Overwhelm with Malignancy: The Trump Technique
Absent heroes, the Gish gallop, and the triumph of evil
There’s a technique in debating called the “Gish gallop.” The debater gallops her way to victory by overwhelming her opponent with a blizzard of shoddy arguments. The trick is to bury your opponent with nonsense, to drown her in noise, to befuddle her with your audacity so that she doesn’t know what to address first and can only throw up her hands in exasperation.
Does this technique sound familiar from recent American politics?
Donald Trump practices the Gish gallop in life and instead of releasing a geyser of mere implausible arguments, Trump’s tactic is to overwhelm the world with his depravity.
A Diabolical Scheme: Life as a Gish Gallop
Imagine a defendant who’s accused of robbing a store. He’s defended by an attorney who, after having her client plead “not guilty,” takes the unconventional path of reversing herself and admitting in court that her client robbed the store. But before the judge can swing the gavel and render a guilty verdict, the lawyer adds that the defendant also robbed the neighbouring shop and the one down the street and the other one around the block — oh, and furthermore that the defendant is guilty of assault and rape and treason and murder.
This Gish gallop would have no chance of working in an actual trial, of course, because the judge would instruct the jury to focus on the crime at hand, and that one admission would seal the defendant’s fate.
But what if the attorney not only alleged that her client committed many other crimes, but proved it by showing the court video evidence of each of them? What if instead of just several more crimes, the defendant had committed a billion? How would the judge respond to seeing video evidence of a single person committing a billion crimes, one after another, say one every ten seconds, twelve hours a day, year after year after year?
Might the judge in that case be so bewildered or appalled that she would no longer even understand what a gavel is, let alone have the wherewithal to swing it with any authority? Wouldn’t the proof of such evil invite any subheroic individual to doubt the very existence of morality, to laugh at the law as a pedantic sideshow, and to treat human existence as a cruel joke?
Wishing the Monster Away with Verbal Magic
Trump has been called a “serial liar” and a “gaslighter.” We think that by assigning such labels, we’re protected from the corrosive effects of his technique. Indeed, we should appreciate now that it would be only a technocratic conceit to think of Trumpism as a mere technique, as a tactic calculated to achieve some selfish end.
One technique can be countered by another. But when we understand what Trumpism really is, we should grasp that no mere technique can end his blight; more effective management isn’t the answer.
The very same optimism, in thinking a verbal handle on Trumpism suffices to preserve our sanity, is responsible for the movie motif of wishing away some force of palpable evil, even the very personage of Satan, by uttering a mere magic word — as though the devil could be so easily defeated and would vanish in a puff of smoke.
This underestimation of the problem at hand evinces the very weakness that may usher evil into the world, the weakness of the genteel class that plays by the book and trusts in fairytale endings.
Evil by a Thousand Cuts
I know you don’t think Trump is evil.
Even with the Woodward revelation that Trump intentionally downplayed the severity of COVID-19, which may have resulted in tens of thousands of additional American deaths, Trump’s no Genghis Kahn or Adolf Hitler or Jeffrey Dahmer.
But you don’t have to commit the very worst crimes possible to be essentially evil. Consider the heap paradox: you create a heap of sand by placing one grain on top of another, but at no particular point have you crossed some clear threshold to have finally built a heap. The heap just vaguely emerges, the whole appearing greater than the sum of its tiny parts.
Likewise, if you commit enough misdeeds, even if none is the worst crime imaginable, you become a supervillain, a stain on human nature. Most importantly, if you have so little conscience, shame, or empathy and are so narcissistic and sadistic that you manage to commit those billion misdeeds (hyperbolically speaking), your life represents an existential challenge to everyone who trusts in the validity of the human enterprise.
We have no trouble imprisoning ordinary criminals, assuming the police manage to catch them and the prosecutors establish their guilt. Petty criminals present no such existential threat, because we easily put them in a conceptual box before we put them in jail: we consider them animals rather than civilized people, since they’ve broken the law in a way we can comprehend. They commit only a handful of crimes at most, and we have a label for the committer of each of them, such as “thief,” “rapist,” or “murderer.”
