By Dartagnan
Community
In film parlance you might call it a “teaser,” a “preview,” or even a “trailer.” It’s when a film studio or production company releases a tiny portion of its planned attraction to a general audience that gives them revealing hints of what’s to come if you stick around for the big show.
Donald Trump dropped some blatant teasers last week revealing what the day-to-day experience of living under a second Trump regime would be like. They all share a common theme or motif, one routinely employed by fascists and despots in autocratic societies to bamboozle the public while keeping their critics (often the media) off balance. The method is called “projection,” and for Trump it is a well-documented, well-established rhetorical tool. The New York Times’ Michelle Goldberg, writing in 2020, described Trump as “a master of projection, and his accusations against others are a decent guide to how he himself will behave.” He has employed it since the 2016 campaign (“Crooked Hillary”), but its usage has increased dramatically as Trump attempts to navigate the legal obstacles that threaten his reelection prospects.
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Projection essentially means accusing your opponents of the crimes and misdeeds you are actually guilty of yourself in order to distract from your own behavior. Its effect is reminiscent of the classic old carnival attraction known as a “hall of mirrors.” A hall of mirrors, of course, is a room or series of rooms staged and set up to reflect back grotesquely distorted images of everyone who passes through. The purpose is to unsettle and confuse, to keep the observer off balance and questioning their reality through a repeated sequence of disturbing illusions.
As reported by Isaac Arnsdorf and Marianne Levine, writing for The Washington Post:
Republican polling leader Donald Trump observed the third anniversary of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by glorifying people charged in the riot, repeating baseless claims that left-wing or government interlopers caused the breach, and attempting to turn the term “insurrection” against his political opponents.
Trump’s projection involves distorting his own current or planned behavior into an distraction he wields against his accusers. It’s intended to provide his supporters with an alternative reality, one duly amplified by the media, that they can accept to justify their existing predisposition to support him. As observed by Arnsdorf and Levine:
Trump went further in social media posts over the holidays, calling Biden an “insurrectionist” in response to a decision by the Colorado Supreme Court to remove Trump from the primary ballot under a provision of the 14th Amendment disqualifying officeholders who “engaged in insurrection or rebellion.”
On Saturday, Trump returned to the theme, concluding an extended broadside against undocumented immigration by saying, “When you talk about insurrection, what they’re doing, that’s the real deal.”
When Jason Stanley, professor of philosophy at Yale University, was interviewed by Madeline Brand for KRCW radio in Los Angeles, he explained how fascists routinely employ this type of projection:
Fascist tactics always involve projection. The fascists are always accusing their opponents of being the totalitarians. The fascists are always accusing their opponents of being the threat to the nation that they in fact are. The fascists are the most corrupt people, like the Nazi party was incredibly corrupt, incredibly lawless. But they accused their opponents of being corrupt.
Recall Trump, who is the most corrupt president in American history, ran an anti-corruption campaign in 2016. … He's projecting he's the one who's trying to crush dissent, he's the one who's going after the press. But what he's doing is he's representing his political opponents as the forefront of a kind of left totalitarianism. And he's saying, ‘You will need me to defend you from this threat to our freedom.’ And that is classic fascist tactics. … It's calling your opponent what you yourself are.”
Trump’s mentor, the despicable Roy Cohn, regularly employed projection as a technique, as noted by professors Chris Bell and Gary Senecal when they analyzed Trump’s rhetorical tactics in an article for Room:
It is worth noting that one of Trump’s early professional role models, his lawyer and fixer, Roy Cohn, employed projection quite consciously as a political weapon. The paradigmatic example of this is Cohn’s activities during the so-called Lavender Scare of the early 1950s, when Cohn, assisting senator Joseph McCarthy, outed scores of government employees for being gay, irrevocably tying homosexuality to Communist sympathizing, which ended their careers, even though Cohn was himself gay.
Bell and Senecal explained how using projection works to distract from the behavior of the person employing it:
At a fundamental level, psychological projections can function to make the relevant distinctions of a situation illegible or difficult to parse, such that it creates confusion about a situation’s basic parameters and thereby serves to obscure its very reality. … Projections serve to muddy the waters and give the outward appearance that Trump’s opponents are operating with the same tactics, intentions, or even at the same moral level as Trump himself, creating a false equivalency, rather than enabling clear symbolic distinctions to be made.
