Donald Trump and the clash of realities

As Donald Trump marches to the Republican nomination a third time, Americans are divided into two radically opposed camps.

On one side are Trump supporters who believe Democrats stole the 2020 election. On the other are Trump detractors — Democrats and homeless NeverTrumpers — who say that denying the legitimacy of the 2020 election amounts to a desire to overthrow democracy itself.

The country is not on the brink of a civil war, and deep partisan divisions are nothing new. But reality itself is contested today in a way that goes beyond anything in earlier US history. The split over the 2020 election is one intensely political manifestation of a wider rift.

Americans who believe that biological men can, in some metaphysical sense, be women inhabit a different world than those who don’t believe that sex or gender is fluid.

By the standards of either side, the other is ignorant, insane or cruel — or all three. And there can be no bystanders in this war of mental worlds because language itself is a conscript. Use any pronouns whatsoever, and you have committed yourself to a team.

Ron DeSantis and a number of other Republican governors have made opposition to transgenderism a signature of their politics. But Trump — and to all appearances most Trump voters, which is to say, most of the popular party — is moved more by belief in the stolen election. The shocking thing is just how little traction the transgender issue has even in the GOP. Sex is something Americans still prefer to think of as private, even when it could hardly be more aggressively publicized.

Yet the breakdown of shared reality is clear enough in sex and politics alike.

Donald Trump is well-adapted to this environment. He’s not a postmodernist so much as the ultimate expression of the power of positive thinking. (Indeed, Norman Vincent Peale was an early influence on Trump.) The best account I’ve heard of Trump’s view of reality is that it comes from the world of high-stakes real estate, where success means closing the deal — and any picture one paints that leads to that result is true enough in the only way that counts. There are risks to this approach even in real estate, of course — and in politics they are much greater. Or are they? Before the latest waves of unreality washed over the country, there was an earlier tsunami. While Trump was yet a television star — a “reality show” host, no less — and no one knew that men could bear babies, an unnamed Republican official rumored to be Karl Rove was quoted in the New York Times magazine saying, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality… we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out.”

Rove denies uttering such words, but he and the George W. Bush administration certainly lived according to their meaning. Undeclared weapons of mass destruction in Iraq? They didn’t exist, but they empowered Bush to start a war anyway.

Defenders of the last Republican president before Trump insist that he didn’t really lie the country into war, but that he was misinformed by the “intelligence community.” Yet the truth is that Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and their aides wanted a war and squeezed and strained “raw intelligence” until they came up with a scenario. Then they and their ideological allies sold a nightmare and a dream, both equally unreal: a nightmare of America losing a “war on terror” to a fanciful “Islamofascist” Axis of Evil, and a dream of being greeted with flowers by Middle Easterners grateful for being bombed, invaded and occupied.

The unrealities of the George W. Bush administration were not exactly a break with the collective hallucinations of the wider bipartisan foreign-policy consensus, however. The madness of the Bush wars had been incubated in both parties during the Bill Clinton years and earlier, through the work of think tanks, academics, journalists and office-holders. And while a one-term Democratic senator won the White House in 2008 based in part on his seemingly antiwar stance, in fact Barack Obama perpetuated most of the old illusions and added a new one: that drone warfare could be humanitarian and morally pure.

Trump is admirably free from the blood-stained ideals and illusions of the Clintons, Bushes, Obamas and Bidens. His false beliefs about the 2020 election have not killed tens or hundreds of thousands of people, as the false beliefs of Bush Republicans and the bipartisan foreign-policy elite have done. That’s no reason to accept Trump’s false beliefs, of course, but it’s an excellent reason to prefer having him in the White House.

Respectability itself, as philosophers and prophets have always warned, is too often a form of untruthfulness, one that allows nonsense and hubris to go unchecked. When a class of wealthy and politically powerful persons commits itself to noble-sounding but wrong beliefs, how can anyone expose its errors while remaining altogether respectable? Lucky is the Socrates who isn’t put to death instead, though by dying Socrates made his point as well as he ever did in life.

Donald Trump isn’t Socrates. But he is Nemesis, which is the comeuppance for hubris. Despite his own false beliefs, Trump is the only available remedy to the lies of an entire class. And in forcing that class to confront realities it prefers to ignore — and making the country recognize the gulf between respectability and performance — Trump does a service to all Americans, whatever mental world they inhabit.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s March 2024 World edition.