Gleefully Disinformed and Afraid*
He claims the country is “occupied” by immigrants. His overlapping lies characterize the country as a dangerous, violent, economically depressed, disastrous hellscape created singlehandedly by none other than Vice President Harris. At a recent fundraiser attended by billionaires, he described the Vice President as “retarded.” Previously he said she was “dumb as a rock” and “born that way.” Yes, with him, every accusation is a confession.
“America is not a great country now,” Trump says. And only he can save the country and return it to the idyllic paradise he left it in when the Democrats stole the presidency from him in 2020.
You remember, don’t you? Shangri fucking la!
This is where we are. It must work with people who subscribe to his authoritarian playbook, gullible, weak-minded voters who live in conspiracy bubbles and gleefully lap up whatever verbal sewage Trump spews.
In the final stretches of the campaign, Trump’s falsehoods have turned to increasingly outlandish and absurd disinformation calculated to instill/install fear. It’s not just Trump’s standard fare of random dishonesty and lies, although there is plenty of that. Trump “has been toggling between outlandish claims about Haitians and other migrants, false descriptions of the federal response to recent hurricanes and incorrect statistics about the economy and crime.” As David Corn explained in Mother Jones:
“He concocts and promotes utterly false narratives to shape voters’ perceptions of fundamental realities. His campaign is a full-fledged project to pervert how Americans view the nation and the world, an extensive propaganda campaign designed to fire up fears and intensify anxieties that Trump can then exploit to collect votes. . . . Trump is heading a disinformation crusade more likely to be found in an authoritarian state than a vibrant democracy.”
With full backing of the Republican Party and MAGA media machine, Trump and his running mate claim that most of the country’s problems, which they falsely characterize and outrageously exaggerate, derive from dangerous, violent immigrants — the genetically inferior ones who are poisoning the blood of Americans, not the white ones Trump marries then discards — the dark ones who entered the country illegally. The legal ones aren’t any better: they’re the ones stealing and eating your pets, overtaking cities and towns, and contributing to the housing crisis.
According to them, Vice President Harris opened the borders to welcome in all comers, as many immigrants as possible, expecting they will vote for her and other Democrats, which they do and will — illegally, of course — early and often. Countries have emptied their “prisons and jails, insane asylums and mental institutions,” and imported their violent criminals, the worst of the worst, murderers and rapists, and their insane, which is why crime in the United States has increased in every sector at such an alarming rate while reducing at commensurate levels in the migrants’ countries of origin.
Immigrants have taken “Black jobs” and depressed wages. They don’t pay taxes, but the Harris administration gives them handouts and benefits paid for with your tax dollars. Migrants are the cause of both the shortage in housing and the increase in home prices.
They’ve taken over cities and turned them into dangerous, gang-infested zones, murdering millions of Americans.
Among his most laughable and preposterous, Trump said on X: “I will shut down all entries through Kamala’s migrant phone app. She’s got a phone app. It’s meant for the cartel heads. The cartel heads call the app, and they tell them where to drop the illegal migrants. It’s not even believable.”
Correct. It’s not believable, not even. Like almost everything else Trump says, it’s an obvious and unbelievable lie.
How convenient for Trump that hurricanes Helene and Milton struck during the last stretches of the campaign. According to him and Republican leadership, the government ran out of resources to provide hurricane disaster relief in the Southeast because Vice President Harris, again singlehandedly, diverted funds from FEMA to distribute to illegal immigrants. Chris Hayes explained:
“The disinformation isn’t just an accident or a byproduct of Republican politics: It’s central to their entire political project. They want to cut people off from trusting relationships with public agencies, with media, with experts and create an alternate universe in which reality is whatever the great leader says it is.
“It’s wildly dangerous. It claimed lives in the pandemic. And it’s risking lives in disaster areas today.”
Giving a speech in Pittsburgh, former President Obama, in classic understatement, said Trump is “a guy who will lie . . . to score political points. . . . The idea of intentionally trying to deceive people in their most desperate and vulnerable moments. My question is, when did that become OK? . . . I want to ask Republicans out there, people who are conservative who didn’t vote for me — I have friends who disagree with me on every issue — when did that become OK?”
Trump, however, doesn’t appear to blame immigrants for Democrats killing babies after they’re born, conducting gender-affirming surgery at schools without parental consent, reinstating the draft, legalizing fentanyl, or confiscating your guns.
Who actually believes this shit? The gleefully disinformed and afraid!
“All told, Trump is relentlessly presenting a dark and spurious view of America — even darker and more spurious than previous iterations of the American Carnage message he has hawked — and proclaiming himself the only available savior. He is perpetuating a fraud. His electoral success is dependent on his ability to poison the national discourse and turn his fictions into reality for tens of millions of voters. And he is enthusiastically aided by a right-wing media ecosystem, a conservative movement, and a GOP that all work together to echo and affirm Trump’s deceptions, for that is how residents of MAGA-land attain influence, power, and profit. They must endorse Trump’s deceit or face being excommunicated. . . .
“Benjamin Carter Hett, a history professor at Hunter College and author of The Death of Democracy: Hitler’s Rise to Power and the Downfall of the Weimar Republic, notes that ‘the individual components’ of Trump’s disinformation campaign ‘are things we have seen before.’ He explains: ‘After Hitler and Stalin, there wasn’t much more to add about the forms of political disinformation, and there is a recognizable lineage to a lot of what Trump and his running mate JD Vance say. I am not the first to note that the eating-the-cats-and-dogs thing is not far from the “blood libel,” and of course saying that if I lose, it will be the Jews’ fault is a hardy perennial. Calling Democrats Communists or Marxists is at least as old as FDR (and very similar to Hitler’s rhetoric as well). It may be that the scale of this is different — the sheer volume of this garbage — and a free media can’t seem to root it out and put a stop to it.’
“Trump’s disinformation con, boosted and abetted by a political party, an expansive media infrastructure, and an entire political movement, is a challenge for the United States and a test. Can his all-out war on the truth prevail? That depends on whether other media accurately portrays it, on how the rest of the political system responds to it, and on whether enough voters resist its pull. Trump has gotten far with this campaign, proving that disinformation delivered by the right carnival barker can be highly effective within America. The final vote count — and perhaps what happens afterward — will show if this nation can resolve its political divisions and differences within the realm of reason and rationality.”
Trump is Running a Disinformation Campaign
I’m holding my breath.
Notes
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/10/11/trump-disinformation-immigrants-storm-00183378
https://www.msnbc.com/top-stories/latest/trump-aurora-colorado-migrants-false-claims-rcna175146
https://amp.theguardian.com/us-news/2024/oct/11/trump-aurora-colorado-venezuelan-immigrants
https://www.american.edu/cas/news/to-the-point-trump-immigration-misinformation.cfm
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2024/10/donald-trump-is-running-a-disinformation-campaign/
R.VanWagoner https://medium.com/@richardvanwagoner publishes. https://richardvanwagoner.medium.com/subscribe
*My brother the very talented fiction writer and novelist, Robert Hodgson Van Wagoner, deserves considerable credit for offering both substantive and technical suggestions to https://medium.com/@richardvanwagoner. Rob’s second novel is a beautifully written suspense drama that takes place in Utah, Wyoming, and Norway. This novel, The Contortionists, which Rob himself narrates for the audio version, is a psychological page-turner about a missing child in a predominantly Mormon community. I have read the novel and listened to the audio version twice. It is a literary masterpiece. The Contortionists is not, however, for the faint of heart.