Saving Democracy From Below
“I’m not running against Kamala, I’m running against an evil Democrat system. These are evil people.”
— Donald Trump
“Unlike Donald Trump, I don’t believe that people who disagree with me are the enemy, who — he wants to put them in jail. I’ll give them a seat at the table.”
— Kamala Harris
Traditionally, the last two weeks of a campaign see newspapers across the country endorse candidates for president as part of the process of clarifying the choices before the American people.
But this time, two leading news institutions — the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post — abdicated their roles. Social media influencers stepped up to fill the gap. But it wasn’t enough to prevent Trump from returning to the White House.
Most notably, they reminded voters of Trump’s toxic racism and malign neglect of Puerto Rico — blocking $20 billion in emergency relief after Hurricane Maria — and of his violent misogyny, revealed in the Access Hollywood tape, where he bragged about casually sexually assaulting women. Puerto Ricans are a key voting block in several battleground states — most notably Pennsylvania — while many, if not most first-time voters have never heard the tape, and are incredulous that Trump could be elected in 2016 after it was released. Both were painful typical examples of issues the media has either forgotten or ignored.
It’s the purpose of journalism to make the world legible, to make issues and choices clear, so the people collectively can decide what course of action to take. While the Times and the Post betrayed that purpose, social media influencers stepped up to fulfill it. It was a signature example of how elite institutions have failed, and how the people themselves are responsible for saving democracy —a task that’s now far more daunting than ever. .
When the two billionaires — Pat Soon-Shiong at the LA Times and Jeff Bezos at the Washington Post — stepped in to silence their editorial boards and sow confusion in the electorate, there were prominent resignations and subscription resignations in response. The Post lost more than 250,000 subscribers — 10% of its paid base — within a few days. But the true face of the campaign was evident almost immediately afterward, that Sunday when Trump held his “closing argument” rally at Madison Square Garden. It drew immediate comparisons to an infamous 1939 pro-Nazi rally held there with similar anti-democratic themes: demonization of immigrants and political enemies, invocation of strongman leadership, threats of violent retribution, denunciations of the press, and more. Trump’s childhood friend David Rem called Harris “the Antichrist” and “the devil.” Businessman Grant Cardone said that Harris “and her pimp handlers will destroy our country.” Radio host Sid Rosenberg called the Democratic Party, “The whole party — a bunch of degenerates, lowlifes, Jew-haters and lowlifes, every one of them.” To kick it all off, a “comic” Tony Hinchcliffe called Puerto Rico “an island of garbage,” and to conclude it, Axios summarized, “Trump himself used Nazi-inspired language like ‘occupied country’ and ‘enemy from within.”
It was, in short, a self-evident hate-fest, that Trump afterward repeatedly referred to as “a lovefest.” To say Trump was lying about the nature of his event would be an understatement, at the very least. But more than that, it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of what he is up to.
Yes, Trump lies. All the time. The Post itself chronicled more than 30,000 lies and false statements that Trump made in office. But simply counting lies doesn’t provide much insight into what is going on. Daniel Dale for CNN debunked “16 false claims Trump made at Madison Square Garden,” which is all well and good, but does nothing to provide insight into why Trump is lying, and what all this lying is leading toward. And this is what the corporate media has repeatedly failed to do.
There are three different things Trump engages in: lying, bullshitting, and gaslighting. It’s important to understand each.
Lying is deceiving people about the state of the world, a frequent Trump habit. Bullshitting is deceiving people about one’s motives, using true or false claims indiscriminately to achieve one’s ends. This is much more characteristic of how Trump routinely operates.
But when Trump calls a hatefest “a lovefest,” he’s doing something more: He’s gaslighting. Gaslighting undermines people’s whole sense of reality on which reasoning depends, and imposes an invented reality on its victims.
“The hate you saw was really love and if you can’t see that, then you’re the hate-filled one!” Trump said. That’s the gaslighting “logic” behind Trump’s claim that his hate-fest was a love-fest, and it echoes a similar logic that’s routinely found in abusive relationships. Trump’s articulation of this logic is core to his misogynistic appeal — something that women, particularly in the wake of the #MeToo movement, have been instinctively aware of, even as the male-dominated punditocracy has ignored it.
Building on that, gaslighting has been the foundation of everything in Trump’s life — from the manufactured illusion of his business brilliance to the key political narratives he’s ridden to power and used to hold onto it. For Trump the election turns on five key feats of gaslighting: climate denial, the Great Replacement theory (evil elites are flooding America with an invasion of dangerous immigrants), the myth of mass voter fraud, his gaslighting Roe (pretending it’s what everyone always wanted, sending abortion “back to the states”), and portraying himself as great for the economy, while Democrats would be disastrous (23 Nobel economists say the opposite in a recent letter, calling Harris’s agenda “vastly superior to the counterproductive economic agenda of Donald Trump.”).
