The New Yorker - USA (2020-11-16)

THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER16, 2020 35

Trump made the invention of reality
a central doctrine of his government. He
installed a sixty-inch television in his
dining room, and was said to spend as
much as eight hours a day watching
cable news. (Trump denies this.) He
often ambled into unfamiliar facts; he
suggested that Frederick Douglass was
still alive (“getting recognized more and
more”), congratulated Poland on the an-
niversary of its invasion by the Nazis,
and pronounced Yosemite to rhyme with
Vegemite, the Australian breakfast
spread. Because of his aversion to read-
ing intelligence briefings, aides resorted
to showing him pictures and homemade
movies. Linguists who assessed his spo-
ken vocabulary found that he used the
most primitive language of any of the
last fifteen Presidents. (Herbert Hoover
was ranked the most sophisticated.) Ac-
cording to the standard measure of com-
plexity in writing, the Flesch-Kincaid
index, Trump communicated at the level
of a fourth grader.

T

he crises of 2020 imposed immov-
able facts on Trump’s politics of
unreality. Facing the deaths from the
COVID-19 pandemic and a pattern of
police killings of Black men and women,
Trump’s government slumped into pa-

ralysis. Congress proved unable to pass

real policing reforms, and could not

even gather itself to approve a second

round of emergency economic assis-

tance. Week by week, as Trump raged

against problems beyond his aptitude

to address, he leaned ever more on the

language and the symbolism of force—a

mode of expression that might be called

the violent style.

Trump, who came to the Presidency

by generating a miasma of fear around

Mexicans and Muslims, adapted his

weapons to new enemies; he railed

against “human scum” and “thugs” and

“traitors,” threatening to send a “surge”

of federal agents into cities, such as Chi-

cago, that are home to large Black pop-

ulations. When scattered acts of loot-

ing accompanied early protests against

racial injustice, Mark Esper, the Secre-

tary of Defense, called for dominating

the “battlespace.” Trump dispatched

paramilitary agents to Portland, Oregon

(“Worse than Afghanistan,” he said),

forcing people into unmarked cars. In a

speech from the South Lawn, on July 4th,

he likened his project to that of the

“American heroes” who “defeated the

Nazis, dethroned the Fascists, toppled

the Communists.” He said, “We are now

in the process of defeating the radical

left, the Marxists, the anarchists, the ag-

itators, the looters.”

His most zealous supporters embraced

fantasies of Antifa invasions, deep-state

coups, and a cabal of Satan-worshipping,

pedophile “Democrat” billionaires. Op-

ponents began to look irredeemable, be-

yond rehabilitation. In August, a popu-

lar pro-gun activist who goes by Colion

Noir posted a video titled “Why New

Gun Owners Should Fear a Joe Biden

Presidency.” He told his audience, “They’ll

be coming for the handguns. These

aren’t new tactics—Hitler did the same

thing in Germany.”

As the election approached, the

threads converged in a toxic political

sludge: the Boogaloo Bois, with their

ironic memes and Hawaiian shirts, brac-

ing for civil war; the record-breaking

gun sales—the spirit of John Birch, in

the era of AR-15s and 4Chan. The cur-

rent culture of political warfare was about

more than guns or fringe conspiracy

theories. It was a mutant version of a

mainstream ethos: a survival mind-set

derived from a sense of zero-sum con-

tests, in which only one side can pre-

vail. The weaker the public felt, the more

they grasped for gestures of force; as in

Freeman’s portrait of antebellum vio-

lence, Americans were coming to be-

lieve that they could no longer afford

to abide by the old norms. Freeman told

me that violence was filling a void left

by America’s eroded democracy: “The

current moment has reams of people

who feel unheard and unrepresented

amidst multiple crises, people who have

been stewing in that gripe for years.

They sense that the tides of demograph-

ics and culture are turning against them.”

She said, “Cloak that in the rhetoric of

democracy, and it has a real appeal.”

Part of America’s predicament is that

its political parties magnify the intensity

of factions, rather than negotiating to-

ward a compromise. Ideally, parties pull

people into blocs that help bridge their

racial, religious, and professional differ-

ences; it gives them an alternative col-

lective identity. America’s parties do pre-

cisely the opposite: they compound and

amplify the differences.

Hardly anyone who studies political

violence expects the risk to subside after

the election. In a survey conducted

in September, a team of prominent po-

litical scientists found that an alarming

Like an amoeba without an e-scooter.

An extra in an epic battle scene, trampled by a non-Equity horse.

You’re a red-breasted flute, but everyone else is a dowel.

A Zen koan growing in the White House Rose Garden.

Sun-damaged curtains in the parlor of an abandoned friendship.

You’re the queen, but you’re a bee being swept into the pool’s

filtration system.

Like a version, touched for the very last time.

Spooky piano music rising from the dishwater.

You wake up alone to a bird reciting Keats.

—Kim Addonizio