This is the third time Donald Trump has run for president as a major-party candidate, and yet, this cycle, the American electorate and the American press seem unable to fully comprehend the choice we are facing.* It is not, as we’ve been trained to think, a contest between an extreme Republican and a middle-of-the-road Democrat. There is still no language that conveys what the stakes really are. This election is not about politics; it’s much more basic—it’s about how the American determines what is real. Will the future of the country be based on evidence and law, or will government be twisted to reflect whatever Donald Trump tells us is true?
It reminds me of a series of phone calls I started receiving, when I was a teenager, from women I didn’t know. They were all looking for a man named Steven Reisner, whom they had been dating; somehow, none of them had ever gotten his phone number, so they had found me in the phone book. It turned out that, invariably, after a few dates, this other Steven Reisner had borrowed money from them, then disappeared. I remember one particularly plaintive voice on the phone: “Steven, why are you lying to me? What have I done wrong?” Try as I might, I couldn’t convince her that it wasn’t me. “Does this mean our engagement is off?” she asked me.
Since those calls, I have come to realize that those women simply did not understand that they had been dating a sociopath. That’s because people who are not sociopathic just can’t believe that pure sociopathy exists. They can recognize that they are being lied to, even being manipulated, but still they believe that somewhere inside the sociopath there is a human being like they are, perhaps a hurting soul gone astray. Psychologists, too, make this mistake, believing that sociopaths are not strategic but, rather, mentally ill, because they were traumatized in childhood. It’s extremely difficult for decent people to accept that there are some people who simply do not share their values about truth and basic human kindness. This is what the sociopath counts on.
Democrats in particular suffer from this neurosis; they are regularly surprised and outraged with each new iteration of Trump’s lies and cruelty, reacting not unlike the women who used to call me on the phone. They just can’t believe that someone could be so brazenly deceptive and selfish and get away with it. Over and over again. Politics has always been a tough game, Democrats think, but even Dick Cheney believes in the rules. These rules can be stretched, but ultimately, they continue to tell themselves, the system will persevere, right?
To my ears, it sounds the same as “Does this mean our engagement is off?”
We are now at the eleventh hour. The Republicans, under the brilliant tutelage of Donald Trump, have become the Party of Sociopaths, and their aim is to relegate the Democrats to a Party of Hapless Neurotics. The fateful question is, will the Democrats and the mainstream press continue to waste their energy being shocked, or will they change their strategy? It all boils down to this: How will the American voter assess what is true?
For Republicans (and Fox News), truth no longer has anything to do with facts, or even reality. Truth has returned to its pre-enlightenment meaning; or, as Merriam-Webster puts it, its archaic meaning: “Fidelity, constancy.” To be true, in the medieval Trumpian world, is to be loyal and steadfast. It’s no longer about reason or even belief: It’s about faith. Freud had a word for this kind of primitive faith; he called it illusion. People crave a godlike father figure, Freud explained, especially when they feel threatened with the eruption of two dangers: “the crushingly superior force of nature … and the shortcomings of society which have made themselves painfully felt.” In the 21st century, facing severe social inequities just when nature seems most out of control, America is in exactly that vulnerable state. And so it shouldn’t actually surprise us that nearly half the country’s voters have rallied around a sociopathic strongman who promises protection in return for absolute fealty.
The Democrats and the mainstream press completely miss the big picture; they think they can combat this alternative reality by zeroing in on Trump’s lies. “Fact checking” has become the self-soothing fantasy of a neurotic press—useless because the real issue is that Trump and his followers live in a completely separate reality. There is no fact-checking exercise that could get us to a common ground because in Trump’s reality, and the reality of nearly half the country, whatever helps the sociopath score points against the Democrats is the truth.
If the Democrats are to get through this, they must take the neurotic gloves off and focus on one goal: forcing Democrats and Republicans alike to see that the Trump reality is leading the country off a cliff and that the only one with a parachute is Trump. Every speech and appearance, every TV ad and interview, every remaining moment of the campaign and afterward, when the Trump armies fight the results, must be devoted to the fact that Trump is trying to rewrite the rules by which we all live so that instead of democracy, we have a Church of Trump. He does not hide this—he has said clearly and repeatedly that his aim is to dismantle the rule of law, arrest his enemies, bring the army to police our streets, shut down the free press, and empower local armed militias to terrify anyone who stands in his way. We just refuse to believe that he will really act that way.
Kamala Harris has finally begun to call out the extreme danger of the Trumpian reality, but she also can’t help herself; she still normalizes him by labeling his statements unhinged, rather than strategic. The press neurotically follows suit, putting ironic scare quotes around his political plans: “Trump Escalates Threats to Political Opponents He Deems the ‘Enemy’ ” reads a headline in the New York Times. But Trump is not threatening an imaginary “enemy”; he is making plans to jail enemies and has already begun to name people included on the list. He has already worked out how he will use the National Guard and the larger military to silence and jail anyone he deems a threat to his power.
We can laugh along with late-night TV and leading Democrats about Trump’s dancing, just as we can call how the press is normalizing Trump’s statements “sanewashing.” But these responses are best understood as symptoms of our national neurotic delusion: the delusion that no one can really be that evil; the delusion that our system will prevent him from doing what he says he will do; the delusion that sociopaths don’t really exist. But sociopaths do exist—and in American society they become billionaires. Or they become president. Or both.
The only way to stop him is to act as if Trump does have a plan, and is deadly serious about all of it. Only we can call this engagement off.
Correction, Oct. 29, 2024: This article originally misstated that Trump has run for president three times.
