The Menace and Conundrum of Trumpian Trolling

Resentment, gaslighting, and hypernormality in the tribal GOP

Over the last few decades, have conservative voters supported the Republican Party because they believe Republican principles and policies are right or are those voters using the party mainly to troll the rest of the country, to torture and embarrass the Americans they resent?

We can dismiss the possibility that Republican politicians have been sincere in issuing any of their significant public statements or in enacting their policies. Regardless of their rhetoric, the effect of their policy platform is to regress the country to a state of social Darwinian squalor ruled over by a pharaonic cabal of sociopathic predators and parasites. No one believes in such pseudo-philosophical conservatism; if you’re rich or hypermasculine, you fall into that aggressive posture the way you have no choice but to act drunk if you’ve consumed too much alcohol.

If you lose touch with your conscience or with a standard of intellectual integrity, or you no longer have much contact with ordinary people (with the bottom ninety percent), and you must lie all the time just to function as a politician, you can easily succumb to our default, bestial mode of surviving on unimaginative selfishness and belligerence.

But what about Donald Trump’s supporters? Do they really believe any of the crazy things they say or are they, too, performing a cynical, sadistic role? Do they care mainly about embarrassing the liberals, and avenging themselves against the establishment by tearing it down and putting nothing in its place? Do they support Trump not because they trust in his farcical leadership but because he’s willing to be the bull in the China shop, due to his severe mental disorders?

The Trolling of Corporate Journalism

One reason why these questions are important is because the answers should affect the way the political news is covered. Taking Republican talking points at face value would be the opposite of being in on that party’s joke. If you suspect you’re being played, and your opponents aren’t acting in good faith, you’re not likely to report on their public statements as if they mattered to anyone.

Journalism critic Jay Rosen has pointed out that political reporters like to think of themselves as belonging to the “Church of the Savvy,” meaning that they regard themselves as political insiders who know how the system works behind the scenes so they won’t waste the viewers’ time being unrealistic, such as by altering the discourse, moving the Overton window, and speaking truth to power.

The CNN brand especially is defined by its condescending signals. But while CNN came out against Trump’s presidency and Trump’s capture of the GOP, CNN couldn’t afford to be honest about its reasons for doing so. Trump’s antics made for excellent ratings for CNN, and all the television news networks fell badly in the ratings when Trump left the stage. CNN was opposing Trump not out of patriotism but to drum up conflict to hook their viewers. The patriotic response to Trump’s pseudo-presidency would have been to refuse to cover anything Trump did in office.

The conundrum posed by the prospect of largescale political trolling is daunting for the corporate media because the troll’s joke is largely on them. The elite media’s claim to authority is their access to the power players which they retain by declining to be objective or critical in their interviews if doing so would upset the political and economic system in which they thrive.

Meanwhile, suppose the GOP no longer intends to be just a political party in a functioning republic, but has turned into an anti-American (neofascist) parasite and an apocalyptic cult, cheered on by its base of repugnant loyalists who are more interested in being entertained by their country’s self-destruction than in fixing their social problems. In that case, Republicans wouldn’t act merely as what Thomas Frank called the “wrecking crew”; rather, trolling for them would be something like a military tactic. Trump’s supporters would be trolling the Democrats, the corporate media, and indeed established experts in all fields, including the medical industry to distract from their cult’s moral vacuum.

Trolling and Dystopian Hypernormality

What, after all, is trolling? Trolling is a performance designed to infuriate your opponent, perhaps even to expose the latter’s facade as a sham by provoking her to lose her cool.

Think of the climactic scene in “A Few Good Men,” when Tom Cruise’s lawyer character needles Jack Nicholson’s colonel who’s testifying on the witness stand. The colonel forgets himself, launches into an inhuman tirade, and loses on the finer legal point at issue. But now imagine that instead of just asking unpleasant questions, Cruise’s character had dressed up as Michael Myers, held a machete to the colonel’s neck, and urinated on his medals.

Trolling or performance art can become so extreme that it takes on a hypernormal status. The comedian Andy Kaufman explored this kind of performance in the ’70s and early ’80s, gaslighting his audience so they couldn’t tell the difference between reality and the show. Perhaps, having practiced transcendental meditation, his intentions were religious, the point being that maybe the world we perceive and take for reality is an illusion.

