It’s almost absurd. Donald Trump has just received four indictments for crimes including defrauding the United States and conspiring against Americans’ right to vote. He also faces forty other felony charges (including Espionage Act violations) in federal court in Florida and 34 in New York related to trying to hush up a sex scandal. But despite all that, his front-runner status to be the next Republican presidential nominee seems set in stone. According to a recent poll, he is 37 percentage points ahead of his closest rival, Ron DeSantis (Governor of Florida).
That the former president could end up in prison does not seem to make a dent in his followers. Among his fans, the proportion of those who believe that he did something wrong is zero percent, which is already strange. Stranger still is the fact that 43% of Republicans reportedly have a “very favorable” opinion of Trump.
DeSantis (who, by the way, seems so uncomfortable in his shoes that he even makes others uncomfortable) can’t beat him to the right. But Chris Christie (a slightly more interesting politician who is getting 2% in the polls) has fared even worse with his attempts to project a more moderate image.
How do you explain the tenacity of support for Trump? Due to the strength of his arguments, surely it is not, because he hardly utters any coherent one. Most of the time it’s hard to understand what he’s thinking, or if he’s thinking anything at all. He manifests indifference, if not disdain, for the facts. But the more he lies, the more his followers seem to love him, as if his onslaught of falsehoods has numbed their ability to recognize the truth.
There is no doubt that radical changes in the ways in which people receive information have something to do with it. Many people (and not just Trump supporters) are very comfortable inside a bubble of Internet-based disinformation propped up by hucksters masquerading as journalists at Fox News and other even crazier outlets.
The Trumpist bubble is mired in pessimism. Despite the remarkable resilience of the economy during Joe Biden’s presidency, 89% of Republican voters think the United States is going downhill. The Trump base is even talking about a national catastrophe in the making, caused by sinister elites, malevolent immigrants, and a wicked international cabal of financiers pulling the strings of the world. Trump has been a master at manipulating these conspiracy fears, which can provoke both retaliatory violence and ecstatic adulation of the self-styled savior.
Popular anxiety is attributable to several causes. Many American industrial workers feel marginalized in a global economy where cheaper labor is sought abroad. And a variety of social and demographic changes — the growth of the non-white population, the loss of religious authority, challenges to an entrenched set of gender norms and sexual and racial hierarchies — have left people bewildered and, in their view, , dispossessed; hence, many adore a leader who promises to “give them back the country.”
The most successful of Trump’s demagogic bets (and the most alarming) is to present his own problems with the law as an attack on all his supporters. His campaign team compared the latest accusations to persecution in Stalin’s Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. After the June indictment in federal court, Trump told his supporters: “In the end it’s not me they’re looking for, it’s you, I’m just getting in the way.”
History never repeats itself exactly the same, and it is always dangerous to make light comparisons with other times and places. But some aspects of the past can help us better understand the present.
In her book The Origins of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt made an observation that remains valid: deliberate lying is the first step toward tyranny. In his words: “Before seizing power and creating a world in accordance with their doctrines, totalitarian movements invoke a fictitious world of coherence (…) in which, through pure imagination, the uprooted masses can feel at home and save themselves the incessant blows that life and real experiences inflict on human beings and their expectations”.
The German historian Joachim Fest said much the same about the “liturgical magic” of National Socialism, a magic that he believed restored to people “the lost sense of belonging together and the feeling of collective comradeship.”
Even more pertinent today is a point made in 1932 by the liberal politician Theodor Heuss, when the Nazis were about to destroy German democracy. He noted that they had achieved a “fantastic propaganda feat, that skillful combination of hero and saint in which one moment is the great man victorious and the next moment the innocent and persecuted martyr.”
The United States today is not the German Weimar Republic, doomed to fall. There were disastrous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, but there is no equivalent to the Treaty of Versailles that punished the Germans after World War I, nor an economic depression remotely comparable to that of the 1930s.
And something perhaps more important is that Trump, despite having filled the Supreme Court with religious fundamentalists, did not win the majority support of the elites (unlike Hitler). Now some white youth are drawn to the far right, but Trump has nothing like the student support the Nazis had.
If Trump ends up being the Republican presidential nominee, he won’t have as easy to defeat his likely Democratic challenger (Biden) as he would defeat his primary rivals. But it remains to be seen whether enough people will be persuaded to vote for an often wavering 80-year-old man to avoid the disaster of a candidate whose ultimate desire is to return to the White House so as not to end up in prison.
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Translation: Stephen Flamini
Ian Buruma es autor de The Collaborators: Three Stories of Deception and Survival in World War II (Penguin Press, 2023).
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2023. www.project-syndicate.org
