Courtesy of NBC
I am sure this is not the first time you have heard this, but the president of the United States deploying the National Guard upon the population of his own country and authorizing “full force” is not normal. Neither is the president describing an American city with a plummeting homicide rate and a bunch of inflatable frogs gathered outside as a “warzone” with “fires all over the place,” mounting to “almost an insurrection.”
Though President Donald Trump has been known for his lies since well before his 2016 campaign, during his second term there has been a stark shift in his rhetoric from being somewhat grounded in reality toward manufacturing an outright false reality for his supporters. When he falsely accused Haitian refugees of “eating the cats and dogs” during the 2024 presidential debate, Vice President J.D. Vance’s response was rather damning:
“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”
It is during times like this that a quote from political theorist Hannah Arendt’s 1951 magnum opus “The Origins of Totalitarianism” pops into my head.
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist,” Arendt writes.
Trump’s bold-faced lies serve a purpose. He can call Portland a warzone, and despite every bit of evidence contradicting him, his supporters will follow. For them, and for many people who choose to disengage from the news cycle, fact does not matter. What matters is if his narrative fits their own biases. He can violate the Constitutional right to birthright citizenship guaranteed by the plain text of the 14th Amendment, then release a statement claiming that he did it to protect the Constitution. His administration can refer to those detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) as “violent criminal illegal aliens” despite scores of American citizens and legal immigrants without a criminal record being arrested. His advisor Stephen Miller can call judicial rulings against his agenda to deploy the National Guard on peaceful protestors a “legal insurrection” after his master Trump pardoned the Jan. 6 insurrectionists. He can make all of these claims and more, and his base will continue to shout his talking points in denial of objective reality. Reality, to them, is now a matter of opinion.
When the president of the most powerful nation in the world presents an ever-changing false reality, when he breaches the Constitution in the name of defending it, when he calls innocent parents following immigration procedure violent criminals, when he calls peaceful protestors lawless and the Jan. 6 insurrection lawful and it seems there is no power in the world to check him, it is a sign that we are no longer in a democratic regime. We are rapidly backsliding towards an uncertain future under a dictatorship, and we are not sounding the alarm loud enough. The sense of unreality we feel now is designed to keep us confused. It is what is keeping us frogs sitting together in a boiling pot.
Portland is seemingly on the right track. Rather than playing into his propaganda, protestors have chosen to hold dance parties, dress in inflatable costumes and discourage violence at demonstrations. But when the Republican party of our own state posts a badly photoshopped image of Portland Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers over a fiery protest in Venezuela, I cannot help but wonder if reality will stop those who no longer live in it.
I fear that, regardless of the peacefulness of the demonstrations, Trump will escalate things from here, just like he has for his entire second term. When he threatened to deploy the National Guard to Portland in June, it felt like an empty threat to many. None of us are laughing now. When he authorizes full force, claims that unrelated, cherry-picked incidents of political violence are the fruit of a militarized “antifa” movement fueled by dark money, and talks openly about persecuting political dissidents, he means it. This will not just go away. Things will not go back to normal so easily.
This recent wave of political persecution was arguably triggered by the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Trump’s recent National Security Presidential Memorandum 7 (NSPM-7), titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” established a coordinated national strategy to “investigate and disrupt networks, entities, and organizations that foment political violence.” The order opens citing the assasination of Charlie Kirk. Using the shield of anti-terrorist action, Trump uses Kirk’s death as justification for pursuing his ideological opposition:
“Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.”
When the Reichstag building, home of the German parliament, burned down in 1933, a single communist agitator was the culprit. Sensing an opportunity, the majority Nazi Party quickly characterized the attack as a plot by all communists to overthrow the government. The fire led to an emergency decree which suspended all civil liberties, and a mass arrest of communists ensued. In the upcoming election, the Nazi Party won the majority of seats — the communists were unable to vote.
Within aspiring oppressive regimes, tragedies by lone actors are used to seize power and fuel persecution. It takes just one incident, one justification, for civil liberty to be cracked down upon, just as the Nazi Party did after the Reichstag fire. The day an ICE agent or a member of the federalized National Guard applies lethal force on someone and gets away with it, things will get even worse. We need to be prepared for that possibility.
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