January 19, 2017

Normalizing Trumps Authoritarianism is Not an Option

by Henry A. Giroux
The dark times that haunt the current age no longer appear as merely an impending
threat. They have materialized with the election of Donald Trump to the
presidency. Trump and his administration of extremists epitomize the dire dangers
posed by those who longed to rule American society without resistance, dominate its
major political parties, and secure uncontested control of its commanding political,
cultural, and economic institutions. The consolidation of power and wealth in the
hands of the financial elite along with the savagery and misery that signifies their
politics is no longer the stuff of Hollywood films such as Wall Street and American
Psycho. If George W. Bushs reign of fearmongering, greed, and war on terror
embodied the values of a kind of militarized Gordon Gekko, Trump represents the
metamorphosis of Gekko into the deranged and ethically neutered, Patrick Bateman.
Yet, Trumps ascent to the highest office in America is already being normalized by
numerous pundits and politicians, including Barack Obama, who are asking the
American public to give Trump a chance or are suggesting that the power and
demands of the presidency will place some restraints on his unrestrained
impetuousness and often unpredictable behavior.
As might be expected, a range of supine politicians, media pundits, and
mainstream journalists are already tying themselves in what Tom Engelhardt calls
apologetic knots while they desperately look for signs that Donald Trump will be a
pragmatic, recognizable American president once he takes the mantle of power. [1] As
comedian John Oliver pointed out on his show, Last Week Tonight, Trump is not
ordinary and his politics forebode the storm clouds of an American version of
authoritarianism. Oliver brought his point home by shouting repeatedly This is not
normal, and, of course, he is right! It is even more surprising that Lesley Stahls 60
Minute interview with Trump portrayed him less as a demagogue than as a
transformed politician who was subdued and serious. [2] In addition, NBCs Andrea
Mitchell reported approvingly upon the transition as if proposed White House
counselor Steve Bannon and proposed attorney general Jeff Sessions, two men with
racism in their pasts, were ordinary appointments. [3] High profile celebrity, Oprah
Winfrey, stated without irony, in an interview with Entertainment Tonight that I
just saw President-elect Trump with President Obama in the White House, and it
gave me hope.[4] This is quite a stretch given Trumps history of racist practices, his

racist remarks about Blacks, Muslims, and Mexican immigrants during the primary
and the presidential campaigns, and his appointment of a number of cabinet members
who embrace a white nationalist ideology. The New York Times opinion writer,
Nicholas Kristof, sabotaged his self-proclaimed liberal belief system by noting, in
what appears to be acute lapse of judgment, that Americans should Grit [their]
teeth and give Trump a chance.[5] Bill Gates made clear his own and often hidden
reactionary world view when speaking on CNBCs Squawk Box. The Microsoft cofounder slipped into fog of self-delusion by stating that Trump had the potential to
emulate JFK by establishing an upbeat and desirable mode of leadership through
innovation.[6]
Such actions by the mainstream media and such highly visible pundits point to not
just a retreat from responsible reporting, discourse, and a flight from any vestige of
social responsibility, but also the further collapse of serious journalism and
thoughtful reasoning into the corrupt world of a corporate controlled media empire
and an infantilizing celebrity culture. Normalizing the Trump regime does more than
sabotage the truth, moral responsibility, and justice; it also cancels out the
democratic institutions necessary for a future of well-being and economic and
political justice. New York Times columnist, Charles Blow, observes insightfully that
under a Trump administration:
The nation is soon to be under the aegis of an unstable, unqualified, undignified
demagogue [who surrounds] himself with a rogues gallery of white supremacy
sympathizers, anti-Muslim extremists, devout conspiracy theorists, anti-science
doctrinaires and climate change deniers.This is not normal [and] I happen to believe
that history will judge kindly those who continued to shout, from the rooftops,
through own weariness and against the corrosive drift of conformity. [7]
Blow is right. Any talk of working with a president who has surrounded himself
with militarists, racists, neo-fascists, anti-intellectuals, and neoliberal
fundamentalists should be resisted at all cost. It is well worth remembering that
Trump chose to put Steve Bannon, a notorious anti-Semite and white supremacist, at
the center of power in the White House. As Reuters reported, White supremacists
and neo-Nazis have rarely, if ever, in recent history been so enthusiastic about a
presidential appointment as Donald Trumps choice of Steve Bannon to be his chief
White House strategist.[8] Trump has also surrounded himself with militarists and
corporate ideologues who fantasize about destroying all vestiges of the welfare
state and the institutions that produce the public values that support the social
contract. Neal Gabler argues that the normalizing of Trump by the mainstream media