But the pioneers in this blurring of ontological lines in the modern age were the Nazis. In Mein Kampf Adolph Hitler coined the expression “the big lie,” by which he meant a lie so audacious that no one would believe someone “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” The Nazis projected their amorality onto the Jews, maintaining that the Jews were the big liars in that sense for blaming the German military for Germany’s loss in WWI. The much larger lie that took control of Germans, of course, was the scapegoating of the Jews for all of Germany’s problems. That lie led to the hypernormal absurdity of Nazism.

“Hypernormality” here refers to a type of exhaustion when all sides know they’re being conned, but the con has been so audacious that it’s been taken up by the powers that be, so telling the truth would no longer save the victims. The documentarian Adam Curtis shows how the Soviet Union operated in a state of hypernormality, since ordinary Russians saw that soviet propaganda was balderdash, as the soviet economy was being held together by duct tape. But for fear of speaking out under the dystopian circumstances, they had to pretend to be enthusiastic supporters of soviet communism. And they pretended for so long that they no longer cared about principles of integrity. North Korea under the Kim dynasty has likely been operating under similar conditions of surreality.

This was the point also of George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, when Big Brother tests the protagonist’s loyalty to the party by asking whether, if the Party says he’s being shown five fingers when really there are only four, he will agree with the Party or side with his lying eyes.

This was the essence, too, of Pascal’s Wager, which was an exercise in calculated behaviourism. The mathematician and theologian Blaise Pascal said that we ought to bet on God for fear of taking the chance of angering him in the afterlife. And if we have trouble believing in God, being motivated by mere fear, we ought to fake it until we make it, to act as though we had genuine faith until we’re accustomed to the performance, whereupon our religious persona would be hypernormalized.

Perhaps we’re predisposed to gaslighting others, though, because as children we learn that we sometimes get what we want by whining or by fake crying, and parents’ pity and protectiveness are liable to be triggered even by the exaggerated displays of helplessness.

The handicap principle might also motivate us to cope with big lies by way of demonstrating our resilience: when animals can succeed in mating dances and the like, despite their conspicuous handicaps, they signal their inner, genetic fortitude.

The Obviousness of Republican Derangement

The evidence that Donald Trump has indulged in this totalitarian degree of demagoguery is too overwhelming to specify. Moreover, to lay out the case that Trump himself is an invidious gaslighter would be to attempt to prove something so obvious as to insult the reader’s intelligence. If you don’t yet understand that Trumpism is the American version of the rhetorical charade perpetrated by the likes of the Nazis, the Soviets, the Kim dynasty, or by any other wildly dishonest regime, the lengths to which you’ll have to go to excuse Trump and his supporters will themselves provide all the evidence needed of the hypernormality, the big lies, and the trolling.

For example, out of deference to Trump, some Republican politicians are rewriting recent history and pretending that the storming of Capitol Hill wasn’t a harebrained attempt at a Trumpian coup but was mostly a peaceful protest or a violent one caused by left-wing Antifa, contrary to the extensive video coverage that everyone saw. Likewise, Republicans in the Senate blocked a bipartisan commission into the causes of that insurgency, potentially covering up some of the Republicans’ complicity with the rioters.

This shows, first, the feebleness of the Democratic Party. It’s not just a question of votes in Congress. The main problem, rather, is that even the disgraced and exiled Donald Trump exerts much more influence on the GOP than does the Democratic Party because Trump can outsell all the Democrats put together. But this episode also shows that politics for Republicans is a game; more precisely, Republicans have mastered the dark art of amoral political maneuvering so that their chutzpah seems effortless.

But let’s face the question directly: Has the Trump Party now been reduced to mere trolling? Have Trump’s supporters succumbed to so many big lies that they’re living in a carefree state of hypernormality? If so, taking at face value anything they say or do would be a ludicrous dereliction of civil duty.

There’s one piece of evidence that seems decisive in this context. The cult of Trump no longer subscribes to orthodox Republican ideology, that is, to libertarian and Evangelical “Christian” rhetorical cover for the perpetuation of plutocratic, social Darwinian dominance hierarchies via rigged, “free market capitalism.” Loyalty to Trump has trumped that ideology, which is why Republicans found themselves making excuses for President Trump’s tariff wars and increased governmental debt, and why Evangelicals turned themselves into pretzels to rationalize Trump’s anti-Christian character and antics.

