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M. Gessen
The Seeds of This Political Disaster Were Sown Decades Ago
Opinion Columnist
Four years ago the Republican convention was a bizarre spectacle, a cross between a Napoleonic fantasy and a Leni Riefenstahl movie. The dominant image was of an imperial dynasty laying claim to forever rule. I expected more of the same when I tuned in on Monday night to watch this year’s convention, but amped up even further by the weekend’s terrifying near-miss assassination attempt.
What I saw instead was an even-toned, inclusive performance that seemed designed to resemble conventions of a more, well, conventional era, or perhaps just entertainment-world award shows. The lineup of speakers offered racial, gender and even ideological diversity — including the Teamsters’ president, Sean O’Brien, who announced from the main stage that his organization was “not beholden to anyone or any party.”
You don’t have to agree with Donald Trump on everything was a consistent talking point. As for the shooting, it had been instantly mythologized as a miracle of survival: Speaker after speaker, including Trump himself, credited the Almighty with saving the former president so he could save America. There was no reference to the speculation, multiplying across the internet, that the deep state was behind the assassination attempt. Even Donald Trump was, by his standards, cogent and calm.
While one half of the electorate was being served this bland spectacle, the other half struggled to follow a dispiriting and confusing story in which the stakes in the presidential election are existential — and the only man who can save American democracy is President Biden. Even as more and more funders, political operatives and ordinary Democratic voters said that he should withdraw his candidacy, the campaign told them to put their faith in a frail, diminished man — worse than that, it insisted that he was neither frail nor diminished.
In the interview with Lester Holt that was broadcast on the first night of the Republican convention, Biden’s most energetic moment came when he lashed out at the press for criticizing him rather than his opponent — a favorite tactic of demagogues everywhere. If the media criticize him, then the media are bad. If the polls show a lack of support for his candidacy, then the polls are wrong. If his allies are trying to save him from himself, then they are no longer his allies. The president and his campaign have adopted the habits of the monster they promise to save us from.
The week felt like an emotional reprise of the early months (or was it years?) of the Trump presidency. Every day, it seemed, brought news that felt like it would change history. We assimilated it and moved on, getting up in the morning, going about our business, pausing to express shock at another piece of news, and starting the cycle over again. We developed the ability to feel simultaneously shaken and bored, dismayed and indifferent. As media outlets engaged with Trump’s lies — some enthusiastically and others because it could not be avoided — we grew accustomed to an ever growing gap between reality as we experienced it and the ways in which it was reflected back to us by politicians and journalists.
Biden and Trump represent entirely different values and policies. This country was a very different place when Trump was president than it has been during Biden’s term. If Trump is elected in November, the difference will most likely be even greater. This week’s convention has given us a glimpse of Trump’s Republican Party not as the amateur agent of chaos that it used to be but as an institutionalized, normalized one. Biden is right: Trump poses an existential threat to democracy.
But both campaigns are creating a sense of unreality, in presenting politics as formulaic spectacle, abstracted from the actual politics each candidate represents and from people’s lived experiences.
To be sure, the two campaigns are telling very different stories. The Republican story is one of constant danger, eternal heartbreak, looming catastrophe. On the second night of the convention, a parade of people spoke of their fears and losses. Michael Coyle, a Philadelphian, described widespread injection drug use and implored Trump to “end the urban nightmare.” Madeline Brame, a woman from New York whose son was murdered, said that “soft-on-crime prosecutors … have turned our great country and our cities into war zones.” Anne Fundner, a woman from California, spoke of losing her 15-year-old son to a fentanyl overdose, for which she blamed the Democrats’ supposed “open-border policy.”
Autocrats and aspiring autocrats, whatever their political orientation, have been telling this story for a long time. They say that the country is on the verge of catastrophe and that only one person — the great leader — can save it. They use this rhetorical strategy because it works. That is, it works in times when a critical number of people are feeling insecure, precarious, frightened, as many Americans clearly are.