is about more than the dereliction of duty my members of the mainstream media. He
writes:
Far more serious is their normalization not of Trump but of his voters. The
former is typical cowardice under threat of reactionary populism. The latter is an
endorsement of reactionary populism that may have far-reaching consequences for
whether the country can ever be reunited after having been torn asunder. [9]
Normalization is code for a retreat from any sense of moral and political
responsibility, and it should be viewed as an act of political complicity with
authoritarianism and condemned outright. What is being propagated by Trumps
apologists is not only a reactionary popularism and some fundamental tenets of an
American style authoritarianism, but also a shameless whitewashing of the racism and
authoritarianism at the center of Trumps politics. In addition, little has been said
about how Trump and his coterie of semi-delusional, if not heartless, advisors
embrace a demented appropriation of Ayn Rands view that selfishness, war against
all competition, and unchecked self-interest are the highest human ideals. In
addition, arguments in defense of such normalization appear to overlook with facile
indifference how the rhetoric of authoritarianism has become normalized in many
parts of the world and that the Trump administration has clearly demonstrated an
affinity with such hateful rhetoric. How else to explain the support that Trump has
received from a number of ruthless dictators who head reactionary governments
such as the Philippines, Turkey, and Egypt, among others. Such a danger is all the
more ominous given the current collapse of civic literacy and the general publics
increasing inability to deal with complex issues, on one hand, and the attempt, on the
other hand, by those who maintain power to ruthlessly promote a depoliticizing
discourse of lies, simplicity, and manufactured distortions.
The United States has entered a new historical conjuncture, which echoes
elements of a totalitarian past. Hannah Arendt, Sheldon Wolin, and Robert Paxton,
the great theorists of totalitarianism believed that the fluctuating elements of
fascism are still with us and that they would crystalize in different forms. [10] Far
from being fixed in a frozen moment of historical terror, these theorists believed
that totalitarianism not only heralds as a possible model for the future[11] but that
its protean origins are still with us.[12] Arendt, in particular, was keenly aware that
a culture of fear, the dismantling of civil and political rights, the ongoing
militarization of society, the attack on labor, an obsession with national security,
human rights abuses, the emergence of a police state, a deeply rooted racism, and
the attempts by demagogues to undermine education as a foundation for producing

critical citizenry were all at work in American society. Historical conjunctures

produce different forms of authoritarianism, though they all share a hatred for
democracy, dissent, and human rights. [13] More recently, Robert Paxton in his seminal
work, The Anatomy of Fascism, provides a working definition of fascism that points
to both its anti-democratic moments and those elements that link it to both the past
and the present. Paxtons point is not to provide a precise definition of fascism but
to understand the conditions that enabled fascism to work and make possible its
development in the future. Accordingly, fascism is:
A form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community
decline, humiliation or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy and
purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in
uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic
liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints
goals of internal cleansing and external expansion. [14]
It is too easy to believe in a simplistic binary logic that strictly categorizes a country
as either authoritarian or democratic and leaves no room for entertaining the
possibility of a mixture of both systems. American politics today suggests a more
updated if not different form of authoritarianism or what might be called the curse
of totalitarianism. In Trumps America, there are strong echoes of the fascism that
developed in Europe in the 1920s and 30s. For instance, there are resemblances to a
fascist script in Trumps scapegoating of other; his claim that the United States is in
a period of decline; his call to make America great again; his blatant appeal to ultranationalism; his portrayal of himself as a strongman who alone can save the country;
his appeal to aggression and violence aimed at those who disagree with him; his
contempt for dissent; his deep rooted anti-intellectualism or what Arendt called
thoughtlessness (i.e., denial that climate change is produced by humans) coupled
with his elevation of instinct and emotion over reason; his appeal to xenophobia,
national greatness, and support for a politics of disposability; his courting of antiSemites, white supremacists, and flirtation with the discourse of racial purity; his
support for a white Christian public sphere; his use of a kind of verbal waterboarding
to denigrate Muslims, Blacks, illegal immigrants, and womens reproductive rights; his
contempt for weakness and his support for the dark side of hyper-masculinity.
I argue in this essay that the dark period Americans are about to enter under a
Trump regime cannot be understood without an acknowledgement of the echoes of a
totalitarian past. With Trumps election, the crisis of politics is accompanied by a
crisis of historical conscience, memory, ethics, and agency exacerbated by an appeal
to a notion of common sense in which facts are regarded with disdain, words reduced

