Navigating the Nonsense and Propaganda of Clownish Authoritarianism

Ignoring what Trump says won’t work. Constant outrage is not a viable strategy either. We must find a more productive way to engage Trump’s dangerous outlandishness

credit: Sky News

A key challenge of our era has been to resist the temptation to constantly rage against Trump’s latest antics – while making sure the silliness and buffoonery of Trumpism doesn’t obscure how extreme and dangerous the situation is. We must not allow ourselves to be lulled into a false sense of security by the clownishness, the ridiculousness of this man and many of his most vocal followers.

Trump’s press conference at Mar-a-Lago on January 7 offered a reminder of how difficult it can be to strike that balance. The man who is about to return to the most powerful political office in the world was his usual outrageous self. A few highlights: Trump announced the name of the Gulf of Mexico would soon be changed to “Gulf of America”; he declared he would use “economic force” to annex Canada and make it an American state; he was adamant “we need Greenland for national security purposes,” and that Denmark should therefore “give it up”; and when asked if he could assure the world he wouldn’t use military or economic coercion to get control over foreign territories like Greenland or the Panama Canal, he replied: “No. I can’t assure you. I’m not going to commit to that. It might be that you’ll have to do something.”

(There was also some windmills hatred, maybe Trump’s weirdest obsession – they are “driving the whales crazy,” the leader of the American Right explained. “Obviously.” But let’s stick with the imperialism part of the press conference.)

Inevitably, everyone across the political spectrum has been talking about Trump’s ramblings. On the Right, the sycophants came out quickly to explain why everything Trump said was brilliant, and those who consider themselves thinkers have been busy coming up with pseudo-sophisticated justifications for how it all fits with a coherent rightwing ideology. Non-MAGA America, meanwhile, has been divided: Do we need to take these proclamations seriously as a specter of what is to come – or dismiss them as silly distractions?

As we are all facing life under a clownish wannabe-authoritarian, it is worth grappling in earnest with the question of how we should calibrate our reactions to Trump. Some may think the “savvy” thing would be to just ignore his outlandish ramblings. As observers and citizens, we indeed need to be judicious about where we focus our energies. But Trump is not some fringe extremist online provocateur who is best dealt with by not dealing with him. And when people reflexively declare his public utterances a distraction, I sometimes find myself wondering: A distraction from what? Let’s not pretend the Trumpian drama is just noise than can be neatly separated from the *real* work of doing politics. There is a fine line between staying focused on the bigger picture and clinging to a version of “normalcy” that has little to do with a political reality shaped and distorted by Trumpian extremism. The president’s words have power, Trump is about to be president – and he comes with a whole machinery of rightwing activists, intellectuals, and media propagandists who will do as he says and do their best to make sure reality adjusts.

Then again, there is little use in being outraged all the time. It is exhausting, mentally and emotionally. Trump won’t stop. We should not let him dictate the conversation so easily. There is also a risk of perpetuating the assertions of dominance behind Trump’s musings. Not much separates raging at his every word from despairing over our supposedly hopeless situation. MAGA desires to project power and strength – something we should subvert rather than confirm. Let’s not indulge the false bravado.

Three questions

Through much of the past decade that he has spent as a leading figure on the Right, Trump has benefited from the fact that somehow, a lot of people steadfastly refuse to take his most radical, most aggressive announcements seriously, while at the same time insisting that he speaks for “real America,” the tribune of the people who we owe deference, whose every word must be amplified. It has been an ideal situation for Trump: He gets the biggest possible platform while never being held accountable for what he chooses to do with it.

We will need to transcend that dynamic and seek a more productive way of reacting to Trump. I believe we should engage Trump’s outlandishness by asking three questions.

1) Whose lives are impacted?

If no one is actually affected in concrete ways by what Trump says, it may not be worth getting all riled up about it. The problem is that as he is the undisputed leader of the American Right and the soon-to-be president of the United States, there is a high chance his words do have real-world consequences. They are speech acts, fueled by power. Think back to September, for instance, when Donald Trump joined JD Vance in trying to incite a pogrom against the Haitian migrant community in Springfield, Ohio. It didn’t matter that almost nothing Trump and Vance said – about Haitians “draining social services” and “eating pets” – had any basis in fact. “Illegal Haitian migrants have descended upon a town of 58,000 people destroying their way of life,” Trump raged. The vile propaganda quickly had its desired effect. Schools and public buildings had to be evacuated because of bomb threats; acts of vandalism against the Haitian community followed; neo-Nazis were marching through town. Life in Springfield, Ohio upended. All based on outrageous lies.

2) How is this supposed to work?

Whenever Trump makes grand proclamations, it is worth thinking about if and how he can actually put them into practice. From the White House, with a Republican trifecta and a hard-right Supreme Court majority, Trump and the extreme Right hold an enormous amount of power. Any analysis of what is to come that doesn’t start there and instead clings to the idea that Trump is simply too “lazy” or “undisciplined” to cause major harm should probably be discarded. But there are still limits to presidential power, to his legal and constitutional authority, and there are still a lot of other players involved on the local, state, and federal level. For example, there is simply no way for Trump to make the rest of the world call the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” And no matter how many times leading MAGA operatives declare they want to use the military to put their mass deportation fever dreams into practice, there is no clear mechanism for this to actually happen – the path from “declare an emergency” to “use troops to round up millions of people” is not at all clear.

