David Roberts on why this campaign is driving him crazy
"We’re in a situation where we have this lying, abusive, obviously nutbag figure, and we can’t acknowledge to ourselves what’s happening."
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If you’re anything like me, trying to make sense of the 2024 presidential election can make you feel like you’re losing it. How is it possible that a twice-impeached insurrectionist and convicted felon who failed his biggest test in office is running neck and neck with the guy who cleaned up his wreckage and skillfully navigated the country out of the pandemic?
A particularly memorable expression of this sense of unreality came courtesy of David Roberts, my former colleague at Vox, who in a recent twitter thread compared the election to an “elaborate practical joke” in which pundits and journalists feel compelled not only to take seriously the proposition that “a pile of shit laced with broken glass” is preferable to a normal president, but also grapple with the reality that the dung pile might ultimately be the choice of voters.
Roberts is one of the country’s top climate journalists and these days authors the highly recommended newsletter Volts, but going back to our time together at Vox I’ve always found him to be an incisive political commentator and media critic. So Public Notice contributor Thor Benson connected with Roberts last month to get his big picture take on the presidential election, the sad state of Trump’s base, why elite media is ill-equipped to deal with a norm-shattering wannabe dictator, and much more.
“What you can’t openly acknowledge is that when these authoritarians come along, what they do is rally and unify the absolute worst people in a country,” Roberts said. “That’s what Trump is doing.”
“These are awful people who are mean, dumb, and they like imposing cruelty on out groups and blaming them for all their problems,” he added. “You can describe this in clinical psychological language, you can process it into a political ‘position’ or ‘issue,’ but really it’s just shitty. It’s a shitty way to be.”
A full transcript of the conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows.
Thor Benson
I really enjoyed your recent thread about the insanity surrounding Trump’s cultish supporters. To what extent was it meant to be media criticism?
David Roberts
I get the appeal of an authoritarian strongman for the reactionary masses, which we know is like 25 or 30 percent of the population. But then you have this elite media discussion happening around it. The New York Times is not part of the reactionary base. Most of the people in the commentariat aren’t either.
It’s just strange to me, because the elite media should be saying, “Here’s an authoritarian strongman who’s trying to do authoritarian shit by activating the reactionary masses, and it’s going to go badly like it’s gone badly every other fucking time we’ve seen it.” But we have a weird convention in US politics where there’s this two symmetric sides thing that’s so deeply ingrained. This convention sustains the entire political apparatus. We can’t let it go.
What’s surreal are these attempts to squeeze what’s going on into that framework. They’re trying to present it in terms of, “Do we prefer Mitt Romney’s tax plan or Obama’s tax plan?” What Trump’s saying and doing does not fit that model, and attempts to continue talking and behaving as if it does strike me as bizarre. It’s this zombified way in which the whole political apparatus and discussion moves forward with all of the same habits and tropes, despite an obvious break or breach from that model.
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Thor Benson
So basically media institutions that are threatened by Trump haven’t adequately adapted to this new reality.
David Roberts
There’s so much momentum and money behind the two symmetrical sides model. Institutions have been built around it. That’s how the thing runs, so it’s inflexible. It’s incapable of a break of its own. It’s incapable of breaking its own behavior, breaking its own habits.
People who are voting for Trump are not in these circles. They're not reading elite media and they’re not part of this apparatus at all, so no one’s talking to them except for, like, nutball AM radio guys. The New York Times doesn’t reach them, much less swing them, but that apparatus has to do something. Pundits gotta pundit, so they just crank out these conventional arguments over and over again.
The whole thing hits me as weird. I think one of the best ways to gain insight on the dynamics at work here, around Trump, is from psychology — particularly the psychology of abuse and abusers. It’s sort of a cliché to say at this point, but I really think it’s true that with families — let’s say a big family with an abusive father — one of the things that happens is that there’s a very surreal kind of quasi-normality trying to form itself around what is clearly not normal.
Within that family it can be difficult to see just how strange it is. You have to come in from the outside to see it. There are strange conventions through which they tamp down their obvious horror and through which they process things that are traumatic and turn them into something normal. People who are in abusive relationships build justifications for them. They’ll tell stories around them to make sense of them.
