An Imaginary Trump for an Imaginary America
Irrational fears require an irrational candidate.
“What you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening.” - Donald Trump, 2018
“The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.” - 1984 by George Orwell
With polls showing the presidential race deadlocked, people have wrung their hands over how this race could be so close. But such polling is merely a reflection not only of a divided America (as America has almost always been divided along one faultline or another) but of reaching our epistemological crisis. We don’t share a set of facts and interpret those facts in different ways. We have two distinct realities, each foreign to the other side. The key difference is that one side exists in a fantasy and votes for a fantasy candidate. I’m sure they would say the same about their opponent, but the evidence doesn’t bear them out (and any evidence provided is only further proof of the conspiracy).
We are living in two Americas right now, and one of them doesn’t exist. Now, it’s a big country, but Trump’s America, the one he describes as a “disaster,” never seems to come into focus for anyone but him and his supporters. Granted, he always uses terms like “disaster” and “mess” because he has a limited vocabulary, but to believe in his vision of America, you also have to believe that migrants are overrunning every major city. I live in a major city. I have friends and family in major cities. We’re not living in a Mad Max-like existence. We live in cities; cities have some crime, and some cities are better than others (these are the ten most dangerous according to recent data, in case you’re curious).
And yet even the anti-immigrant message that has permeated Trump’s entire existence in national politics doesn’t even pop up in ads as much as the “threat” trans people pose. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to sit through the same dumb “Kamala wants to give free sex changes to prisoners” ads while watching football the past two months. Considering its frequency and the amount it costs to buy airtime, one would think this would be the most pressing issue facing Americans—the gender identity of the incarcerated—and if you live in the other world, it probably is. It’s meant to turn out the base, who have imagined problems that need the imagined solutions Trump proposes.
Even if you provide the most charitable reading and say that all his support stems from economic anxiety created by inflation, you have to simply assume that tariffs—his only economic plan—will do the trick. That’s not to let Harris off the hook, and we can debate whether tax breaks for middle-class families or child tax credits will do the trick. But economists tend to agree that Trump’s tariff plan would be a catastrophe. Furthermore, there’s little reason to trust Republicans or Trump with the economy. Reagan’s trickle-down economics was a failure; the economy cratered under George W. Bush, and Trump inherited Obama’s economic recovery only to turn it into tax cuts for the wealthy and then let it fall apart when COVID hit because he didn’t care about pandemic response. In my adult life, I have yet to see a Republican President who didn’t drive the economy off a cliff.
But if you believe that Trump is magic and every attack against him the bias of a liberal media (a liberal media that’s spiking its Harris endorsements in the wake of a possible Trump victory), then no argument will suffice. America’s two biggest crises are undocumented immigrants and trans people, and the only person who can save us bears no resemblance to reality. If you see Trump as a doddering old man, then you wonder how he could dress himself in the morning, let alone solve any major crisis. But if your identity is to support the Republican candidate, then your options are either holding your nose and voting or pretending he’s something he’s not. You pretend he’s a Christian. You pretend he’s strong. You pretend he’s smart. And if you can’t pretend, you say that all politicians are crooked, and he’s just telling it like it is.
Of course, Fantasyland has real consequences for those of us in the real world. If you spread the lie that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election, that leads to January 6th, where people died. Then you lie on top of that lie, and in addition to saying that Joe Biden stole the election (despite zero evidence of that happening), you lie and say that January 6th was a “day of love” and not to believe your lying eyes. The lies that permeate a fictional reality will bear serious hardship.
That’s why undecided voters and major news outlets have been at a loss for so long. There are no facts to ground them in the other place. If I show you a video of the Apollo 11 mission and moon landing, and then I show you Star Wars, and you think both could be true or that the truth lies somewhere in between, then there’s no helping you. If you’re an undecided voter, you’re not interested in evidence; you’re interested in questioning everything to the point of nihilism. If you’re the media, you’re not interested in questioning anything because it might offend people who might believe fabrications, and you’ve adopted a framing that the customer is always right.
There are self-proclaimed moderates who would like us to “turn down the temperature” and “listen to each other,” as if the issue here is one of volume and tone and not substance. But I don’t have to respect viewpoints that aren’t true. If someone is afraid of werewolves, I don’t have to sit down and think about the existence of werewolves and how we will address the werewolf problem plaguing our nation. I’m sure that those in Trump fantasyland think I’m the crazy one because I don’t believe in a secret cabal of liberal elites who drink adrenochrome or because I haven’t embraced the latest ginned-up outrage over a trans influencer receiving a can of Bud Light. But QAnon is a conspiracy, and I don’t have one dollar more or less in my pocket because of Anheuser-Busch’s marketing strategy for one of our worst beers.
These are imaginary problems festering as real resentments among a large subset of Americans, and so I’m not surprised that Trump—the Trump they imagine as big and strong and tireless and owning the libs—is their champion. Long ago, he decided he didn’t have to be bound to the rules of reality, and it’s been disheartening to see major institutions agree with him. But the Emperor has always been nude, and he doesn’t have any more clothes just because millions of his followers see him robed in greatness. We can respect the basic humanity of his supporters without accepting their delusions. The polls are telling us nothing about who will win the election, but we already know more than enough about who Donald Trump is, what his supporters want, and what they will do to the rest of us if they get the chance. To pretend otherwise is to live in a fantasy.