But the mind boggles at the thought of a billion robberies, a billion rapes, a billion murders — all committed by a single, evidently supervillainous individual.
Again, Trump may not be a murderer, but his destructiveness and monstrous immorality are obviously superhuman in scale.
President Supervillain
President Trump is a supervillain. That’s why he was elected president, because most Americans understand their government is dysfunctional and they want to burn it to the ground.
Only a quarter of Americans believe their government can do well for Americans in general, these being the quarter that regularly votes Democratic. Half of Americans don’t vote at all, out of contempt for the establishment, and the other quarter votes Republican, to benefit only the richest few Americans and to undermine the country’s democracy by reinforcing the power of its nascent plutocrats.
- Question: How do you tear down a superpowerful nation?
- Answer: With a supervillain.
Let that sink in: President Trump is a supervillain. That statement carries with it two mind-altering poison pills.
First, there’s the unwelcome thought that a person can actually be supervillainous, can assault the senses with so much inhumanity, venality, mendacity, fraud, treachery, treason, incompetence, recklessness, sociopathy, racism, misogyny, vulgarity, viciousness, and infamy that this villain ends up getting away with all of his misdeeds, because the rest of us have been so inundated with them that we find we lack the conviction or the fortitude to deal fully with any of them.
Second, there’s the paradox of imaging that such a supervillain could somehow become president of the United States. It’s actually happened, so this isn’t a thought experiment or a tasteless joke.
The Unheroism of Democrats
- Question: How do you defeat a supervillain?
- Answer: Only with heroism.
Americans can watch dozens of Marvel superhero movies and still be so obtuse as to entrust the official response to Trump to a party of elderly and feminized Democrats. Trumpism will ride roughshod over all the neoliberal and progressive hypocrisy the hapless Democrats can muster.
Haven’t American liberals reckoned yet with the fact that anti-Americans represent the vast majority of the American population? Again, half don’t vote because they’ve given up on American values, and a quarter (known as “Republicans”) vote to repeal those liberal, Enlightenment ideals with gestures towards theocracy and kleptocracy. That means the sophisticated, conscientious, all-too gentle Americans are outnumbered. There’s no democratic victory when Democrats are elected to office with more than half the cast votes — when half the country doesn’t vote!
Democrats know as much even though the mass media seldom refer directly to this devastating fact, that most Americans have lost confidence in their leaders and in their political system since at least the 1970s.
In any case, no heroism can be expected from the Democratic Party.
Trumpism and the Revelation of Evil
What would be the relevant kind of heroism?
Well, imagine the antithesis of Trump, someone who instead of telling a billion lies, tells a billion truths or helps rather than defrauds people a billion times over. Imagine Fred Rogers but without the saccharine Christian presumptions.
Who has told the unvarnished truth a billion times in the United States? Who has suffered on other people’s behalf a billion times rather than cheered as much only whenever he or she has triumphed at other people’s expense? I see no such hero on the American political horizon. That means the battlefield has long been vacated by the forces of goodness — which was perhaps the signal for this rough beast to have slouched its way towards Bethlehem to be born.
Even if he wins reelection or steals the 2020 election and appoints himself dictator, Trump the old man will eventually fade away, his power and audacity drained. But Trumpism, the fact that one man had the depths of depravity to commit a billion sins — a staggering, incomprehensible swarm of violations and defilements — and managed to do so from the highest office in the land threatens to undermine not just the good people of the United States, but goodness as such.
Can we still believe in morality after having witnessed the obscenity of Trumpism? Can we pretend to be good when we participated in the world that generated Trump? Will some heroic force arise to meet the challenge or is evil more fundamental than good?
We think of Trump as a con man, perhaps even as the greatest con man of all time. But that conception invites us to adopt too narrow a perspective, since con artistry is about petty self-enrichment, which deals only with Trump’s intentions, not with the effects of his diabolical “technique.”
A con artist makes the victim’s savings vanish; Trumpism blots out the world’s grace, forcing the victims to doubt whether goodness was ever real and whether life has a redeeming purpose.