It can seem very surreal from the outside, and I come back to that again and again with all of America. We’re in a situation where we have this lying, abusive, obviously nutbag figure, and we can’t acknowledge to ourselves what’s happening. The political commentariat is trying so hard to process this into a normal thing that they’re familiar with. It’s just surreal to me.
Thor Benson
It seems the right has convinced a lot of journalists that they’re part of the “liberal media,” so they want to prove they aren’t, and they try too hard to do it. They don’t want to be seen as out of touch elites who don't get the common man, so they take every Trump supporter at the diner as a voice of the people.
David Roberts
Yeah, and these dynamics are so familiar for every authoritarian that comes along. We just lived through a whole century of this shit. In the post-war period, there were all these books about the dynamics of authoritarianism, and we’re playing out that script. What you can’t openly acknowledge is that when these authoritarians come along, what they do is rally and unify the absolute worst people in a country. That’s what Trump is doing.
These are awful people who are mean, dumb, and they like imposing cruelty on out groups and blaming them for all their problems. You can describe this in clinical psychological language, you can process it into a political “position” or “issue,” but really it’s just shitty. It’s a shitty way to be. These are shitty people. You cannot say that out loud, because we’ve been browbeaten for decades about how you disrespect them when you don’t understand their “folk ways.” The amount of self-hatred and self-loathing among the liberal elite is just stunning to witness. They love self-flagellation. It’s kind of gross.
Thor Benson
How much do you think our media ecosystem and echo chamber might contribute to some people seeing Trump as an appealing candidate?
David Roberts
Someone once said, “Fascism is a counterrevolution against a revolution that never happened.” What fascists do is try to convince this reactionary base that they’re in danger, that they’re under dire threat from the liberals and the queers and the professors. These people are coming and stealing their kids and turning them against them and stepping all over traditional values.
It’s always the same message. You could point to any number of historical analogues. You have to hype people up about an impending threat and get them in such a frenzy that they are willing to engage in preemptive violence. “This threat is so imminent that we have to act first,” basically. That’s how all fascist leaders are trying to work up their followers.
“All of the outgroups are coming for you.” You can look at right-wing media going back decades, and the main message has never been right-wing policies or politicians are good. The central message — the main thing — is that your enemies are bad. The Democrats are everything bad. Even things that are contradictory: “They’re stupid, but they also have these global fucking schemes going.” Everything bad and scary you can think of? That’s Democrats.
That’s the message that these people have been marinating in for decades. That’s how they indemnify any right-wing figure against criticism. Any critic is among the “enemies of the people.”
“Here goes the media again trying to tear me down.” It’s like a permanent permission structure. It prevents any criticism. If you criticize them, that means you are part of this giant borg of outsiders and evil people. Trump is the reductio ad absurdum of this tendency. You have a bunch of people saying, “Sure, he’s a lying, cheating fraudster, a thug and an idiot, but even that’s not worse than the demonic, global bestriding beast of the Democrats.” At this point, they’ve spent so many decades feeding that fear to their audience that there is no one on their side who could be worse.
It’s the Flight 93 election. I think that was first written about in 2016, and it captures this mentality. Basically, if you’re in a plane and terrorists have hijacked it, and they’re about to crash into a building and kill a bunch of people, in that situation, anything you do to prevent the worst case scenario is justified. “We are in such danger that nothing is off limits. We are in such danger that we have to put aside any scruples, any values, any restraints.” That’s all right-wing media is — a permission structure. People listen to it to indulge their worst qualities and be cruel and mean, and it gives them permission to do that.
Thor Benson
Obviously, your main expertise is climate. When you’re looking at this election and thinking about all of the climate scientists you’ve talked to and everything you know, how dire of a situation do you think we’re going to be in if Trump wins, considering how little time we have to beat climate change and his plans to “drill, baby, drill”?
David Roberts
For one, the period of time he’s going to be president — is that four years? Eight? Is it forever? Is he just going to hand it off to Barron? Are we never going to have an election again? The tail risks here are difficult to calculate.
I mean, it would be terrible. He’d pull out of the Paris Agreement. He’d reverse Biden’s policies. So much of the Inflation Reduction Act funding and so much of the clean energy economy is happening in red states that I think some of it would survive. The basic IRA tax credits would probably survive, maybe except for the EV ones. Clean energy would likely continue its march, but he would absolutely take any restraints off of the oil and gas industry.
