How Trump Uses Disinformation To Fabricate His Authoritarian Unreality
With the US doing objectively well, Trump's only path to victory is by fabricating a false dystopia—manufacturing crises and pushing lies that distort American prosperity into American carnage.
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At first glance, the United States of 2024 doesn’t appear to fit the usual historical circumstances that cultivate the rise of authoritarianism.
The American economy is the strongest in the world. Inflation is easing. The stock market has seen record highs. Rate cuts have begun. Violent crime is seeing historic declines. There are certainly still challenges, but to say we’re better off than we were four years ago would be an understatement.
Between the Biden-Harris Administration’s Keynesian-style economic investments and the Fed’s monetary policy, we’ve nailed a historic post-pandemic recovery and stuck the long-sought soft landing. If Donald Trump is elected, he’ll reverse all this progress with blanket tariffs and mass deportations that economists say would balloon inflation and potentially trigger a recession simultaneously.
In spite of these fundamental truths, the country is in the middle of a tight race where Trump, who previously sought to overturn American democracy and is pushing openly fascist tactics and proposals, has a real shot of becoming president again. Why?
People usually turn to the “strongman” in bad times. Adolf Hitler climbed to power amid economic turmoil within a Germany that was desperately trying to re-discover its identity after World War I. Benito Mussolini ascended amid violence and chaos in Italy. Vladimir Putin rose in the aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse. Their appeals were all centered on being “strong” leaders who would bring their countries back to their former glory. In other words, they promised to make their nations great again.
If you were to look at America by the numbers, Trump’s appeal might not make sense. We’re in relatively prosperous times, as I outlined. However, with disinformation and our fractured media environment, there is no longer a commonly agreed-upon set of facts or shared perception of reality. We each have our own individualized algorithmic realities that reinforce our own biases.
As a result, political polarization, cultural divides, and distrust in institutions have become central challenges and significant sources of tension in American life. Also, after America elected its first Black president, our country’s founding flaws resurfaced once again, and the underbelly of the Confederacy that never truly died reared its head. The Republican base has also been primed for disinformation narratives by the GOP’s decades-long Southern Strategy. Trump and his allies know of these structural American flaws and have exploited them with great success.
The country’s circumstances, although far from perfect, are far too positive for Trump to sell his style of authoritarianism if he made his pitch based in reality. So, Trump resorts to gaslighting his supporters into believing America is in the middle of a migrant invasion that’s bringing surges in crime and destroying our economy. It’s the same playbook he ran in 2016. It’s the only one he knows. It’s a playbook that didn’t work in 2020 because he was the incumbent and overseeing a real-life crisis. But now, outside of power, Trump is twisting American reality into the dark hellscape he’s fabricated. And he has a lot of people helping him with his new Big Lie.
Let’s dive into Trump’s unreality and how it’s being reinforced by an increasingly powerful right-wing information ecosystem.
Trump’s False Reality And Right-Wing Propaganda Ecosystem
Donald Trump and his right-wing allies can’t win on the issues as they are, so they create a false dystopian reality. They say crime is up when it’s down. They say the economy is in shambles when it’s the best in the world and only getting better. They say undocumented immigrants are bringing crime when they actually commit crimes at lower rates than both legal immigrants and native-born citizens. They say Haitian migrants are eating pets when they’re not. They say the election was stolen when it wasn’t. They say man-made climate change is a hoax when it’s very real. They even spread depraved lies about disaster relief efforts. In their universe, up is down, good is bad, and morality is irrelevant.
The entire basis for Trump’s candidacy is built on a foundation of lies.
After outlining this false, dark reality, Trump then blames these imagined woes on immigrants of color, utilizing classic authoritarian disinformation tactics. Polling indicates these tactics are working, with distorted views of immigration and the economy remaining a central theme of the 2024 election.
This false message is reinforced by a right-wing information ecosystem that has grown far more powerful and far-reaching in recent years. Nowadays, it’s not just partisan radio and TV networks like Fox News running point for the Republican disinformation machine. Now, we have social media algorithms run on attention economy business models that perpetuate right-wing narratives.
There is now an interconnected right-wing information network that includes podcasts, social media influencers, and mainstream outlets. There are also countless bro podcasts that present themselves as non-political shows, but they have right-wing underpinnings to them, seeding propaganda and “anti-woke” sentiment in young men.
This happens because it’s profitable. The late Charlie Munger of Berkshire Hathaway once said, “Show me the incentive, and I will show you the outcome.” With the incentive structures ingrained in our social media environment, the outcome of an eroded democracy is inevitable.
Elon Musk has played a key role in this transformation with his acquisition of Twitter. Twitter, now called X, has become a cesspool of right-wing disinformation. The most recent examples we saw were in the form of lies about the hurricanes over this past month. It resulted in hurricane victims refusing aid from FEMA and death threats to meteorologists.
Musk is also going out of his way to help sow distrust in democracy, laying the groundwork for Trump’s planned challenges to the 2024 election. This week, CBS News published an excellent analysis of Elon Musk’s social media posts and had stunning findings:
“Elon Musk has used the social media platform he owns to amass nearly 3.3 billion views on X by fueling doubts about election security issues since January this year…
CBS News collected more than 48,000 of Musk's posts over the past four years, with support from the International Center for Journalists Disarming Disinformation program and the research group Convocation Research+Design. The analysis focused on X posts on the topic of election administration, security and operation.
An analysis of nearly 17,000 of Musk's posts from this year, as well as thousands more he replied to or reposted, found 361 posts specifically on the topic of potential election fraud in U.S. elections. Although these election posts represent a small fraction of the dozens of posts Musk publishes each day, each one had an average of 9.3 million views as Musk continues to be the most followed profile on X.”
Not only is Elon Musk putting enormous amounts of money toward helping the Trump Campaign, but he’s also turned one of the biggest social media platforms into a de facto propaganda arm for Republicans. Spend any amount of time on the “For you” tab on X, and you’ll be inundated with right-wing sentiments. It’s hard to believe that isn’t having some kind of impact on voters.
This increasingly powerful, well-funded right-wing information infrastructure helps reinforce the false unreality Donald Trump presents to the country. This is what Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, and the Democratic Party are up against.
In spite of false claims of a “liberal media,” there is no comparable liberal information ecosystem to combat this disinformation. Mainstream media does a good job at times of pushing back on right-wing lies, but they also have their flaws, at times giving false credence to Trump’s disinformation. It’s not biased to be unabashedly pro-democracy and pro-truth, and we need more of that in our media.
We all have to do our part in pushing back on this right-wing disinformation.
Come November 5, we have to hope that objective reality wins the day. Because if Trump wins, as we saw with his 2017 inaugural “American Carnage” speech, Trump’s false claims of chaos tend to be promises of what he would actually bring himself.