If you fall for these five feats of gaslighting, seeing the world in broad-brushed ways directly contrary to fact, then you’ll be primed for swallowing a sixth: that Democrats are the threat to American democracy, and Trump alone is its savior. In his gaslighting narratives, Trump’s always the hero, and his enemies are lying about everything. He specializes in sweeping declarations — what’s “horrible” or “never seen before” — with a pathological aversion to facts. The was seen once again the fallout from his Madison Square Garden rally.
Of all the despicable things said there, the so-called comic’s remarks, calling Puerto Rico “a floating island of garbage” stood out above all else, prompting waves of outrage on social media. Puerto Rican artists Jennifer Lopez, Ricky Martin, and Bad Bunny — with a combined audience of over 314 million Instagram followers — all responded by expressing support for Harris, posting a video from Harris’s official account outlining her vision for Puerto Rico.
“I will never forget what Donald Trump did and what he did not do when Puerto Rico needed a caring and competent leader,” Harris said in the clip. “He abandoned the island, tried to block aid after back-to-back devastating hurricanes, and offered nothing more than paper towels and insults.”
Trump’s appalling, racist mistreatment of Puerto Rico has remarkably been forgotten in public memory, like so many other examples of Trump’s scandalous and reckless behavior. But the Madison Square Garden rally and the celebrity/social media response brought it all back and made it top of mind for many via social media.
Typically, Trump responded with two classic gaslighting tropes he uses all the time: he disclaimed any association or responsibility for the joke — even though this campaign had vetted it — and he claimed he’d done more than anyone for Puerto Rico when in reality he’d blocked $20 billion in aid after Hurricane Maria. Both attempts fell flat. But his third gaslighting attempt hit paydirt — sort of.
Biden inartfully tried to say that the only garbage was that coming out of the Trump-supporting comedian’s mouth, and the Trump campaign jumped on it, claiming that Biden was calling all Trump supporters “garbage.” It made the front page of the New York Times, and Trump tried to give the gaslighting more legs by doing a campaign appearance with a garbage truck. But even though it was catnip for the #bothsides media, that was not how it played in the Puerto Rican community, where the lack of an apology said everything that needed to be said.
But that wasn’t the only forgotten part of Trump’s record to suddenly re-emerge via social media that week, as summed up in a Teen Vogue story, “Gen Z Is Listening to the Trump Access Hollywood Tape on TikTok for the First Time.” The tape in which Trump bragged, “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ‘em by the pussy. You can do anything,” almost destroyed Trump’s 2016 campaign, and many young voters today, hearing it for the first time, can’t believe that it didn’t.
Teen Vogue focused on Soleil Golden, a 22-year-old creator with 591.5k followers, who posted a video of herself and a friend reacting to the tape. “‘I moved on her like a b*tch,’ Trump can be heard saying as the two TikTokers shake their heads, cover their eyes, and hold their fingers to their temples as though they have a migraine,’’ Teen Vogue reported.
“I’m automatically attracted to beautiful… I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait,” the tape continues. “And when you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ‘em by the pussy. You can do anything.”
The Washington Post also reported that “This week, many said on the social network they were shocked by the former president’s words and confused why the episode wasn’t a dealbreaker in 2016.”
For a day or two it had looked like it would be: the party might abandon him. But Trump did something he’s never done before or since: he apologized. Sort of. He apologized while attacking his enemies, trivializing it as “locker room banter” (athletes vehemently disagreed), and saying it was long in the past. “These words don’t reflect who I am,” he lied and went on to say, “I’ve said some foolish things, but there is a big difference between the words and actions of other people. Bill Clinton has actually abused women and Hillary has bullied, attacked, shamed, and intimidated his victims.”
But then, in the next two weeks at least 11 women came forward accusing Trump himself of sexual assault or misconduct — a number that would subsequently more than double. Trump accused them all of lying to hurt his campaign, and threatened, “All of these liars will be sued after the election is over.” But, of course, that was just another lie. Trump never sued any of them. It was all just bullshit and bluster on his part. And the media let him get away with it.
Now, eight years later, that pattern continues with a vengeance. Trump’s gaslighting on climate denial, the Great Replacement theory, mass voter fraud, abortion, and the economy have been normalized by our media. Their job is to make the world legible, and instead, they’ve helped Trump do just the opposite: make it impossible to truly make sense of.