to slogans, and science confused with pseudo-science. Under such

circumstances, language is emptied of any meaning and constitutes a flight from
ethics, justice, and social responsibility. As language becomes devoid of any meaning,
the American public is inundated with empty slogans such as post-truth and fake
newseuphemisms for a landscape of manufactured derangements and distortions
that constitute what might be called a culture of post-ethics. This culture is part of
what Todd Gitlin calls an interlocking ecology of falsification that has driven the
country around the bend.[15] Against the background of an infantilizing culture of
immediacy, spectacle, and sensationalism, Trump will govern as if he is running a
reality TV show, endlessly performing for an increasingly depoliticized public. But
there are more dangers ahead than the toxic seduction of politics as theater and the
transformation of the mainstream media as adjunct of the entertainment industry or
for that matter a growing distrust of democracy itself. Under casino capital, the
alleged celebration of the principle of a free press hides more than it promises.
Noam Chomsky, Bill Moyers, and Robert McChesney, among others, have observed,
mainstream media now work in conjunction with the financial elite and the militaryindustrial-academic complex as an echo chamber while further indulging in the rituals
of shock, celebrity culture, and spectacularized violence in order to increase their
ratings. Earlier this year, Les Moonves, CBS CEO stated that his networks inordinate
and disastrous coverage of Trump may not be good for America but its damn good
for CBS.[16] Moonves openly gloated not only because the network was pumping up its
ratings but was also getting rich by inordinately covering Trumps presidential
campaign. As he put it, [T]he moneys rolling in [T]his is going to be a very good
year for us.Its a terrible thing to say, but bring it on, Donald. Go ahead. Keep
going."[17] Moonves made it clear that the power of mainstream media in general has
little to do with either pursuing the truth or holding power accountable. On the
contrary, its real purpose was to normalize corruption, lies, misrepresentation,
accumulate capital, and allow the transformation of the press to become an adjunct
of authoritarian ideologies, policies, interests and commodified valuesif that is
what it takes to increase their profit margins.
Normalization is about more than dominating media outlets being complicit with
corrupt power or willfully retreating from any sense of social responsibility; it is also
about aiding and abetting power in order to increase the bottom line and accumulate
other cowardly forms of power and recognition. This is evident in the fact that some
powerful elements of the mainstream press not only refused to take Trump seriously,
they also concocted embarrassing rationales for not holding him up to any viable
sense of accountability. For instance, Gerard Baker, the editor-in-chief of The Wall