Trump would castigate stalwart Republicans like Liz Cheney solely because they refused to succumb to his latest exercise in mesmerism: Cheney, for example, was removed from her leadership position in the House because she wouldn’t downplay the storming of the Capitol or pretend that Joe Biden stole the 2020 election with massive voter fraud. Cheney is ideologically more conservative than her replacement Elise Stefanik, who “was the co-chair of the Tuesday Group, a caucus of moderate Republican lawmakers committed to working with Democrats shortly after Trump’s election.” What’s more, Cheney is even more Trumpian than Stefanik, voting for Trump’s policies 93% of the time compared to Stefanik’s 78%.

That’s ironclad evidence that policies and ideology don’t matter to Republicans under Trump. But the appearance of caring about conservative ideas used to be crucial to Republicans under Ronald Reagan, Newt Gingrich, and George W. Bush as well as under the likes of Jerry Falwell Sr, Ann Coulter, and Ben Shapiro. Back then, conservatives were the cold warriors and the so-called moral majority, waging culture war against the forces of secularism, effete liberalism/socialism, and the Axis of Evil.

Trump’s Role in the Hollow GOP

It might seem, on the contrary, that the January 6th insurrection on Capitol Hill showed that the Republicans can’t be just trolling, that they must stand for something. However, if millions of Republicans actually believed in the QAnon conspiracies or were convinced that the Democrats are intent on destroying America or that they’re in league with the devil, the US would already be deep into a second civil war. And Trump’s lemmings wouldn’t have left Capitol Hill until thousands lay dead.

Instead, the “insurrectionists” looked like they were throwing an infantile temper tantrum, with no strategy or iron will behind their cockamamie rhetoric. True, they graduated from mere verbal trolling on Twitter or 4chan to a hostile public demonstration. But their actions were as fruitless and as frivolous as their baseless tirades. The full scope of their derangement has been aimed not at rationally solving anything but at punishing their country by humiliating it with displays of their rank irrationality.

In his CNN special, “Radical Rebellion: The Transformation of the GOP,” Fareed Zakaria explains why the transition happened, the main point being that the conservatives lost the culture war so they had to shift ground. Instead of admitting defeat at the hands of the liberal elites, though, the conservatives were rankled by their paper tiger leaders who had made grandiose promises only to fail to deliver the Gilead-style dystopia the conservative voters longed for (in their antimodern, anti-intellectual ignorance).

(Not even Reagan’s heroism was unambiguous, since Republican belligerence in the Cold War seems to have prolonged the Soviet Union, the latter having been ready to collapse before the Americans were prepared to negotiate. Only Reagan’s eventual “embrace of Gorbachev and praise for his reforms gave the Soviet leader the latitude to enact the political and social changes — perestroika, glasnost, demokratizatsiya — that ultimately caused the collapse of the Soviet Union.”)

Consequently, American conservatives think Trump is a godsend because unlike real politicians who at least make a show of caring about governing and about the welfare of their constituents, Trump’s reckless enough to deliver directly and shamelessly on the barbaric cultural agenda or, at a minimum, he’ll scorch the earth behind his failures, to vent conservatives’ frustrations.

Trump’s monstrousness symbolizes Republicans’ weakness, not their strength. His petty treacheries stand for the Republicans’ naked resort to cheating to steal elections when the vast majority oppose the shenanigans that used to be known as their policies. Trump stands also for Republicans’ indignation at having to hide their values’ unpopularity by turning their party into a cult or a primitive tribe that no longer talks about its policies or even pretends to govern for the good of the nation. This is how populism or demagoguery often works, by channeling mass grievances until the democracy loses its republican checks on mob rule.

How Will Trumpian Trolling End?

The upshot is that when you hear Trump’s Republicans talk about building a wall, keeping out foreigners, draining the swamp, bringing the troops home, rejecting fake news from the media, not wearing masks in a pandemic, or proclaiming that Trump won re-election in 2020, you should keep in mind that none of that talk likely matters to Trump or to his supporters.

The supporters are only trolling their American foes, meaning they’re performing their grievances to save face or to win at counterproductive rivalries to rubberstamp the essence of American society. And like Big Brother or real-world fascist dictators, Trump relishes the feeling of being empowered at the expense of his loyalists. Trump is a narcissist who needs to feed his childish ego with displays of his dominance at least as much as he needs to feed himself with food.

The question is whether there’s a non-catastrophic offramp for such a deluded, sore losing, trolling, hypernormalized excuse for a political party. Possibly, the latest technologies that shorten our attention span will come to the rescue. Like a toddler that’s whining because she’s spilled her milk, but that can be easily diverted by dangling a new toy in front of her, the “conservative” troll might take up the technological invitation to forget her tantrums.