Thinking the Unimaginable (continued)

Second part: An Orwellian Totalitarianism?

This article is the second in a triptych in which Philippe de Lara analyzes the populist revolution that might sweep across the Atlantic. Here, the author explains that the Trumpist revolution has already led to a quasi-dictatorship in the United States. In particular, he draws on the language of Trump and his entourage. For him, it is an “undertaking to separate language and truth, such that the question of truth or not can no longer be asked.” The totalitarian nature of the Trumpist lie is comparable to the nightmare described by Orwell in 1984. 

“The sloppiness of our language promotes the idiocy of our thoughts.”

George Orwell¹

Since Donald Trump’s de facto departure from the Atlantic Alliance and betrayal of Ukraine, not a day goes by without a new statement or decision that increases the mortal anxiety of Ukrainians and the sideration of their European allies. Trump has chosen to ally himself with Putin, and to harass the democracies, until recently the United States’ natural allies. This reversal of alliances has had and will continue to have consequences for the world order and peace that are difficult to predict in the medium and long term, as Trump’s style and the revolutionary atmosphere in Washington deliberately foster major unpredictability. This unpredictability is heightened by Russia’s benevolent wait-and-see attitude – and even that of China, which protests against the threat of tariffs but refrains from commenting on American policy in Asia – making the purpose and viability of American strategy even more unfathomable.

It is exactly the same in U.S. domestic politics: most observers sense that the MAGA commando is transforming the American regime, but are unable to assess where and how far this transformation will go: will it be lasting or short-lived? How should we describe the regime that Trump wants to establish? An illiberal democracy along the lines of Orbán’s Hungary? Genuine fascism, as many authors, notably Timothy Snyder, believe? Or something even more worrying? In this second part of “Thinking the Unimaginable,” I attempt to draw a coherent picture of the Trumpist regime under construction, based on the chaotic and confusing clues that beset us.

An American dictatorship

A year before he entered the White House, on January 10, 2024, Donald Trump said on Fox News: “I’ll be a dictator for a day.” He added: “After that, I’m not going to be a dictator, I’m going to handle this the way we did [in the first term].” A year later, the world, dumbfounded, discovered that that first day was a groundhog day. After two months in office, Trump continues to govern by presidential decree, in the manner of an autocrat, despite having a majority in both Houses. His hatred of Joe Biden and contempt for his predecessors are as virulent as ever. He portrays himself as a savior, reminding us all the time that the 2020 election was “stolen.” The safeguards provided by the U.S. Constitution are as if frozen before the President’s revolutionary frenzy.

When he encounters opposition from the courts or the law, he simply sidesteps, as in the case of the USAID liquidation, or simply ignores the fact that his decisions are illegal². Who would have imagined that the Republican majority in the Senate would confirm all the appointments submitted for its consideration, that it would not fear dishonor and ridicule by approving without flinching, among others, the appointments of Tulsi Gabbard as head of Intelligence or Kash Patel as director of the FBI, despite their damning track records³? In addition to the authoritarian blows, there have been a flurry of more discreet decisions and appointments which, despite their chaotic appearance, outline a well-prepared revolution.

Not only is Trump sweeping aside the rules and procedures of the rule of law, he brags about it. He is staging a so-called “comeback” of America (“great again”) by destroying what made America great: checks and balances, in particular the independence of the judiciary, freedom of the press, a certain vision of individual liberty, relative moderation of political life thanks to consensus on institutions, confidence in the “melting pot” that has transformed generations of immigrants from all over the world into proud Americans. But this is not the first authoritarian populist upsurge in American history. In The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays, historian Richard Hofstadter demonstrated the periodic appearance of a paranoid style in American politics⁴. According to him, “the paranoid tendency manifests itself in the confrontation of opposing interests which are totally irreconcilable (or perceived to be so) and which therefore cannot be accommodated in the normal political process of negotiation and compromise.” The paranoid style is the form taken in America by the spirit of secession (see my previous article). The book’s title refers to the campaign of Barry Goldwater, the extremist Republican Party candidate in the 1964 presidential election⁵. But the paranoid style has also had left-wing representatives, such as Huey Long, governor of Louisiana from 1928 to 1932, defender of the poor and precursor of the New Deal, but also a corrupt quasi-dictator, openly linked to the Mafia. Huey Long was assassinated in 1935 while running for president of the United States against Roosevelt⁶. The Trump phenomenon therefore has precedents in American history, but this is the first time the “paranoid style” has reached the White House.

