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Donald Trump has hastened America’s decline into a “post-truth” society that privileges feelings over reality, my colleague Megan Garber has argued. I spoke with Megan about her contribution to “If Trump Wins,” our new project considering the threat that a second Trump term poses to American democracy. We discussed Trump’s manipulations and the double-edged power of emotion in American life.
First, here are four new stories from The Atlantic:
‘Our Truest Ideology’
Lora Kelley: You write that every story Donald Trump invents—“every wild claim, freed from the dull weight of accuracy—doubles as permission: You, too, can feel your way to your facts.” Why, for Trump’s followers, is that permission to let feelings overpower the truth so compelling?
Megan Garber: Facts require a certain amount of effort. They require learning and patience and work. Above all, facts require humility: a recognition that your personal reality is not necessarily everyone else’s reality, and that there are truths that exist beyond you and your preferences.
There’s something very compelling about someone who says, You know what, you don’t need to do that. If you feel that the world is a certain way, Trump’s pitch goes, then the world can be a certain way. Trump himself models that, and gives his followers permission to share that idea. Take the Big Lie, for example. Trump did not want to have lost the election. And so he said, I did not lose the election. There is, perversely, this almost elegant simplicity to it. Feelings are so much easier than facts.
Trump is also a brand, and he’s so good at tapping into the idea that emotion is all there is. He lives out the notion, in politics, that the customer is always right. Whatever the voter wants to be true in a certain way can be true.
Lora: What does Trump’s continued ability to grip the country tell us about Americans’ urge to be entertained?
Megan: Americans defer to entertainment so much, not just in the world of culture but in the world of our politics. Much of the way Americans are taught to think about politics is incredibly superficial—an approach that equates politics with an ongoing show where the biggest responsibility is not to democracy but to entertainment and distraction.
Trump does that even for the people who are not his supporters. So in this very tragic way, he captures something that is broadly true, I think, about American culture: that entertainment is our truest ideology and the truest value that we share. The media, especially early on, treated Trump as a performance. And that treatment generally underplayed all of the terrible things he represents.
Lora: At the same time that Trump is approaching feelings in this bad-faith way, other people in America—including activists who are fighting against Trump and his policies—are centering feelings in their politics too. What place do emotions occupy in American life when people of all political leanings are using them for their own ends?
Megan: Emotions have always been part of politics. And emotions can be tools of justice or weapons of cruelty. Part of what is so tragic about Trump, and so insulting, is that the possibility of emotions in politics can be so strong. Trump simply proves the worst of it.
But the other side of that is: We are also seeing more and more empathy. With the affordances of social media, people have voices and can turn their feelings and their experiences of the world into shareable pieces of media. Movements can spread so much more quickly now; people can speak up and say, This is what it feels like to be me. This is what it feels like to be told that you have fewer rights than other people do.
Related:
Today’s News
- Representative Kevin McCarthy of California, who was ousted from his position as speaker of the House in October, will retire at the end of the year.
- Police responded to reports of a shooting on the University of Nevada at Las Vegas campus. The suspected shooter has been located and is dead, authorities said.
- Senate Republican leaders blocked a legislative package that would have provided aid to Ukraine.
Evening Read
Against Algebra
By Temple Grandin
(From 2022)
One of the most useless questions you can ask a kid is, What do you want to be when you grow up? The more useful question is: What are you good at? But schools aren’t giving kids enough of a chance to find out.
As a professor of animal science, I have ample opportunity to observe how young people emerge from our education system into further study and the work world. As a visual thinker who has autism, I often think about how education fails to meet the needs of our very diverse minds. We are shunting students into a one-size-fits-all curriculum instead of nurturing the budding builders, engineers, and inventors that our country needs.
More From The Atlantic
Culture Break
Read. Pick out a new read from The Atlantic’s top 10 books of 2023.
Listen. The late Shane MacGowan’s “The Old Main Drag” is as undeceived a statement of human despair as anything in the canon of folk music.
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Katherine Hu contributed to this newsletter.
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