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The Potemkin Presidency [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-01-20
As the U.S. Senate enters the final voting phase of the Donald Trump’s nominees for Cabinet-level and other federal offices, it is obvious that his nominees are not intended in the traditional way to manage the Departments they are ostensibly the head of: exercising management, judgement, and leadership and fulfilling their oaths to “faithfully execute the laws of the United States” with the law as their master.
Rather, they are being installed to pantomime what a Department Secretary “looks like” to a MAGA voter - in other words, they won’t be actual qualified Cabinet Secretaries, but they will “play one on TV.”
This explains why Trump has picked who he has picked - all are vacuous shells with no actual leadership experience or expertise in their departments. Rather, Trump has seen them on TV, and knows they are very good at convincingly reading a teleprompter and creating shareable memes.
Trump’s time at “the Apprentice” has made him very savvy and sensitive to the demands of visual propaganda. If Trump knows anything, he knows what looks good on TV and that drives 99% of his decisions (witness his reactions after getting COVID, getting shot, and any time he is in front of a camera - it’s all about the imagery.) There has never been a more visually focused and image-aware leader in history, save for perhaps Hitler himself and the visually stunning imagery built by his head propagandist, Josef Goebbels.
Just as Goebbels said, “What the press has been in the Nineteenth Century, radio will be for the Twentieth Century,” the modern corollary would indicate that “What TV has been in the Twentieth Century, Social Media and the internet will be for the Twenty First Century.” No-one understands that more than Trump, who described himself in a Supreme Court filing seeking to stop the decision banning Tik-Tok as “... one of the most powerful, prolific and influential users of social media in history,” nevermind that social media such as Facebook and Twitter have only existed for about 20 years.
Social media operates as a supercharged version of the Third Reich’s Volksempfänger, the single-station radios Goebbels created as a way to get low-cost radios into the hands of the German public for propaganda purposes. Going far beyond simply broadcasting a single-minded message to the masses, social media creates individualized channels tailored to personal interests that allow even the most obscure topics to be twisted and channeled to the propagandist’s whims.
Trump and his minions have found in social media the secret sauce of their success, and are intent on turning the federal government into a Potemkin village, with Cabinet-level “influencers” spewing disinformation while Elon Musk and his “DOGE” crew tear the government’s foundations up by the roots behind the facade.
The truth of what is coming has been there all along. To make the government small enough to “drag it into the bathroom and drown it in the bathtub,” in Grover Norquist’s words. Steve Bannon talked in Trump’s first term about “flooding the zone with shit.” According to Bannon,“This is not about persuasion: This is about disorientation.”
When there is no agreed upon reality, falsehood has no rebuttal and Trump can do what he wants. The challenge for us over the next four years is to stay oriented, keep our principles, and, in Trump’s own words, “Fight like Hell.”
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