ECHOES IN THE GASLIT CHAMBER
Much was made of Robert Mueller’s mien during his July 24 testimony before the House Judiciary and Intelligence committees: how he seemed, to quote Rachel Maddow from her interview with Intel chair Adam Schiff that night, “old…less vital.” This was something I picked up on listening to the hearings on NPR that day as I drove to New England to visit my sister. (When I saw video highlights that night, I was surprised by the intensity of Mueller’s gaze as he focused on his questioners.) Unsurprisingly, enablers and followers of POTUS were less charitable. An NBC News live blog cited the following responses:
Conservative radio host Mark Levin described him as looking “feeble.” Matt Schlapp, American Conservative Union chairman and husband of campaign aide Mercedes Schlapp, tweeted that it’s “amazing to think that Bob Mueller and Bill Barr are approximately the same age.” Sen. Lindsey Graham, without referring to Mueller himself directly, is calling the hearing “confusing and sad.”
And writers on conservative media sites like the Daily Caller amused themselves over his performance.
Most of what I found amusing (in the not-haha-funny way) came from GOP attempts to discredit Mueller and/or his investigation, and the real zinger was served up by the Intel ranking member. As I told members of my Indivisible group, “When the Intelligence Committee hearing started, I was wondering what sort of conspiratorial nonsense Devin Nunes was going to come up with. He did not disappoint.” But then a Daily Show mashup of his opening statement and remarks by Sean Hannity appeared in my Twitter feed the next morning, showing that Nunes had cribbed a substantial amount of his statement verbatim from the Fox hack. In light of this, the ranking member’s performance assumed a whole new level of…something.
It was absurd, obviously. In kind, Nunes was arguably doing what most party-affiliated politicians do: share talking points in an effort to coordinate their messaging to voters. Dems on the two committees reverted again and again to the mantra, “No one is above the law,” for example. But considered in this context, Nunes’ effort was, to put it mildly, inept. It reminded this former English prof a little of the plagiarized papers she used to get from struggling students with gobs of unaltered or mildly altered text copied from web sources and stitched in with varying degrees of felicity. The parody Twitter account Devin Nunes’ Alt-Mom also played on this connection:
But Nunes’ performance wasn’t just absurd. This sort of parroting has become a common feature of the current iteration of the GOP — the party of Trump. Nunes was far from the only GOP rep to borrow lines from Fox News during the Mueller hearings. Members of the current administration and other enablers regularly pass on the Trumpian li(n)e du jour, whether it’s AG Barr echoing Trump’s assertion of “No collusion” multiple times during his cynical rollout of the Mueller report, or House minority leader Kevin McCarthy endorsing POTUS’s reckless, baseless claim in April of this year that the 2016 Strzok-Page text exchange was evidence of an attempted deep state “coup.” Trump himself often gets material from Hannity, and repeats oodles of lunacy from the far-right fringes of the Twitterverse; both return the favor. And then there’s the most garish expression of this linguistic circle jerk, the allegedly choreographed chants of Trump slogans that attendees at his stupid rallies participate in: “Lock her up!” “Build that wall!” “Send her back!” etc. etc. etc.
The appeal of this far-right echo chamber for its consumers is obvious enough. Having the same stuff repeated to you in an endless loop is like hearing nothing but your favorite songs on the radio, or watching nothing but your favorite shows on television. It’s pleasurable, and it’s also reassuring: you’re affirmed in your belief about how the world is, because it’s pretty much all you hear about the world. Anything new that enters the chamber — viz. the “Send her back!” chant — is of a piece with what’s already in there, and this firms up your belief, since it seems to demonstrate that threatening developments in the world outside can be identified and explained within the chamber, and targeted for retaliation. In this sense, echo chambers are doppelgängers of religious faith, offering surety about what underlies the apparent chaos of the world. For Trump’s followers, going to a rally gives them a chance to enact that surety, and exact at least symbolic vengeance on their perceived enemies, in the secure embrace of thousands of loud, like-minded supporters. It’s this feature that makes the rallies a weird hybrid of revival meeting and monster truck rally.
Needless to say, all this makes the far-right echo chamber more than a little sinister to those of us on the outside. The reassurance it offers comes at the expense of others. The pleasure it affords depends on the stimulation of emotions that run counter to the ideals of an inclusive democracy (resentment, fear, etc.). Reinforced at the rallies and in the far-right media and blogosphere, these feelings obviously play into Trump’s crass nativism. And of course its consumers are vulnerable to misinformation. The response of one Michigan Trump supporter to Rep. Justin Amash’s explanation of his advocacy of impeachment at a May town hall epitomizes this: “I was surprised to hear there was anything negative in the Mueller report at all about President Trump,” she said. “…I’ve mainly listened to conservative news and I hadn’t heard anything negative about that report and President Trump has been exonerated.”
