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Trump’s Kryptonite
Trump’s superpower is entirely human and all too common. Recognizing it is the first step to defeating bad explanations.
This the first post in a series that explores the pandemic and its impact on problem-solving and knowledge creation.
Do you think Trump has a superpower? Depending on your leanings, he’s either a political genius or an idiot savant. “He is completely unencumbered by the truth,” wrote Charles Blow, “the need to tell it or accept it.”
Trump attributes his success to his gut and his style is certainly fast and intuitive. But the ability is altogether human, used and abused by all of us. Trump marshals industrious little rationalizations called ad hocs to fatigue his foes. Fact checkers lie exhausted in his wake as he moves from one alternate reality to the next.
Trump certainly seems impervious to reality. He’s weathered countless scandals, court battles, even a Presidential impeachment. Teflon Donald. Not even recorded evidence can stop him. “What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening,” he told his faithful. He famously boasted that he could “stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody,” and still not lose voters.
But in Trump’s perverse fairy tale, only one person is hurt. What happens when reality changes so profoundly that hundreds of thousands of people are lost in the pandemic’s wake?
History suggests the pandemic is the perfect setting for Trump’s authoritarian impulses. The chaos of a crisis provides ample cover. On the occasion of Donald Trump’s election in 2016, Timothy Snyder shared 20 prescient lessons for recognizing authoritarian behaviors. He highlighted how authoritarians will seize on “emergencies” and “exceptions” to alter the balance of power. Snyder wrote, “The sudden disaster that requires the end of the balance of power, the end of opposition parties, and so on, is the oldest trick in the Hitlerian book.” Many authoritarians apparently got the playbook: Hungary’s Viktor Orbán and Russia’s Vladimir Putin are staging “coronavirus coups” to seize even greater power.
Unlike these other authoritarians, Trump’s political fortunes are suffering during the pandemic. Why?
