightning rods and untouchable. But no longer.

The collective pain and suffering that will occur if these venerable programs are dismantled is incalculable. At the moment, Trump has proclaimed that programs will be cut and then has rescinded his initiatives partially and in full. He has generated a broad-based climate of chaos, anxiety, and fear that reaches down to inform the psyche of virtually the entire population. One cannot know what will come next. It's my contention that sowing such havoc clouds thinking and keeps the populace off balance. It feeds into the creation of a rapidly changing, surrealistic environment, which again propels Trump's mission of keeping the nation increasingly in a position of submission in the face of the expansion of his power and control.

At the moment there is pushback that has engendered positive results. With the house on fire, the leaders of the Democratic Party need to be screaming from the rooftops. Resistance needs to be militant, extreme, and unrelenting. But we have yet to see it. On the grassroots level, protest needs to surge ahead in size and strength that is unprecedented. But it is hard to find the right levers and gain traction.

We live in a nightmare and we are losing our country. But broad-based resistance that will stop the destructive and sadistic designs of Donald Trump, his acolytes, and his minions is by no means inconceivable. I am not a hardcore Marxist, but I believe that foundationally material conditions frame and mold consciousness. That presumption has been thwarted in our times by the allure of cultural memes and ideologies, but I do believe they have the last word.

Once the destruction wrought by Trump's programs is felt by large sectors of the population, effective opposition will be forthcoming. Once farmers realize that the destruction of foreign aid is economically devastating, when automakers find that they can't sell their cars because Trump's tariffs have greatly depressed sales, and the population at-large experiences inflation that leaves them economically stressed, Trump will not be able to hold off the tide of resistance. Though we should not will it, news of Americans dying of disease in large numbers because of the anti-scientific and absurd policies of RFK Jr., or succumbing to poisoned food or ill-tested drugs, will begin to bring an end to the horrors we confront.

We must all resist to the limits of our abilities, through direct protest, by supporting local institutions, and by engaging in civil society-in the face of the wider danger. We need to maintain our private lives and keep our internet data away from the government. And we all need to deepen our commitment to fact and to truth, and to a reality-based world amid the swirl of irrationality and ignorance that surrounds us.

I quote again from Professor Timothy Snyder and his book On Tyranny:

“Fascists despised the small truths of daily existence, loved slogans that resonated like a new religion, and preferred creative myths to history and journalism. They used new media, which at the time was radio, to create the drumbeat of propaganda that aroused feelings before people had time to ascertain facts. And now, as then, many people confused faith in a hugely flawed leader with the truth about the world we all share.

Post-truth is pre-fascism”

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