Of course, I am not ignoring the decisive weight of the Russian grip on the new president and his team. Donald Trump is undoubtedly the trophy of the cognitive war waged by the Kremlin, and we can see a little more every day that everything is happening as if Trump were being remote-controlled by Russia, as Françoise Thom has shown in her essays. The most revealing acts of complicity with Putin’s regime are his abandonment of Ukraine, his hostility toward its president – an “unelected dictator” at the head of a “neo-Nazi” regime – and his repeated declarations of friendship and trust toward Putin – a “man of his word” who wants peace (Trump), and “a good guy” (Witkoff). But other more discreet acts are just as damning: the purge of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the halting of the CIA’s cyberwarfare program aimed at Russia and, last but not least, the launch of the pharaonic F47 future aircraft project, which will suck up a significant portion of the Pentagon’s budget, already slashed by Elon Musk, to the detriment of U.S. military capability in the months and years to come. Nevertheless, it is important to uncover the specifically American sources of the MAGA revolution if we are to gain a thorough picture of the Trumpist phenomenon.

What Trump’s language reveals

Trump is a multi-faceted character, with each facet seeming to blur the others: the tyrant, the grotesque clown, the shopkeeper, the mafia boss, the Russian agent, the plutocrat, the professional liar, and so on. The enormity of his lies and the obscene vulgarity of his character are perplexing. During his first term already, we did not know what to make of him. After his defeat in the 2020 election, it seemed impossible that he would survive politically the lamentable assault on the Capitol by his supporters on January 6, 2021. Bewildered by his style, many observers put this aside to focus on his decisions and try to find rational explanations for them. The president’s “transactional” strategy, or the “interests” of the United States, are often mentioned, allowing us to overlook his outrages. Yet Trump’s style – his vanity, his lies, his brutality, his inconstancy, and his sloppy and confused language – is a key to the MAGA revolution. Here are the main features:

1) Revisiting the past

The most spectacular case is his insistence that the 2020 election was “stolen,” even though it was arguably the most audited election in U.S. history and that no appeal was successful, despite the army of lawyers mobilized by the Trump camp. This legend has become one of the bedrocks of the MAGA people: to believe in the conspiracy to steal the election is to believe in all the others, to show one’s faith in the America’s savior. During the 2024 campaign, Trump stated that he would not recognize the result in the event of a Kamala Harris victory, which was an implicit threat of insurrection. He continued to brandish this threat right up to the end, even though his victory had come to seem certain. He is back at it again: FBI and CIA agents threatened with dismissal by DOGE can save their jobs provided they pledge allegiance to the stolen election hoax.
This has become commonplace, but it is worth noting the support, enthusiastic or resigned, of Republican voters and of the Grand Old Party itself for the imposition of alternative facts of this sort. In this case, it is neither Trump’s vanity – he cannot stand losing, even if he goes on to win – nor his grudge against Joe Biden, that is at issue. The legend of the stolen election is what I suggest to call the ‘framework lie’: it gives credence to all the revisions of the past and other ongoing lies. The “theft” of the 2020 election, like the episode of the failed attempt on the candidate’s life, is a sign of the providential nature of the 2024 victory. Divine providence made Trump a savior, the agent of a historic rupture, sending all previous administrations back into darkness, at least since George W. Bush. Trump’s stature as the president who can avoid all wars is not only naive but deceptive: it makes it seem as if the wars of the 21st Century were merely the result of the mistakes of his predecessors, as if they were not the result of circumstances and actions that even the president of the United States cannot control8 (according to Trump, Bush, Obama, Biden, and of course Zelensky are at the origin of this war, through their inaction, or through their action). The talk of Trump the peacemaker predates the invasion of Ukraine, but it fits comfortably into the Russian narrative. Once again, however, it does so in a very particular style: Putin justifies his “special operation” with a broad historical narrative, demonstrating that Russia was merely reacting to “aggression” by Ukraine and NATO, itself the latest episode in the corrupt West’s age-old confrontation with Holy Russia9. Trump, on the other hand, supports the same position with a confused and incoherent discourse, in which the 2022 invasion is sometimes a kind of natural catastrophe that must be stopped without any mention of its perpetrator, and sometimes Zelensky’s fault.