Street Journal, publicly announced that in the future he would not allow his

reporters to use the word lie in their coverage. This is more than a retreat from
journalisms goal of holding people, institutions, and power to some measure of
justice; it also legitimizes the kind of political and moral cowardice that undermines
the truth, informed resistance, and the first amendment. While such actions may not
rise to the level of book burning that was characteristic of various fascist and
authoritarian regimes in the past, it does mark a distinctive retreat from historical
memory and civic courage that serves to normalize such actions by making dissent
appear, at best, unreasonable and, at worse, an act of treason.
Such actions become apparent in efforts by the mainstream press to rage against
the rise of fake news, suggesting that since they are not part of such attempts their
integrity cannot be questioned. Of course, fake news is a euphemism for deliberately
lying and collapsing the line between facts and fiction, the truth and falsehoods. By
that definition, lying is about more than fake news, it is central to the need to
manufacture consent in the interest of implementing polices, constructing identities,
and shoring up values that serve a wide range of unsavory political and ideological
interests. The slippery nature of the term fake news is on full display particularly
when used by Trump and his merry band of liars to dismiss anyone or any organization
that holds him accountable for his fabrications. Hence, there were no surprises when
Trump at his first president-elect press conference refused not only to take
questions from a CNN reporter because his network had published material critical
of Trump, but he justified his refusal by labeling CNN as fake newsreducing the
term to a slogan used to silence the press. Clearly, we will see more of this type of
bullying repression and censorship but it will not be aimed just at mainstream outlets
such as CNN but will also eventually be used to smear all manner of alternative social
media such as Truthout, Tikkun, Counterpunch, TomDispatch.com, Democracy Now,
and others. Traditional democratic public spheres such as higher education will also
feel the brunt of such an attack.
Normalization has many registers and one of the most important is the control by the
financial elite over commanding cultural apparatuses that produce, legitimize, and
distribute highly selective media narratives that shore up the most reactionary
ideologies and financial interests. The mainstream press says little about how such
actions serve as an apology for the egregiously reactionary nature of Trumps
ideology and policies. Moreover, they fail to note how distortions of the truth, the
endless production of lies by governments, politicians, and corporations, along with
the medias flight from civic literacy, serve to bolster authoritarian societies willing
to distort the truth while simultaneously suppressing dissent. Under such
circumstances, it should not be surprising that Trumps authoritarian and hateful
discourse, threats of violence, loathing of dissent, and his racist attitudes towards

Muslims, Blacks and Mexican immigrants are downplayed in the mainstream media.
These structured silences have become more and more apparent given the benign
manner in which the supine press and its legion of enervated anti-public intellectuals
and pundits treat Trumps endless nighttime Twitter outpourings and his incessant
choreographed public fabrications.
For instance, The Wall Street Journals refusal to address critically Trumps endless
lies and insults is matched by the high brow New Yorkers publishing of a piece on
Trump, which largely celebrates uncritically how he is viewed by conservative
intellectuals such as Hillsdale College president, Larry Arnn. Arnn supports Trump
because he shares Arnns view that the government has become dangerous. [18] If he
were referring to the rise of the surveillance and permanent war state, it would be
hard to disagree with Arnn. Instead, he was referring to the governments
enforcement of runaway regulations.[19] What Arnn and The New Yorker ignore is
the fact that the real danger the government poses is the result of it being in the
hands of demagogues such as Trump who are truly dangerous and threaten the
planet, American society, and the rest of the world. While New Yorker staff writer
Kelefa Sanneh mentions Trumps connection to the alt-right, he underplays the
groups fascist ideology and refuses to use the term white supremacy in talking about
such groups, reverting instead to the innocuous term, white identity
politics.[20] Trumps misogyny, racism, anti-intellectualism, Islamophobia, and hatred
of democracy are barely mentioned. Sanneh even goes so far as to suggest that
since Trump has disavowed the alt-right, his connection to neo-fascist groups is
tenuous. This is more than an apology dressed up in the discourse of ambiguity; such
reporting is a shameful retreat from journalistic integrity, an assault on the truth,
and constitutes an egregious act of normalization. This is only one example of what is
surely to come in the future under Trumps rule.
Under Trumps regime of economic, religious, education, and political
fundamentalism, compassion and respect for the other will be viewed with contempt
while society will increasingly become more militarized and financial capital will be
deregulated in order to be free to engage in behaviors that put the American public
and planet in danger. A form of social and historical amnesia will descend over
American society like a poisonous virus. A culture of dumbness and civic illiteracy will
be produced and legitimated along with a culture of fear that will enable a harsh law
and order regime.
Policies will be enacted in which public goods such as schools will be privatized, and a
culture of greed and selfishness will be elevated to new heights of celebration.
There will be a further retreat from civic literacy, civic courage, and social
responsibility, one matched by a growing abandonment by the state of any allegiance