The fact that this voter declared her intention to support Trump in 2020 in spite of what she had learned that night shows that facts aren’t necessarily kryptonite to the gaslighting — to call it what it is — that she and other consumers of this echo chamber continue to undergo. There are reasons that the feel-good aspects of their consumption (an inclination to bigotry, a longstanding set of unaddressed grievances, etc.) make them willing dupes. At the same time, echo chambers, as their largely hermetic nature suggests, are vulnerable to the hard light of day.
The reasons for that aren’t far to seek either. The more a story is based on fabrication, the more the willingness to accede to it depends on the spectacle of other people doing so, in short, the more it resembles an epistemological Ponzi scheme, the closer the people invested in spreading the story need to cleave to its particulars. Deviations from the script risk prompting listeners to direct their gaze elsewhere, become aware of other possibilities, and start to question what they’re being told. Considered in this broader context, Nunes’ verbatim parroting of Hannity during the House Intel hearing was a savvy enough recognition of this vulnerability. You don’t riff on alt-scripture.
Echo chambers are especially vulnerable when, as is the case with Trump, a con is involved. Finding out you’ve been lied to is one thing, but finding out you’ve been fleeced in the bargain (by tax cuts and various forms of deregulation that are exacerbating income inequality, by the gutting of the ACA, etc.) is something else again. Trump’s genius, if that’s not too strong a word for it, as a con man lies in part in his ability to recognize and defend his weak spots. The playbook ain’t rocket science — divert, lie, attack — but the level of execution is unprecedented from an occupant of the Oval Office. Don’t just say What about…?, turn the damn tables upside down. Go big and nasty after political opponents, war heroes, celebs, victims of mass shootings and weather events, and the public servants trying to minister to them, Gold Star parents, immigrants, women, the disabled, brown and black and queer people, etc. etc. Draw attention to your strength, even if that strength is merely being a bigger douche bro than everyone else. Don’t just lie about things that touch on your points of vulnerability, lie about everything. Call the very possibility of “self evident” truths into question. And don’t just counter-punch, hammer proactively and relentlessly at those who question your mounting Everest of fabrications. “Just remember,” he notoriously declared to a group of veterans last July, “what you are seeing and what you are reading is not what’s happening… Just stick with us, don’t believe the crap you see from these people, the fake news.” For those whose support is predicated not simply on the economic dividends and/or racist spectacles he’s delivering, but also in some measure on a belief in the alt-reality he’s wrapping his deliverables in, this kind of zero-sum us/them crap adds an extra safeguard for retaining that support.
The X factor that has made Trump’s con so effective, though, is his skill as a mesmerist c/w the brute force of his personality. Racist and economic resentment and the quirks of the electoral college map, with a likely assist from a hostile foreign power, all helped enable his campaign to seize the White House in 2016. But Trump himself, of course, played no small part in the seizure, and has played an ever bigger role since. Any grifter can puff up their chest and start gaslighting: it takes a special form of manic charisma, one that the word “bully” only begins to capture, to fix the gaze of a sizable minority of the nation for this long. And it’s his hold on this block of voters that has been key to keeping the power brokers in the party he hijacked in line — and thus shielding himself in large measure from calls for impeachment.
For how long he will continue to hold his dupes in thrall and justice at bay will depend on several things, notably the health of the economy, which his idiot tariffs are showing signs of weakening. One hopeful sign of his diminishing control over things that doesn’t entail the suffering of tens of millions of people is the increased frequency with which he’s lying. While sometimes credited to his greater “comfort” in the office, it’s at least as (and arguably more) symptomatic of how desperate he’s becoming to divert attention from all the kompromat that threatens that control. As the Washington Post’s fact checker database shows, his lying spiked around the 2018 midterms, when the GOP was thrashed in House races, and since this spring, the paper reports, he has been telling demonstrable falsehoods at the staggering rate of around 20 per day (up from 15/day at the end of 2018, which in turn was “almost three times his 2017 rate”).
This whiff of desperation suggests that the congressional, judicial, and state-level pushback against his administration’s policies, and the federal and state probes into its patent malfeasance are having an effect. Continuing to call out the lies, racism, and cruelty, and exposing the con for what it is, as both Trump’s political opponents and media outlets like WaPo have been doing, is another necessary mode of resistance, one that we can all contribute to. And we can call out those among his supporters who know who he is and profess not to care, whether because they say they like (benefit from) his policies or for other reasons. Few of us have the megaphone of U.S. Rep Joaquin Castro with which to publicly shame the fat cats. On whatever scale we operate, though, we can work to strip away the privilege-stoked grievances and conspiratorial bullshit that saturate the far-right echo chamber, lay bare his supporters’ complicity in his administration’s toxicity, and raise the question to what extent their support is in fact about that toxicity — to what extent they themselves are racists, sexists, homo-/transphobes, etc. That’s no panacea, of course: Trump parades his shamelessness openly, and Twitter is awash in pix and videos of his #deplorables behaving in similar ways. But surely those like the Michigan voter who could express surprise over the coverage of Mueller’s report, not to mention the juror in the first Manafort trial last year who “did not want [him] to be guilty” but acknowledged that the evidence was “overwhelming,” are still susceptible to shame.