2) The separation of language and truth

Trump’s lies cannot be reduced to alternative facts alone, which are by definition ad hoc. They are backed up by an newspeak that evacuates the very notions of agent and responsibility, by means of floating syntax and hollow statements repeated over and over: “This war should never have broken out,” “young men are dying and we have to stop it,” and so on. An example of what I call floating syntax is Trump’s statement on the terms of the ceasefire, which should include “the sharing of some assets in Ukraine”: sharing between whom and whom? Ukraine and Russia, or the United States? Ukraine has disappeared as a stakeholder in this “sharing,” and is now no more than a passive field – “in Ukraine” instead of ”of Ukraine.” These imprecisions and stammering make it possible to pass off his constant about-turns between the attitude of an impartial negotiator and that of Russia’s zealous ally, and to overlook the successive humiliations inflicted by the Russians, each time they curtly refuse an American suggestion, starting with the very idea of a ceasefire – Putin counters this with the prior requirement of a “global settlement of security problems in Europe”. In this wooden language, there is neither victim nor aggressor, neither success nor failure of “negotiation.” It is designed to serve Putin, but also to deliberately plunge reality into a fog in which it fades away.

Trump’s language is therefore not so much an avalanche of lies – he even utters true sentences on occasion – as an undertaking to separate language from truth, so that the question of truth or not can no longer be asked, for example, that it is no longer possible to evoke the Russian threat. The radical nature of the process is camouflaged by the appearance of a muddle¹⁰ and the repetition of innocuous-sounding elements of language, which either euphemize or invert reality. The idea of “transactional” method is not the least of these euphemisms. Trump has managed to get all the journalists to adopt it, but it is nothing more than the replacement of international law and respect for treaties by Putin’s doctrine of arrangements between the great powers (the only truly sovereign states, according to him).

As with French pro-Russians, Putin never appears as deliberately acting and responsible for his actions, but as a passive being, a victim who only reacts to what is done to him. But Trump does better: he creates a world in which there is no longer any agent to whom an action can be ascribed, no longer a link between a decision and responsibility for the consequences, a world in which there can no longer be any question of the war crimes perpetrated by Russia, not even to refute their existence11. The “alternative facts” that made people smile have been transformed into an alternative reality, in the sense of an imaginary reality that erases and replaces real reality.

3) Trump’s vulgarity: natural AND strategic

Every time a conspiracy theory is officially proclaimed, it is a step further into servitude and debasement for those who believe it, whether it is about the harmfulness of vaccines or threats to Russia’s sovereignty. The same is true of Trump’s many displays of vulgarity: turning the White House gardens into an advertising booth for Tesla, ostentatiously attending a wrestling show, making statements tweeting in sloppy language. For presidents, speeches to Congress are always an exercise in distinguished eloquence, steeped in history and literary reference. Trump broke away from this tradition and expressed himself as usual, but it was hardly noticed, so accustomed are we to the vulgarity of the character. It is said that he only values success and wealth. He is constantly turning the Ukrainian issue into a business opportunity. I wonder whether, since he was re-elected, his natural temperament has not also become a deliberate strategy: playing the big, irascible, self-centered baby. He uses it to keep his positions vague, without being blamed for it (“that’s just the way he is!”), and to impose vulgarity as the norm of public life.

Conclusion: Orwellian totalitarianism

Donald Trump is said to have an attention span of just a few minutes. Behind this disturbing but, all in all, amusing flaw in a leader, I see a virtuoso of doublethinkdescribed by Orwell in 1984:

“Doublethink refers to the ability to hold two antithetical convictions in the mind at the same time, and to accept both of them.” (1984, Second Part, ch. 9)

“To know and not to know, to be perfectly convinced of one’s perfect sincerity at a time when one is uttering carefully crafted lies, to simultaneously affirm two points of view that cancel each other out, while knowing them to be contradictory and without ceasing to believe in either […]. Therein lay the supreme subtlety: inducing unconsciousness into full consciousness, and then becoming unconscious again from the hypnotic sleep one had just triggered.” (I, 3)

“The duplicity of intelligence which the party demands of its members, and which is more easily achieved in a climate of war, is now almost universal, but the higher one rises in the hierarchy, the more marked it becomes.” (II, 9)

