On September 30, in the middle of Tropical Storm Helene, which took the lives of 250 people in the American south with 206 still missing and which did US$38 billion dollars in damage, Donald Trump accused the Federal Emergency Management Agency of “going off their way to not help people in Republican areas” although the agency, known as FEMA, had provided US$32 million in aid for households in North Carolina, $87 million for Florida, US$57 million for South Carolina and US$632,000 for Tennessee, plus another US$31 million for households in Georgia, which went narrowly against him in 2022.
This is signature Donald Trump, whose single most salient attribute is that he appears to believe every lie that he tells, which could be the secret behind his ability to make millions of people believe them, too. Since long before he ran for public office, he has trashed virtually every public institution he has come in contact with, hence the danger to democracy itself. The destruction of confidence in public institutions is the destruction of a nation’s shared ethos.
He has attacked the Federal Bureau of Investigation, previously regarded – rightly or wrongly – as the preeminent law enforcement agency in the United States if not the world, calling the agency “political monsters.” He has called the courts a “joke” and a “laughingstock.” He has called black prosecutors “animals” and “rabid” and accused them of racism. He once said the Indiana-born Federal Judge Gonzalo Curiel, who ruled against Trump’s border wall, couldn’t be impartial because he was “Mexican.” His attacks on the independent press, one of the bulwarks of democracy, have been unrelenting. Just 12 percent of his followers trust the mainstream press. Far too many of his followers have responded with death threats to election workers, police, judges, journalists and now FEMA trying to save lives in the wake of the hurricanes that have struck the south.
Asia has to know that Trump’s elemental threat to American democracy is real. This matters to Asia, where to many governments America remains the indispensable nation. Seen from a vantage point 10,000 km away, where the Biden administration has had to spend four years putting back together the complicated diplomatic architecture that Trump and his two incompetent secretaries of state destroyed when he was in the White House the idea that Trump could return to office seems incomprehensible as he churns away at destroying the credibility of democratic institutions.
His slurs are not just attacks on individuals. They sow doubt in all democratic institutions. These lies have infected his followers. In 2023, among GOP voters, just 17 percent viewed the FBI positively with 56 percent viewing it negatively. Some 43 percent of respondents to a Politico poll believe Trump’s prosecution was brought to help President Joe Biden. 45 percent either somewhat or greatly distrust the Centers for Disease Control after his attacks during the Covid-19 pandemic. Only 22 percent of Republicans have high confidence that votes will be counted accurately in 2024, according to an Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll from last year despite the fact that his own allies’ investigations in Arizona, Georgia, Wisconsin, and Nevada have never found a single case of fraud other than by a handful of individuals, some of them Trump voters.
This is a never-ending cascade of disparagement, of knowing falsehoods that eventually, if they continue, will damage credibility in the public eye enough to cripple their ability to function, which appears to be what Trump wants. The lies have picked up steam as he has found himself threatened by Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign, growing darker by the day. He has been aided in this assault by his vice-presidential running mate JD Vance, who remarkably said after being caught in his own lies about legal Haitian emigres eating cats and dogs in Ohio, “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do.”
This is at one with a comment by an aide to former President George W. Bush who in 2004 told reporter Ronald Suskind that “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 know how that went. The world is still paying for George W Bush’s shock and awe in the Middle East.
“When you place lies and facts on an even footing, it basically creates a political sphere in which there is no fact-based reality,” Masha Gessen wrote recently in the New York Times. “That is a pre-totalitarian condition. You can’t have politics if you don’t have a shared reality and if you don’t place an absolute value on the truth. I think that normalization degrades our political life and degrades our understanding of politics.”
The “degradation of understanding” is apparent in the fact that, although all the investigations of fraud – by his own teams – in the 2020 election found no fraudulent activities in vote counting or certification in nine contested states, and that his legal team lost 62 lawsuits (including a lone victory that was overturned on appeal) contesting election processes, and that the Republican Party’s ballyhoo arm Fox News paid US$787 million to settle false claims, only 44 percent of Americans have a “great deal” or “quite a bit” of confidence the vote count will be accurate in 2024, according to a survey by the Associated Press.
Trump, as he has shown over recent weeks as the threat to his reelection has grown, has become even more hysterical in his attacks on migrants in the face of universal studies showing in-migration is a decided plus. Republican officials have already demonstrated they are not only willing to countenance his proliferating lies but to do whatever he commands in the bid to retake power, including attempting to rig elections, gerrymandering constituencies, and turning a blind eye to the coup he attempted to perpetrate on January 6, 2023. If he once again demands that local election officials find more votes in his favor, as he did in Georgia in 2022, this time there might not be a Brad Raffensperger there to tell him no.
Given public opinion polls in battleground states, he may well prevail, especially given that the architecture of the electoral college is in his favor, along with Fox News, which seems not to have learned its lesson despite the humiliation of the lawsuit it has paid off, with more to come.
Eventually, there will be a reckoning, as there have been reckonings for Huey Long, Richard Nixon, Joe McCarthy, and others. Trump isn’t the first demagogue to appeal to a mass audience by appeals to bigotry and racist hysteria, nor is he likely to be the last. Historians will inevitably make a meal of him. There are plenty of others in Congress today including his own vice-presidential candidate JD Vance, whose own beliefs appear remarkably malleable. The tragedy is if he is elected. Given what he has promised – the mass deportations, the wholesale destruction of the civil service, his assault, already begun, on the courts, the real victim will be democracy. Americans will learn what the Germans learned after their surrender on May 8, 1945.
John Berthelsen is a Co-founder and Editor in Chief of Asia Sentinel, former Managing Editor, Hong Kong Standard, Asian Wall Street Journal correspondent in five countries, Newsweek Magazine correspondent in Vietnam.
This article was originally published on Asia Sentinel.
Views in this article are author’s own and do not necessarily reflect CGS policy