He recently went to oil execs and said it to them out loud. “Give me a billion dollars, and I’ll do whatever you want.” There’s zero euphemism. Zero pretense. The mask is completely off. “Give me money, and I’ll do what you guys want.”
It would be devastating if he won, but it’s so hard to predict what Trump will do. For instance, in his first term, there were things he cared about and things he farmed out to the right-wing apparatus. He cares about immigration. But in his first term, he farmed out energy stuff and climate stuff. There was Scott Pruitt. Remember Scott Pruitt? They were dutifully trying to deregulate the oil and gas industry.
That did happen, but the Project 2025 people — the ideologues who are planning what to do if he wins — their plan is to undo everything. Undo IRA. Undo the EPA itself. Their plan is to wipe out everything.
Even what Biden has done will not get us there. Biden will have to do more in a second term to meet the targets that we have set. If Trump wins, we’re not going to hit those targets. One thing a lot of people don’t appreciate very well, because our media environment is so broken and stupid, is that a lot of people don’t think about IRA or what it is or how it works. Other countries were galvanized by IRA.
Thor Benson
Yeah, these things have ripple effects beyond our borders, and this is a global effort.
David Roberts
Other countries were like, “Oh shit. The US is in the clean energy race. We’ve gotta do something ourselves. We’ve gotta get into this race, too.” It was very influential in legislative bodies around the world. Similarly, if Trump comes in and says, in policy and in rhetoric, that we’re not in this race, and we’re slowing down, then it’s going to have an important impact internationally. It would send a really bad signal.
As tattered as the US is these days, we’re still incredibly influential, especially in this area. It’s one thing for people to think, “Well, 2016 was an anomaly that happened because of some very weird historical conditions.” That’s one thing. If Trump comes back in, then it becomes clear that you just can’t trust the US as a long-term partner in anything. “They’re just inconstant. They’re swinging wildly from one way to the next. They’re not trustworthy.”
That’s it for today
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Yes, no one in our country wants to acknowledge the reality of Trump, and that is because our country has never experienced anyone or anything like this before. The blind loyalty of millions of Republican Americans to Donald Trump is the elusive piece of the puzzle that evaded my understanding - just like you. How could so many Americans believe Trump's lies and fanatical speeches, his constant remarks full of hatred, and his crazy conspiracy stories? How could Americans want a President who is a convicted felon, and convicted of massive fraud and sexual assault? The piece of the puzzle that is missing is actually hard to recognize and even harder to admit.
The political party division in our country went from a tradition of "extending a hand across the aisle" previous to 2000, to now in 2024, we are so divided we could be living in two different nations. So what happened in 2000 to cause or assist this U.S. internal rift and the government dissention in Washington, D.C. and across our country?
IN THE YEAR 2000, VLADIMIR PUTIN BECAME THE PRESIDENT OF RUSSIA. This is a man who has spent his entire life as a Russian secret service intelligence officer - a spy - before becoming the President of Russia. He thinks the U.S. should be wiped off the face of the earth, because he blames us for the breakup of the Soviet Union. Over the last twenty-four years, Put has consistently worked to create a divide in our country for one reason - a country divided is weaker.
Putin's Russia has penetrated the U.S. in many ways, and Microsoft has PROVED that almost sixty percent of all cyber attacks into the U.S. come from Russia. This includes our: food supplies, gas and oil, banking and finance, health and hospitals, cell phone communications, elections and polls, and military data bases - just to name a few. They appear to winning the war of international cyber attacks and information control.
The Soviet working model placed a man loyal to Russia as the head of each satellite country, and in the U.S. that man is Donald Trump. This is the government model that Putin grew up with and his goal is to return Russia to the glorious days of the Soviet Union. A list of his Presidential goals are found in a book called The Foundations of Geopolitics which was published in Russia in 1997.
The Mueller Report was created to investigate Trump and his relationship with Russia. William Barr, the AG at the time, prevented the American public to absorb the full impact of the 2-year and $32 million dollar investigation. "March 24, 2019 may go down as one of the most artfully deceptive and effective undertakings in the history of spin control. In this masterpiece of disinformation, Barr completely stole Mueller's thunder, misrepresented it, and presented Trump forces (including the Russians) with a victory they then used to label the entire Trump-Russia scandal as a hoax." (Unger, American Kompromat). IT WAS NOT A HOAX, but the real thing - a man wrongly elected to the Presidency of the United States due to Russian election interference is most likely working for the Russians.