to the common good. Fear and the threat of state violence will shape how problems
are addressed, and a growing culture of dissent will be ruthlessly suppressed in all of
the public spheres in which it has functioned in the past. The free-market mentality
that gained prominence under the presidency of Ronald Reagan will accelerate under
the Trump administration and it will continue to drive politics, destroy many social
protections, celebrate a hyper-competitiveness, and deregulate economic
activity. Under Donald Trumps reign, all human activities, practices, and institutions
will be subject to market principles and militarized. The only relations that matter
will be defined in commercial terms just as civil society will be organized for the
production of violence. It is most likely that the most dangerous powers of the state
will be unleashed under Trump, possibly on the environment, public and higher
education, protesters, poor Blacks, Muslims, and illegal immigrants. Surely, all the
signs are in place given the coterie of billionaires, generals, warmongers,
Islamophobes, neoliberal cheerleaders, and anti-public demagogues Trump has
appointed to high-ranking government positions. Americans may be on the verge of
witnessing how democracy ends and this is precisely why Trumps election as the
president of the United States cannot be normalized.
Trumps repressive and poisonous attitudes and irresponsible view of others and
the broader society will not change his role as president. If fact, he will consolidate
his power and will be more reckless than he was during the primaries and presidential
campaigns. Trumps narcissism, indifference to the truth, and addiction to the
spectacle will further increase his view of himself and his policies as unaccountable,
especially as he institutes a mode of governance that suppresses the opposition and
deals with his audience directly through the social media. Fortunately, a number of
diverse groups, extending from union members and womens groups to more left
oriented groups such as Refuse Fascism.org, along with teachers, actors, and artists
are organizing to protest Trumps neo-fascist ideology and policies. As George Yancy
pointed out to me in a personal correspondence, such actions are unique in that they
make the political more pedagogical by elevating protests, modes of resistance, and
criticism to the level of the cultural rather than allowing such criticism to reside in
the voice and presence of isolated, prophetic intellectuals. Moreover, a number of
opposition magazines and social sites such as In These Times, The Nation, Truthout,
and Counterpunch along with various public intellectuals such as Anthony DiMaggio,
Robin Kelley, and members of the Black Lives Matter Movement are producing
instructive articles on both the nature of resistance and what forms it might take. [21]
At issue here is the urgent necessity to produce a collective effort that enables a
level of critical thinking, civic literacy, and political courage that will inspire and
energize a massive broad-based struggle intent on producing ongoing forms of non-

violent resistance at all levels of society. Rabbi Michael Lerner is right in insisting
that progressives need a new language of critique and possibility, one that embraces
a movement for a world of love, courage, and justice while being committed to a mode
of nonviolence in which the means are as ethical as the ends sought by such
struggles.[22] Such a call is as historically mindful as it is insightful and it draws upon
legacies of non-violent resistance as diverse as those called for by renowned
activists such as Saul Alinsky, Paulo Freire, and Martin Luther King, Jr. Yet, in spite
of their diverse projects and methods, these modes of non-violent resistance all
shared a commitment to a collective and fearsome struggle in which non-violence
strategies rejected passivity and compromise for powerful expressions of
resistance. Such struggles to be successful will have to be coordinated, fearless, and
relentless. Single-issue movements will have to join with others in supporting both a
comprehensive politics and a mass collective movement. We live at a time in which
totalitarian forms are with us again. American society is no longer at the tipping
point of authoritarianism, we are in the midst of what Hannah Arendt called dark
times and individual and collective resistance is the only hope we have to move
beyond this ominous moment in our history.
Henry A. Giroux currently is a Contributing Editor for Tikkun Magazine and the
McMaster University Professor for Scholarship in the Public Interest and The Paulo
Freire Distinguished Scholar in Critical Pedagogy. His most recent books include The

Violence of Organized Forgetting (City Lights, 2014), Dangerous Thinking in the Age
of the New Authoritarianism (Routledge, 2015), co-authored with Brad
Evans, Disposable Futures: The Seduction of Violence in the Age of Spectacle (City
Lights, 2015), and America at War with Itself (City Lights, 2016). His website
is www.henryagiroux.com.
Tom Engelhardt, Tomgram: Rebecca Gordon, No New Normal, TomDispatch
(November 20, 2016). Online: http://www.tomdispatch.com/blog/176212/
[1]

[2]

Neil Gabler, And So It Begins: Normalizing the

Election, Moyers&Company (November 24, 2016).

