Donald Trump's Attempt to Control Reality

He's after any institution that produces knowledge independent of him

There should be no doubt left in Americans’ minds that Donald Trump and his allies threaten the Constitution and America’s almost 250-year-old republican experiment. One important aspect of Trump’s strategy to seize power is his effort to create an alternative, largely false, reality so that Americans cannot know the truth about the world and act intelligently.

Taking Trump’s commitment to controlling reality seriously helps explain why he has gone after those parts of government and civil society that seek to produce knowledge—and why his administration would cut the federal government’s effort to monitor online foreign disinformation activities. It helps make sense of policies that undermine America’s global leadership in knowledge production—including in science and technology.

One important aspect of Trump’s second term has been to wreak vengeance on those Americans and American institutions that he considers his enemies. But there is also a deeper strategy. Since the start of his second term, Trump has systematically weakened government agencies and civil society institutions where knowledge is generated outside his control. It is easy to pretend that all Trump wants to do is reduce the size and cost of government. Unfortunately, he is committed to something much more dangerous. His cuts and policies seek to diminish society’s capacity to challenge his lies and purposeful disinformation.

Within government, Trump has targeted everything from science to education—including the Department of Education’s National Assessment of Educational Progress—to public health to the State Department’s once-reliable annual reports on human rights abuses. His Administration is attempting to predetermine the outcome of scientific studies and recently fired all the scientists working on a climate report mandated by Congress. He is seeking to single-handedly decide what the Smithsonian and other national museums should teach and even, by taking over the Kennedy Center’s board, what counts as art. Despite uncertainty, he has determined the origins of COVID.

If there is any entity within the federal government that relies on scientific, disciplinary approaches to knowledge, Trump has ensured that they either lack the resources to produce good knowledge or that unreliable biased information will be substituted instead.

Outside government, Trump has sought to cut funding for university research in all fields, including the sciences, social sciences, and humanities, and for America’s libraries. He has threatened journalists and is seeking to defund PBS and NPR. When he lies or breaks the law, he does not want his misdeeds brought before the courts, so he has threatened those lawyers and law firms that shine light on the false bases for his actions while judges who rule against him fear for the safety of their families from violence.

Trump knows that truth is his biggest enemy. So long as he and his allies can create a false reality in which he is always right, voters are not able to make good choices. There is no doubt that the expert class has not always got things correct, but a government that can make up its own data or hide the truth cannot be accountable to voters. A government that crushes independent sources of truth – universities, the press, journalists, libraries—seeks to control society rather than protect liberty.

Scholars have shown that in the world of social media, Americans have increasingly become more divided. We inhabit different worlds defined by the algorithms that drive misinformation and disinformation into our social media feeds. Rather than respond to these problems, Trump is trying to make his false reality our only reality. He seeks a total victory in America’s culture wars by destroying the capacity of people inside and outside of government to develop and share facts that can challenge misinformation and disinformation from the right or left.

Whether the issue is weather, the causes of autism, the effectiveness of schools, or the truth about the past, Trump wants control over what we Americans know, and thus how we think and feel.

Trump does not care about the truth. If he says someone is a terrorist, they are. If he says that something does not harm our public waterways, it doesn’t. If he says that tomorrow will be sunny, it will be, even if rain falls from the clouds. George Orwell understood in 1984 that the secret to authoritarian power is controlling reality and forcing people to deny what they know to be true and good—to deny themselves.

But we don’t need to turn to Orwell. Our Founding Fathers knew, as Thomas Jefferson put it in an 1816 letter, “if a nation expects to be ignorant & free, in a state of civilisation, it expects what never was & never will be.”