War of the Worlds
Trump is creating another reality to distract from the one he can't fix
I have good news and bad news. The good news is that Trump is not going to be able to deport 11 million people, end birthright citizenship, or magically return prices to their pre-pandemic levels.1 All of these are unworkable with his historically small congressional majorities, and he knows it.
The bad news is because he knows it, he now needs a new shiny object to wave in front of his base’s faces. Enter neo-imperial expansionism. Launching a “short, victorious war” to shore up your legitimacy is an oldie but a goodie that every autocrat in history will recognize. After all, the only way to distract from an internal problem you can’t solve is to create an external one you can. Call Canada a state? The base will love it! Claim Greenland for its resources? Why not! Take back Jimmy Carter’s Panama Canal deal? Yes, and make sure to say “China” a lot while you’re at it! Having floated these insane notions, Trump’s next task is to legitimize them.
Trump’s playbook for normalization should be well understood at this point. It starts with a crazy idea. By dropping walls of text on Truth Social and rambling in front of reporters, he batters our collective psyche with it. Once planted there, several things happen quickly. Elites in his party freeze in place, more terrified of his wrath than of the consequences of his idea. The idea wheedles its way into MAGA brains, immersing them in reality-defying nonsense. Liberals lashing out in horror do Trump’s work for him by repeating the idea even more than he does.2 Conservatives rally to defend their champion, eager to own the libs. Mainstream media outlets, prisoners of bygone notions, alternately present “both sides” of the issue or engage in irrelevant navel-gazing (“Is Trump telling lies? Or falsehoods?”, “Was it an insurrection or a riot?”). The process repeats until everyone sorts into their respective camps. Polarization reigns where once there was consensus. Lunacy has replaced normalcy.
This is exactly how Trump rewrote the memory of January 6th. It is exactly how naked imperialism is reentering American political discourse. Republican members of Congress are mum on the issue, though some of the savvier ones are skipping ahead and wholeheartedly embracing annexationist rhetoric. Right on cue, the news media is either absurdly whitewashing the ideas or investigating their origin stories like they’re Marvel characters. Trump’s rightwing foot soldiers on TV and online are already embracing the troll.
Your average Russian would instantly recognize what is happening in American media: On Russian television, the Kremlin sets the acceptable line on a whole host of issues, and regime-affiliated media outlets either test-drive the idea with audiences or straightforwardly indoctrinate them with it. Framing aggression as defense is exactly how Putin gaslighted his people into accepting huge casualties in Ukraine.
This week, I decided to put on the (highly underrated) 2005 movie War of the Worlds.3 The annexationist mind-virus taking over MAGA brains didn’t have much to do with Martians laying waste to New Jersey, but while watching it, I was reminded of the War of the Worlds hysteria of 1938. On October 30 of that year, Orson Welles narrated a dramatized radio broadcast of H.G. Wells’ original story, which many people took to be a newscast describing a real Martian attack. People called their relatives, ran to police stations, and fled their homes. Rather than calm nerves, newspaper reporters amplified the panic to discredit radio as a news medium. Both then and now, fiction replaced reality for a large segment of the population, while a dissolute media deliberately abdicated its responsibility to tell the truth.
In 2025, I’m going to do what the media won’t do and call a spade a spade. Trump’s expansionist rhetoric is dangerous. It is reckless. It threatens to destroy the world that our parents and grandparents fought and died for in World War II, a world where borders are no longer redrawn by force and certainly not by the United States. “Why is Trump talking like this now?”, the media asks. Tell me, what do all men with power want? It’s not complicated: Trump is a small, pathetically insecure man who only lives to aggrandize himself. Move on to the bigger issue: what this means for America.
Trump’s rhetoric represents a new proto-fascist strand of the MAGA virus. ‘Fascist’ is an overused term, and early in his career I was skeptical of its application to Trump. As he prepares to reassume power, however, Trump is increasingly taking on the unmistakable characteristics of a fascist leader. His movement cultishly venerates him. He uses fear of imagined internal and external ‘enemies’ to mobilize the masses. He distorts and destroys truth to perpetuate his power. His movement is obsessed with machismo and manliness. And now he is normalizing aggressive territorial expansion.
This is a war of the worlds: Earth 1 where we live, where words have meaning, and truth exists, and we call power to account; and Earth 2, where Trump wants us to live, where all words – not just “fascist” – are meaningless, where truth is what Trump says it is, and where nothing is true and everything is possible.
Earth 1 can win. Last time it took a once-in-a-generation pandemic — something even Trump couldn’t bluff through. I worry about what it will take next time to break the normalization cycle.
Nevertheless, the solution is simple: to quote a former Trump official, “What evil fears most is the publicly spoken truth.”
No, I’m not rooting against ordinary people getting their spending power back. Deflation (the economic term for when prices fall) actually harms for anyone with debt, like credit cards, a car loan, or a mortgage. This is because deflation increases the real value of a debt, making it more expensive to pay back in real terms.
Yes, I realize that I am at this moment a liberal lashing out in horror.
Crazily, three different War of the Worlds films were released that year. I watched the Stephen Spielberg and Tom Cruise one.
"Trump is creating another reality to distract from the one he can't fix." Yes. But it will be accepted and embraced and sit under the couch until another distraction is required. HOW DID WE ALLOW THIS ALL TO HAPPEN IN THE FIRST PLACE? How did we get here? I cannot get my head around why so many people...so many people...have embraced this kind of insanity! Where is common sense? Where is critical reasoning? Hell, where is just plain reason at this point? Or maybe it's me that's going insane. Maybe I'm in the wrong here, and the MAGA population is the entity in bulk that holds the saner and more righteous way to go forward. After all, they elected a convicted felon, a liar, a conman, a sexual abuser, a scammer for their President. And he is filling his cabinet position with more of the same ilk like himself...conmen, felons, liars, the list goes on. Is it me then? Do I have it wrong, and they have it right? Am I seeing everything from the wrong point of view? Am in in the minority, and they the majority? Is that why they are ruling? Are we, as a country, leaning more toward a Bozo the Clown shit show government that will only respect the wealthy, that will eagerly embrace issues of conspiracy and denialism? HOW...WHY...are we here in this moment? What did I do wrong, and what did they do right to get themselves in this absurd position? TELL ME! HOW DID WE GET HERE? I DON'T GET IT!
By the way, Keith...great reporting here! Very well worded, and very well felt!
Thanks Keith. You've put into words what I've been thinking for the last week or so. A copy of this needs to go to the Editor in Chief of every news outlet in the Western World.