Inevitably, at this point, someone will say: “Ugh, how are you still talking about Trump as if he gives a sh*t about the constitution or the law?!?” Trust me, I do not need to be reminded who and what Trump is. But it is not just about him. He would need compliance and active complicity from a lot of people and institutions who are under no legal or constitutional obligation to follow his orders. Being lawless does not make Trump omnipotent – and obscuring that distinction is an act of defeatism that only serves the regime. There is a vast gulf between Trump’s authoritarian aspirations and rightwing propaganda on the one hand and the realities of a complex modern state and society on the other. And in that space, politics will continue to happen, possibilities to resist and push back exist.

3) What do Trump’s proclamations reveal about the Right’s animating worldview and Trumpism as a political project?

Whenever Trump says something truly extreme or utterly outlandish, a lot of people chalk it up to “Trump being Trump,” to his inability to stay on message, his tendency to go on crazy tangents and simply make stuff up. But quite often, what may sound idiosyncratically Trump is actually quite in line with – and indicative of – the Right’s broader vision for America. During the election campaign, for instance, Trump was very consistent in focusing on immigration and presenting mass deportation as the central goal of his regime. There was indeed something particularly Trumpian in the way he kept escalating the number of people he wants to deport all the way up to 20 million, 25 million, maybe more. But the focus on how “crazy” the fluctuating numbers were obscured what taking the magnitude seriously should have revealed: What the Trumpist Right desires is a purge of the nation that will not be confined to undocumented people. They have been talking about “denaturalization” for a long time. All the planning operations on the Right, including Project 2025, have been prioritizing immigration. And the hard-right intellectual sphere is openly dreaming about redrawing the boundaries of citizenship and excluding everyone they believe is simply not worthy of inclusion in the body politic. Trump’s raging was capturing the Right’s overall project quite well.

Trump’s bizarre insistence on “territorial expansion,” as the mainstream media describes it in rather euphemistic fashion, can similarly serve as a window into how the MAGA Right sees the world and America’s place in it. The Trumpists are definitely all in: Marjorie Taylor Greene has already announced she will introduce legislation to make the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.” Senator Tommy Tuberville says “We’ve gotta take the Panama Canal back.” Fox News propaganda is emphasizing the need to annex Greenland “for war purposes,” Elon Musk is X-tweeting about Greenland, and the wannabe-thought leaders on the extreme Right are running with the idea that acquiring Greenland should be “a major priority” for Trump.

This is partly just the work of sycophants who are hoping to curry favor with their Dear Leader. But this isn’t just about Trump and his bonkers ideas. One reason why his imperialist ramblings resonate so much with the Right is that there is a long tradition of such expansionist desires. The Panama Canal, for instance, was an obsession of the radical Right in the 1960s and 70s. As he rose to become the leader of the Republican Party, Ronald Reagan constantly brought it up, indulging in some kind of hyper-nationalist nostalgia. And annexing both Canada and Greenland has been on the radar of the more radical factions of the rightwing alliance since the late 1980s, at least. As Jeet Heer has pointed out, Pat Buchanan explicitly called this his “American Dream” in the spring of 1990. Buchanan plays a key role in the pre-history of Trumpism. In 1992, Buchanan led an – ultimately unsuccessful, at least in the moment – rightwing revolt against the Republican establishment in the GOP primaries. He channeled the frustrations of “paleo-conservatives” who thought the Republican Party was in the hands of elites who did not do nearly enough to push back against the liberal onslaught of racial, cultural, and religious pluralism, who wanted to take a more explicit stance against egalitarian democracy, who demanded more radical measures in defense of an ethno-nationalist vision of “real America” as a white Christian homeland. Crucially, Buchanan was also instrumental in shifting the Right’s focus more explicitly to what came to be called the “culture wars.”

The “paleo-conservatives” saw themselves in the tradition of a more authentic “Old Right” – before the “modern conservatism” of William F. Buckley in the 1950s and 60s, and certainly before the rise of the “neo-conservatives” in the final third of the twentieth century who aggressively supported the idea of projecting American power globally via the liberal international order. The paleos wanted to take the country back to the “America First” vision of the 1940s. That tradition has often – and misleadingly – been described as “isolationist,” because the America Firsters of the forties did not want the United States to enter the war against Hitler. But it was never isolationism. This strand of the American Right has been steadfastly opposed to committing America to any kind of “liberal” order or fighting for “democracy” across the globe. What they have always desired, however, is hegemony in the Western Hemisphere. Their vision is about domination.

To the extent Trumpism has a clear idea about America’s role in the world, it is in line with this “America First” tradition. I doubt Trump’s obsession with Greenland comes from reading Buchanan – or reading anything at all. But it doesn’t necessitate much sophisticated analysis to understand why such dreams of territorial expansion would appeal to him. As a political project, Trumpism promises to restore former glory by purging dangerous outsiders and the “enemy within” from the nation – and by ruthlessly asserting dominance in the world wherever and whenever America wants.

Trumpism is, in many ways, much more a continuation of long-standing ideas and impulses on the radical Right – an exacerbation and radicalization, yes, but not a departure. If we pay attention, his most outlandish ramblings can help us identify those dangerous tendencies and impulses more clearly.

I fear that, after so many years of Trumpism shaping American politics and culture, a lot of people have become so inundated with Trump’s bizarre stunts, so accustomed to his outrageous rhetoric, that they might be numb to how dangerous this is – and how much this isn’t just “Trump being Trump,” but the face of a radicalizing Right in charge of the Republican Party. There is, unfortunately, no law of nature that says democracy can’t be brought down and wars can’t be started by a bunch of clowns if they have enough support from people, parties, and institutions who enable them. It’s all just a farce – until the goons and buffoons are in power. And that’s where we are.