As Stanley noted in an interview with Sean Hilley, writing for Vox, projection is first and foremost a tool to exercise power by manipulating a susceptible population: “The goal is to make them feel like victims, to make them feel like they’ve lost something and that the thing they’ve lost has been taken from them by a specific enemy, usually some minority out-group or some opposing nation.”
This is why fascism flourishes in moments of great anxiety, because you can connect that anxiety with fake loss. The story is typically that a once-great society has been destroyed by liberalism or feminism or cultural Marxism or whatever, and you make the dominant group feel angry and resentful about the loss of their status and power. Almost every manifestation of fascism mirrors this general narrative.
But even more important than recognizing the technique in practice is to acknowledge that for fascists, it is always employed for an ultimate purpose. As David Renton, writing for Jacobin, observes, those goals are necessarily facilitated by violence, and the violence occurs in stages, with the utmost goal of co-opting those state institutions best equipped to perpetrate it.
On taking power, both Italian and German fascist parties partially relegated their militia structures. Both were invited into power by existing conservative elites. Both, at this stage of their development, made much of their loyalty to the existing national army and its existing hierarchies of command. They relied on the existing structures of the state to punish any remaining left-wing opponents.
As fascism became more radical in office, a much more ambitious kind of violence became available to it: the use of military power in war, to create new forms of colonial rule and to enact genocide against the movement’s racial enemies.
But we don’t have to look for historical antecedents to determine who would constitute the initial targets of a second Trump regime. Fascist or quasi-fascist regimes in Russia, Turkey, and Hungary provide a clear enough picture. As Stanley, writing for the Guardian, has noted:
Fascist ideology strictly enforces gender roles and restricts the freedom of women. For fascists, it is part of their commitment to a supposed “natural order” where men are on top. It is also integral to the broader fascist strategy of winning over social conservatives who might otherwise be unhappy with the endemic corruption of fascist rule. Far-right authoritarian leaders across the world, such as Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, and Russia’s Vladimir Putin, have targeted “gender ideology”, as nazism targeted feminism. Freedom to choose one’s role in society, when it goes against a supposed “natural order”, is a kind of freedom fascism has always opposed.
For all of his political existence Trump’s primary motivation has been to escape accountability for his own crimes, and the only way he can realistically do this is by getting himself elected again. The ultimate end goal for Trump is the co-opting of the U.S. intelligence services and ultimately the military to cement himself in power by continually escalating the sense of threat among his supporters, thus justifying—even compelling—usage of those formidable tools to eradicate that threat. Both he and his enablers in the Republican Party have explicitly announced their intention to do just that in the event of a second Trump term. This escalation would also have the singular intended benefit of keeping the focus off himself.
Bell and Senecal explain:
“[Projection works] since it bypasses engaging with his opponents at the level of logical argumentation, which would involve at a minimum the cultivation of some sort of background knowledge on a topic and engaging in the necessary preparation in order to make a reasoned or rhetorically persuasive case about his favored positions and/or why he is being treated unfairly.”
Trump’s supporters have no interest in critically analyzing what he’s saying to tease out what is truth and what is not. His contrived rantings simply confirm their preexisting biases and sense of victimhood. Hence, as Stanley writes, “The projection from Trump is off the charts” as he focuses on his reelection.
So Trump is giving us a clear preview of what life would be like should he be permitted to once again occupy the Oval Office. It would resemble a grotesque, never-ending hall of mirrors with phony accusations constantly deployed to confound and confuse his political opponents while he proceeds to dismantle American society for his own personal benefit. The Republican Party we now see slouching toward his embrace will go along for the ride, just as they did in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 insurrection, because they will see it as benefiting their own interests.
It will resemble the worst aspects of his first term on steroids. The difference will be an exponentially more sophisticated propaganda and disinformation apparatus in place on Day One, all targeting the discrete populations Trump intends to demonize. For Americans who don’t wish to live in such a country, it’s of the utmost importance to recognize Trump’s rhetoric for what it is well before they’re called upon to cast their votes this November.
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