
Drawing by Nathaniel St. Clair
Victims of avalanches or crashing waves have difficulty recognizing what’s up from down. In both situations, there is a momentary loss of gravitational pull as well as a loss of oxygen. Following the news these days is similar. Trump’s rush of executive orders leaves one breathless and desperate to find solid ground to stand on. His dramatic break from the normal is creating an existential crisis. “Either Trump and his MAGA followers are totally delusional or I’m losing touch with reality,” is a simple reaction to following what is coming out of Washington. While Trump continues to refer to “common sense” – he promised “the complete restoration of America and the revolution of common sense” – it may be common only to him and his MAGA followers.
Truth and veracity have been essential parts of our accepted world since the 18th century. The Age of Reason was based on the assumption that rationality and logic would improve humanity. But with Trump and MAGA, we are now close to Mark Twain’s famous quote; “Truth is mighty and will prevail. There is nothing wrong with this, except that it ain’t so.”
We have seen this tension between truth and reality in the recent political past. Journalist Ron Suskind wrote about the difference between faith-based and reality-based people in 2004 in The New York Times magazine in relating a conversation he had had with someone in the Bush administration; “The aide [to President George W. Bush, allegedly Karl Rove] said that guys like me were ‘in what we call the reality-based community,’ which he defined as people who ‘believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.’ I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ‘That’s not the way the world really works anymore,’ he continued. ‘We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.’”
We are again in a situation of differing realities, this time based on faith in Donald Trump. As a result, when Trump speaks, we in the reality-based community have become reliant on fact checkers to confirm our reality as opposed to his. But now even fact-checking is being called into question. When Mark Zuckerberg ended fact-checking at Meta, it was part of a rapidly diminishing space between fact and fiction. Zuckerberg justified his policy reversal this way; “After Trump first got elected in 2016, the legacy media wrote nonstop about how misinformation was a threat to democracy. We tried in good faith to address those concerns without becoming the arbiters of truth,” Zuckerberg explained. “But the fact checkers have just been too politically biased and have destroyed more trust than they’ve created, especially in the U.S.” End of Meta fact-checking. End of an important “truthful not neutral” media in Christiane Amanpour’s phrase.
When someone lies or breaks accepted rules, especially the president of the United States, there should be negative consequences. Courts of law are a democratic society’s way of judging if not telling the truth or breaking the law should be punished. The U.S. Attorney General described a Federal Court’s ruling about the January 6 events as follows; “Today, the Justice Department secured the conviction of four members of the Oath Keepers for their criminal conduct surrounding the January 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol,” Merrick Garland announced. “A jury found all four defendants guilty of seditious conspiracy, as well as conspiracies to obstruct the certification of the electoral college vote and to prevent members of Congress from discharging their duties.” According to Garland, the jury reached a fact-based decision.
Based on the convictions of almost 1,600 people in several courts, how are members of a reality-based community to understand the pardons/commutations for the January 6 rioters? How can one accept Trump’s version of what happened that day and his pardons/commutations with any sense of a factual, reality-based order?
Trump’s justification for the pardons/commutations is that the American people elected him fully aware that he would issue pardons and commutations when in office. “We’re going to go to the Oval Office, we’re going to release our great hostages that didn’t do — for the most part, they didn’t do stuff wrong,” he said, a strong echo of “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” The same message was recently repeated by Trump’s new press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, in her first press conference. When asked if she would pledge to tell the truth, she responded, “And I will say it’s very easy to speak truth from this podium when you have a president who has implemented policies that are wildly popular with the American people – and that is exactly what this administration is doing.”
There are two very different explanations of the January 6 events, the courts’ decisions and Trump’s pardons and commutations.
Judge James “Jeb” Boasberg, the DC District Court’s chief judge, said; “I am proud of the way this court handled this unprecedented and historic prosecution, that judges regardless of which president appointed them handled matters fairly and expeditiously,” he told CNN.
This is how the just released leader of the Oath Keepers, Stewart Rhodes, described the trials, pardons and commutations: “He’s [Trump’s] reversed an unfair trial. A court won’t do it, but President Trump can and will, and that’s how the Founders designed our system. It’s why he has the power of pardon and commutation…It’s a remedy to right wrongs.”
We are not dealing here with mere political differences. “fairly” and “unfair” are different versions of reality. In a euphoric moment similar to the one during George W. Bush’s presidency, Donald Trump and his followers are challenging Enlightenment principles, creating their own version of what is real and unreal, what is fair and unfair. In doing so, Trump and his MAGA believers are challenging the moral and ethical foundations of liberal democracy.
Reality-based people are living through a dizzying, spinning moment that exemplifies Mark Twain’s and Karl Rove’s cynicism about truth prevailing. But like skiers and surfers who have survived catastrophic experiences, we wait to come up for fresh air and see our feet once again standing on fact-based solid ground.