No, most American cities are not in fact teeming with murderers and drug-dealing terrorists, but we do live in a world of profound economic anxiety, routine violence and an opioid epidemic. It is not true, as speakers at the Republican convention claimed, that Biden’s policies are to blame for the wars in Ukraine and Gaza, but we do live in a world of unrelenting news of war carnage. Nor is it true that the United States is overrun by millions of dangerous immigrants, but we do live in an era of mass displacement, of what Hannah Arendt described as “homelessness on an unprecedented scale, rootlessness to an unprecedented depth.” She was writing about preconditions for totalitarianism in the 20th century.
The Biden campaign’s approach to these anxieties is to insist that Americans are wrong — that experts’ objective economic data disproves ordinary people’s subjective sense of precarity. Rather than listen to their lived experience, which tells them that they are insecure despite all the job creation and economic growth, or accept what they see and hear, which tells them that the president is too old for the job, Americans should fear only Donald Trump, the Democrats insist — and put their trust in Biden, the only leader who can save us from the autocratic abyss.
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It is in this kind of environment that conspiracy theories flourish — not, as it is often mistakenly thought, in a low-information environment, but in a low-trust environment. Starting immediately after the attempted assassination, social media saw a rapid profusion of posts that used the phrase “inside job,” promoting the baseless claim that the Secret Service tried to have Trump killed. According to the nonpartisan media watchdog group NewsGuard, posts about the shooting that used the word “staged” — promoting the equally baseless theory that the shooting was organized by the Trump campaign, to generate sympathy or admiration — were also proliferating, and at an even greater rate.
This second conspiracy theory concerns me even more, because I saw people I know embracing it.
The thing about conspiracy theories is that they tend to be so utterly implausible. This one would have required that the Secret Service be in cahoots with both Trump and the shooter; that Trump be willing to put his life in the hands of a 20-year-old and able to comport himself comfortably onstage despite knowing he was about to be shot; and that the shooter be willing to die for the cause of a fake news event. A world in which all of this is true seems far scarier than the world in which we are living now. And yet, people find reassurance in taking nothing at face value, in “doing their own research” by reading self-proclaimed experts on social media.
Add to the surreal trajectory of the presidential race the developments in Trump’s many ongoing legal cases. Two weeks before the Republican convention kicked off, the Supreme Court ruled that a president has sweeping immunity for official acts. A judge whom Trump appointed, Aileen Cannon, then dismissed the case against him for stealing classified documents that he does not deny taking and that we all saw stacked in his bathroom.
Whether you are a supporter of Trump who believes that the many criminal cases against him are part of a persecution campaign, or someone who believes, based on the evidence, that he committed a number of crimes, the message is clear: justice in the United States is contingent and entirely partisan.
As the week drew to a close, rumors circulated that Biden would soon announce the end of his candidacy. It was a hopeful possibility, not just for the Democrats’ electoral prospects, but also for the end of the gaslighting, the re-establishment of a shared reality. But those rumors have circulated before, and yet here we still are.
As for Trump, despite the gestures he made in his speech on Thursday night toward national reconciliation, tolerance and unity, the convention reflected the ultimate consolidation of his power. If he is elected, a second Trump administration seems likely to bring what the Hungarian sociologist Balint Magyar has termed an “autocratic breakthrough” — structural political change that is impossible to reverse by electoral means. But if we are in an environment in which nothing is believable, in which imagined secrets inspire more trust than the public statements of any authority, then we are already living in an autocratic reality, described by another of Arendt’s famous phrases: “Nothing is true and everything is possible.”
It’s tempting to say that Trump’s autocratic movement has spread like an infection. The truth is, the seeds of this disaster have been sprouting in American politics for decades: the dumbing down of conversation, the ever-growing role of money in political campaigns, the disappearance of local news media and local civic engagement and the consequent transformation of national politics into a set of abstracted images and stories, the inescapable understanding of presidential races as personality contests.
None of this made the Trump presidency inevitable, but it made it possible — and then the Trump presidency pushed us over the edge into the uncanny valley of politics. If Trump loses this year — if we are lucky, that is — it will not end this period; it will merely bring an opportunity to undertake the hard work of recovery.
M. Gessen is an Opinion columnist for The Times. They won a George Polk award for opinion writing in 2024. They are the author of 11 books, including “The Future Is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia,” which won the National Book Award in 2017.
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