Americans are not just electing a president in November — we’re also electing a reality.
Both Vice President Kamala Harris and former President Donald Trump are running on drastically different policy visions from each other. But what’s more significant and less talked about in mainstream media outlets is how Trump is running on a completely fabricated, alternate version of reality than Harris. And Trump is hoping to retake the White House by convincing enough Americans to accept his false version of reality.
As a former president, it’s safe to assume Trump has knowledgeable people around him who may have tried gently reminding him that the current healthy state of the economy, historically low crime rates, and dwindling numbers of illegal border crossings don’t jibe with the reality he’s selling to the American public. It’s not that Trump doesn’t know that the America he wants his supporters to believe is fictional. Rather, his false characterization of America as a dystopian hellscape is an essential ingredient to his conquest for power.
It’s important to note that America is far from perfect as a nation. Tens of thousands of Americans die every year because they can’t afford the high cost of healthcare. One cancer diagnosis can quickly evaporate the life savings of someone who worked hard and saved money to build a stable life – even for people with health insurance. Student debt and the usurious interest rates that come with it still hold back entire generations from building wealth. Police are still largely able to kill with impunity and eat up ever-larger portions of city budgets that could be diverted to public services and programs proven to reduce crime.
But Trump is not concerned with any of these very real and pertinent issues. His campaign is instead deeply rooted in lies, disinformation, and conspiracy theories all aligned with his central goal of gaining and then consolidating power. And it’s important to note that throughout history, fascist governments have had a similar reliance on the use of lies as a weapon to take and retain power. When looking at Trump’s rhetoric in this context, it becomes easier to understand why he’s become increasingly committed to telling easily disproved lies on the campaign trail.
There is no room for facts in Trump’s fabricated reality
Earlier this year, popular sports talk radio host Colin Cowherd — who almost never discusses politics with his audience — took a detour from his usual sports-related diatribes to dispute the reality Trump was selling to voters. Cowherd was particularly committed to fact-checking the former president’s claims about the economy and crime rates under President Joe Biden.
“He’s trying to sell me an America that doesn’t exist,” Cowherd said of Trump on a May episode of his podcast. “I don’t see crime. I’m not stumbling over homeless people. I see happy people. Dodger Stadium’s full, leads Major League Baseball in attendance. Laker games are full. NFL games are full. People have money in their pocket. LAX is packed. I just saw record airline revenue over the weekend.”
“I’m constantly being sold an America by Donald Trump of ‘crime rates are skyrocketing.’ No, they’re actually not. Starting in 2023 they have plummeted coast to coast,” he continued. “You can’t keep selling me on how bad the country is, because it’s not bad for me and my friends.”
As Trump demonstrated with his lies about Haitian migrants in Springfield, Ohio and Charleroi, Pennsylvania, the actual truth matters far less than the narrative he wants to create. Both Trump and his running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), were undeterred from their lie that Haitian migrants were supposedly kidnapping and eating residents’ pets, even though everyone from the city’s municipal government and local police to Ohio’s Republican governor repeatedly debunked their claim. Vance himself admitted that he was content to “create stories” for the sake of driving media coverage — even if those stories put his own constituents’ lives in danger.
It’s easy to see why it’s difficult to refute Trump’s lies, given the severe consequences for anyone trying to contradict his preferred narrative. Local business owners in Springfield have praised the Haitian immigrants who took jobs in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and allowed them to remain open and prosper. In fact, one local businessman in the small Ohio town has been subjected to death threats from Trump supporters for simply pointing out that Haitian migrants have reversed Springfield’s population decline and revitalized the city’s economy. One message left on the company’s voicemail called for the owner to “take a bullet to the skull.”
Following the devastation from Hurricanes Helene and Milton in late September and early October, Trump continued his barrage of lies. Despite both Democratic and Republican governors in the affected states lauding the Biden administration’s prompt response to the disaster, the former president insisted without evidence that the federal government was in absentia while local residents were suffering and was spending money meant for disaster relief on programs for undocumented immigrants. Of course, this was projection: Trump, not Biden, diverted millions of dollars from the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s operational budget in 2018 to pay for immigrant processing at the Southern border.
In a joint editorial, the Charlotte Observer and the Raleigh News & Observer condemned Trump’s lies about hurricane response in North Carolina, where a bulk of the damage from Helene took place. The papers said the former president has “politicized the situation at every turn” and spread “falsehoods and conspiracies that fracture the community instead of bringing it together.”
“Let’s be clear: Western North Carolina is not a political football. This is not a campaign opportunity,” the editorial read. “The most unhelpful thing any politician — or anyone else — can do right now is spread misinformation and tell people that their government isn’t doing anything to help them.”
Wherever he goes, the most egregious lies Trump is telling are about migrants. During a campaign rally in Aurora, Colorado, the former president was particularly fixated on a story circulating among right-wing media outlets about members of a Venezuelan prison gang taking over apartment buildings. Even though Aurora Republican Mayor Mike Coffman has insisted that Venezuelan gang activity is “isolated” in the town of roughly 400,000 residents, Trump has continued to lie about the city being supposedly “taken over” and “occupied” by violent migrant gangs. Trump notably did not accept Coffman’s invitation to tour Aurora and see for himself that the city was not the “war zone” he described in his campaign speeches.