Online: http://billmoyers.com/story/media-normalizing-election/
[3]

Ibid. Gabler, And So It Begins: Normalizing the Election.

[4]

The interview is available at http://buzz.blog.ajc.com/2016/11/12/oprah-trump/

[5]

Nicholas Kristof, Gritting Our Teeth and Giving President Trump a Chance, New

York Times (November 9, 2017).

Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/10/opinion/gritting-our-teeth-and-givingpresident-trump-a-chance.html?_r=0

Irish Central Staff, Bill gates Says Trump Could lead America like
JFK, IrishCentral.com (January 6, 2017). Online:
http://www.irishcentral.com/news/politics/bill-gates-says-trump-could-lead-americalike-jfk
[6]

Charles Blow, Donald Trump, This is not Normal, New York Times (December 19,
2016). Online: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/19/opinion/donald-trump-this-is[7]

not-normal.html?_r=0
[8]

Bill Trott, Donald Trumps choice of Steve Bannon as chief strategist sets off

critical firestorm, Global News (November 15, 2017). Online:

http://globalnews.ca/news/3068972/donald-trumps-choice-of-steve-bannon-aschief-strategist-sets-of-critical-firestorm/
[9]

[10]

Ibid., Gabler, And So It Begins: Normalizing the Election.

Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, New

York: 2001). Sheldon S. Wolin, Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and

the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism, (Princeton University Press, 2008).
[11]

Marie Luise Knott, Unlearning With Hannah Arendt, trans. by David Dollenmayer,

(Other Press: New York, NY. 2011, 2013), p 17.

Bill Dixon, Totalitarianism and the Sand Storm, Hannah Arendt Center (February
3, 2014). Online: http://www.hannaharendtcenter.org/?p=12466
[12]

[13]

The following three paragraphs draw from previous work in Henry A. Giroux,

Barack Obama and the Resurgent Specter of Authoritarianism, 3:4 JAC (2011), pp.
415-440.
[14]

Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism. (USA, N.Y.: Vintage Books, 2005), p.

208.
[15]

Todd Gitlin, Welcome to the Vortex, Open Democracy, [7 January 2017]

Online: http://www.commondreams.org/views/2017/01/07/welcome-vortex
[16]

Amy Goodman, "It Might Not Be Good for America, But It's Good for Us": How

the Media Got Rich on Trump's Rise, Democracy Now (Novemmber 9, 2016).
Online: https://www.democracynow.org/2016/11/9/it_might_not_be_good_for
[17]

Ibid.

[18]

Kelefa Sanneh, Secret Admirers: The Conservative Intellectuals Smitten with

Trump, The New Yorker (January 9, 2017). Online:

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/01/09/intellectuals-for-trump
[19]

Ibid.

[20]

Ibid.

[21]

See for instance, A Handbook For Resistance in the January 2017 issue of In

These Times; the December 5th issue of The Nation on How to Fight Back; Anthony
DiMaggio, The Anti-Trump Uprising: Forging a Path Forward in Uncertain Times,
Counterpunch (December 15, 2016).
Online: http://www.counterpunch.org/2016/12/15/the-anti-trump-uprising-forging-apath-forward-in-uncertain-times/; Robin D. G. Kelley, After Trump, Boston
Review (November 15, 2016). Online: http://bostonreview.net/forum/aftertrump/robin-d-g-kelley-trump-says-go-back-we-say-fight-back; a resistance manual
launched by the Movement for Black Lives, See
https://www.resistancemanual.org/Resistance_Manual_Home
Rabbi Michael Lerner, Yearning for a World of Love and Justice: An introduction
to the Ideas of Tikkun and the Network of Spiritual Progressives
[22]

(NSP), Tikkun (April 30, 2015). Online: http://www.tikkun.org/nextgen/yearningfor-a-world-of-love-and-justice-the-worldview-of-tikkun-and-our-network-ofspiritual-progressives

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