The Mueller Report stated in the Preface that "That fall (2016), two federal agencies jointly announced that the Russian government directed recent compromises of e-mails from U.S. persons and institutions, including U.S. political organizations" and these thefts are intended to interfere with the U.S. election process. The Special Counsel's investigation established that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election principally through two operations. First, a Russian entity carried out a social media campaign that favored presidential candidate Donald J. Trump and disparaged presidential candidate Hillary Clinton. Second, a Russian intelligence service conducted computer-intrusion operations against entities, employees, and volunteers working on the Clinton Campaign. The investigation also identified numerous links between the Russian government and the Trump Campaign. This investigation established that the Russian government perceived it would benefit from a Trump presidency. " On page 180 of this report, it says "In any event, probing the President's intent in a criminal matter is unquestionably constitutional in at least one context: the offense of bribery turns on the 'corrupt intent to received a thing of value in return for being influenced in official action'." (Report On The Investigation Into Russian Interference In The 2016 Presidential Election, March 2019)
Donald Trump was an easy snatch. Russians lure foreigners to work for Russia with money and beautiful women. In the 1990's, the Trump Organization was bleeding money and at the same time the KGB had expanded their services to hook more foreigners - especially Americans. Both Eric and Don Jr bragged about the Trump Organization receiving $100 Million from Russian banks (www.businessinsider.com). Russian banks are managed and controlled by the Russian KGB and the FSB. The lure of both Russian money and Russian women seized Trump's attention and captured his allegiance. As an extremely ignorant American to the world of mob mentality, he realized too late that his life and the lives of his family are at stake.
Last, while few Americans understand coercive mind control (aka brainwashing), it began about 100 years ago in totalitarian countries (dictatorships) and was/is found in Germany, Italy, Austria, China, and a whole host of other monocratic countries. Putin spent his spy years in East Germany and acquired all the skills used by Hitler to brainwash an entire nation into mass murderers. Just like Charles Manson in the United States, whose cult followers committed nine gruesome murders, Hitler in comparison killed over six million humans. Putin returned to Russia with his acquired skills and became the head of the FSB - Russian Federal Security Service, and then the President of Russia. Lo and behold we find these skills now used in the United States on millions of Americans. Let's start to call it what it is - BRAINWASHING. Trump has turned his followers into fanatical and mindless cult followers. He recently said to Iowa voters "Even if You Vote & Die, It's Worth it." The deductive reasoning power of these cult followers is no longer working - no independent thought processes. Any attempt to change their minds or "reason" with them is inefficacious and no use.
Brainwashing is defined as "telling lies over and over until it is perceived as the truth." (wikipedia) CNN recently reported that 50% of the Republican voters still believe Trump's Big Lie that the election was stolen from him. Biden won that election by over seven (7) million votes. This lie is nonsense.
Americans are no different than the pre-WWII German public. The human mind can be altered and controlled. It is called indoctrination, re-education, and is swayed by propaganda. The many-sided destructiveness of Donald Trump includes a long list of catastrophic traits, but he learned his brainwashing techniques from Russia.
The current brainwashing epidemic we see in our country is consistently seen in cults or autocratic societies. It is not openly discussed nor is it acknowledged by most Americans. It is time to open the Pandora's Box and recognize this cult-like brainwashing sweeping across our country. We must also accept that there is little that can be done to detox these people. To win the 2024 election, we need to ignore this cult as much as possible, and loudly illustrate Biden's winning words and 50 years of public service experience - which contributes to the stability of our country.
Thank you for the stress on PERMISSION that trumpism gives people. The first thing I thought as I watched the escalator ride is "he's giving people permission to say their worst prejudices out loud." The era of Civil Rights didn't magically convert people: it just created a general sense of civility when talking in public about those they hated as Others. No more n-word. Trump shredded that civility from the get-go; he encouraged people to be uncivil and from there it was a short step to making plans to force people to take on the assumptions behind prejudice. And so: Christian Nationalism, racism, Islamophobia, anti-LGBTQ laws, and eventually "life begins at conception" as a way of privileging one PART of one religion's views to endanger women's health.