Trump’s lies about migrants have continued to escalate, and the ex-president is apparently undeterred by aides reportedly urging him to ease off of his caustic rhetoric. One unnamed member of Trump’s team confided to Rolling Stone that when the former president was asked to “play it safe” with his rhetoric in the final weeks of the campaign, Trump responded by saying: “That’s how you lose.” That report came a day after a rally in Nevada in which Trump claimed without evidence that migrants were now taking over hospitals and schools.
“You cannot get into a hospital, by the way. Because the migrants have all the beds. You cannot get into a hospital,” he said. “You cannot get your kids into a school because there are migrants there that don’t even speak the language… they’re getting precedent over your children.”
Trump’s relentless lying follows the fascist playbook to the letter
For Trump to lie so much about nearly everything suggests that he’s either mentally unwell or that he’s intentionally crafting an alternate reality for his supporters. And while the former president is 78 years old, that still doesn’t fully explain why he continues to lie despite being fact-checked at every turn by politicians on both sides of the aisle and the vast majority of media outlets. Rather, it’s more likely Trump’s lies are part of a larger strategy that other fascist despots have deployed throughout history.
In a 2018 interview with Vox, Yale University philosophy professor Jason Stanley defined fascism as less of an ideology than a tactic. While he noted that fascism was inherently a right-wing system at its core, it could more accurately be described as a way of running for power and holding onto power once it’s been granted by the public. Stanley argued that fascism is incompatible with truth, and that fascists rely on lies as a means of controlling the populace.
“Truth is the heart of liberal democracy. The two ideals of liberal democracy are liberty and equality. If your belief system is shot through with lies, you’re not free. Nobody thinks of the citizens of North Korea as free, because their actions are controlled by lies,” he said.
“Truth is required to act freely. Freedom requires knowledge, and in order to act freely in the world, you need to know what the world is and know what you’re doing,” he continued. “You only know what you’re doing if you have access to the truth. So freedom requires truth, and to smash freedom you have to smash truth.”
Stanley said that Trump “practices fascist politics,” and illustrated this by pointing out ways in which fascist regimes of the past have successfully manipulated the public into accepting their version of reality. His example is eerily similar to Trump’s latest spate of lies about migrants.
“In the past, fascist politics would focus on the dominant cultural group,” Stanley said. “Their goal is to make them feel like victims, to make them feel like they’ve lost something and that the thing that they’ve lost has been taken by a specific enemy, usually some minority out-group or some opposing nation.”
Vox’s Sean Illing illustrated Stanley’s point by referencing a quote by German philosopher Hannah Arendt, who wrote in her book “The Origins of Totalitarianism” that fascists have always sought power through the ability to “transform their lie into a new reality.” And through their constant attacks on the truth, fascists can make the people more susceptible to any reality that is the most politically beneficial to them. Arendt expanded on this in a 1974 interview:
“What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has to constantly rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows. And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.”
Trump has clearly specified that the goal of his second administration is twofold: To rapidly expand the powers of the executive branch, and to use his sweeping new powers to brutally crack down on both legal and undocumented immigrants. And it’s unlikely he would stop there: In an October tweet, the former president announced his plans to invoke a centuries-old law that would allow him to punish journalists in addition to migrants.
“November 5th, 2024 will be LIBERATION DAY in America. I will rescue Aurora and every town that has been invaded and conquered — and we will put these vicious and bloodthirsty criminals in jail or kick them the hell OUT OF OUR COUNTRY,” he tweeted. “[U]pon taking office, we will have an OPERATION AURORA at the Federal Level. To expedite removals of this savage gang, I will invoke the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to target and dismantle every migrant criminal network operating on American Soil.”
As the Brennan Center for Justice wrote, the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 is an anti-immigrant law that hasn’t been used since Franklin Delano Roosevelt invoked it to round up and detain Japanese-American citizens in sweeping detention camps during World War II. This would give Trump the power to detain all migrants regardless of their legal status based solely on their country of birth, without trial.
“Although the law was enacted to prevent foreign espionage and sabotage in wartime, it can be — and has been — wielded against immigrants who have done nothing wrong, have evinced no signs of disloyalty, and are lawfully present in the United States,” the Brennan Center wrote in October. “It is an overbroad authority that may violate constitutional rights in wartime and is subject to abuse in peacetime.”
The Alien Enemies Act of 1798 is one of the highly controversial Alien and Sedition Acts passed at the end of the 18th century. According to the National Archives, the Alien and Sedition Acts also made it a crime for anyone to "write, print, utter or publish" any "false, scandalous and malicious writing or writings against the government of the United States." Violators could be punished with a fine of up to $2,000 and a maximum prison sentence of two years.
The former president openly campaigning on draconian anti-immigrant policies and deploying the weaponization of lies is textbook fascism. This is no longer hyperbole: General Mark Milley, who served as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during Trump’s presidency, told journalist Bob Woodward that he now viewed Trump as “fascist to the core.”
“No one has ever been as dangerous to this country as Donald Trump,” Milley said. “Now I realize he’s a total fascist. He is the most dangerous person to this country.”
The warning signs couldn’t be clearer: Donald Trump is a fascist waging war on truth, facts, and reality for the sake of power. And whether he succeeds in his goal of becoming the most powerful person in the world and permanently extinguishing the American experiment of multiracial democracy will be up to a few ten thousand people across a small handful of states in the coming weeks.
Carl Gibson is a journalist whose work has been published in CNN, USA TODAY, the Guardian, the Washington Post, the Houston Chronicle, the Louisville Courier-Journal, Barron’s, Business Insider, the Independent, and NPR, among others. Follow him on Bluesky @crgibs.bsky.social.