Doublethink is notably exercised in the ongoing modification of the past:

“Day after day, and almost from one minute to the next, the past was updated. Thus, all the predictions made by the Party proved to be correct: the documents proved it. […] It was not even a question of falsification, simply of substituting one absurdity for another. Most of the data being processed had no connection whatsoever with the real world, not even the connection implied by a blatant lie.” (I, 4)

Under the hellish regime imagined by Orwell, the Party proclaimed: “He who controls the past controls the future. He who has control of the present has control of the past.” (I, 3)

Doublethink is not the product of conditioning, but an activity, constantly at work: O’Brien, the party leader who manipulates and then arrests and tortures the novel’s central character, Winston, claims it is a “little exercise” but doublethink requires considerable mental labor, as painful as that of a contortionist for the body.

Trump is a virtuoso of doublethink, as he is able to lie and immediately forget that he has lied with confounding ease.

The comparison between Trumpism and the world of 1984 has already occurred to many analysts: “Orwellian”. Even so, I write this word with a trembling hand. Indeed, neither Trump’s nor Putin’s regimes are perfect tyrannies, comparable to that of the “Party” in 1984: not only do they not reach the same level of mind control of their subjects –Putin is more advanced than Trump in this domain – but, and this is the most important point, they have not yet achieved the purity of a power that has no end in sight, whose sole aim is its own perpetuation – Trump is ahead of Putin in this domain. In both Trump and Putin, there is a remnant of human desires, aspirations to something other than power for power, the absolute, impersonal power of the Party. They want money and glory (to go down in history), whereas O’Brien and his likes are merely priests devoted to the immobile perpetuation of the Party.

What is more, the regime imagined by Orwell is stable and likely to last forever, as it exists identically in the three empires that were formed after a period of revolutions and cover the whole Earth: Oceania (which includes “Air Zone No. 1,” formerly England, where the novel is set), Eurasia and East Asia. They have different nominal ideologies (“Engsoc” – English socialism – neo-Bolshevism, and the “culture of self-denial”), but these are anyway irrelevant, given the nature of power. The three regimes are at war with each other, but it is a deceptive war. It serves to mobilize the population, but it cannot be won. The three empires are allied two to one, but switch alliances very often to vary the show. Perpetual war ensures the stability of all three regimes.
Trump’s America is not Oceania, nor is Putin’s Russia Eurasia, but their leaders are Orwellian in many ways, and therefore capable if left to their own devices of creating an Orwellian world. In the school of Orwell, my argument is neither a utopia nor a prediction, it is a warning.

1. “Politics and Language,” translated to French in George Orwell, Œuvres, Pléiade, 2020, p. 1307.
2. Following a court injunction, he reversed his decision to cut USAID, but he is preventing it from operating. Takeovers and purges of federal agencies are illegal, as these agencies are independent and their budgets are voted by Congress.
3. Tulsi Gabbard has met with Bashar al-Assad and questioned his regime’s war crimes, in particular the use of chemical weapons against civilian populations; she has been a zealous relay of Kremlin propaganda since the invasion of Ukraine. As for Kash Patel, Trump counted on him in 2017 as a “political executioner to root out and fire” all those in the White House he suspected of not being sufficiently loyal. He publicly supports the conspiracy sect QAnon and at every opportunity slams the “Deep State,” including the agency (the FBI) he now heads.
4. French translation published in 2012, Le Style paranoïaque. Théories du complot et droite radicale en Amérique, Bourin éditeur, Paris, with a remarkable preface by Philippe Raynaud.
5. Goldwater proclaimed that “extremism in the defense of liberty is no vice.” He opposed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (which introduced racial desegregation) in the name of freedom for the Southern states, and called for, among other things, the abolition of Social Security, disaffiliation from the UN and the use of nuclear weapons against the USSR. His campaign was a failure (he won only 15% of the vote), but had a lasting influence on the Republican Party.
6. The Huey Long epic is little-remembered today, despite its artistic posterity: Huey Long’s career inspired a novel (All the King’s Men, by Robert Penn Warren, Pulitzer Prize 1947) and several films (notably by Robert Rossen, Sydney Lumet and Raoul Walsh); one of Donald Duck’s nephews was named Huey in 1937 – I do not know if it is Riri, Fifi, or Loulou in the French version.