Philippa Kaur

Donald Trump has been colonising the world’s attention for years, via television, on social media and in books. Ironically, given Trump likes books about as much as he does germs, more than 100 books about him are listed on Wikipedia, ranging from biographies and exposés to paeans of praise (think his former campaign manager, Corey Lewandowski) and scathing analyses of his presidency.

One work, Plaintiff in Chief, concerns the gob-smacking number of lawsuits Trump and his businesses have engaged in – 3500 – and is already well out of date, having been published in 2019. There is even a book about all the Trump books. Its nicely punning title, What were we thinking?, might also be said to apply to the publishers of Carlos Lozada’s book although that would undervalue his insights, and those of the authors whose work he examines.

Review: Confidence Man: The making of Donald Trump and the breaking of America –Maggie Haberman (HarperCollins)

With the application of all this intellectual muscle, though, what do we still need – or want – to know about Donald Trump? All of us probably do need to know the likelihood Trump will run again for president and, worse, win. On that hinges the future of democracy in a global superpower along with prospects for real action combating the effects of climate change.

Read more:
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The answer to this need-to-know question is undeniably important, but I still want to know whether Trump actually believes the 2020 presidential election was stolen. Is there some psychological wound from his childhood that renders him unable to bear loss? Or is his unblinking refusal to accept the election result yet another example of his lifelong habit of lying and grifting to get his own way?

If the answer is the former, I care less about what might have happened to Donald as a toddler than that he has managed to persuade about two thirds of Republican voters to his view, according to polls analysed by Politifact.

If the answer is the latter, which bespeaks a truly chilling level of cynical disregard for the consequences of his actions, it immediately raises another question. Exactly how has Trump been able to persuade so many Republicans to believe his lies, despite all evidence to the contrary, including Trump’s legal team losing 64 out of 65 cases brought contesting the result?

I ask these questions following publication of Maggie Haberman’s Confidence Man: the making of Donald Trump and the breaking of America. Since the mid-1990s, Haberman has reported on Trump, first for the Murdoch-owned tabloid, The New York Post, then for its rival, The New York Daily News, and, since 2015, for The New York Times.

The driving argument of her book is that to understand Trump you need to understand the New York real-estate and property development world in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. What he learnt there, she argues, about business, politics and people, was the template of behaviour he took into the White House.

Trump, real estate mogul, in 1985.
Marty Lederhandler/AP

‘False’, ‘Totally false’, ‘Fake News’

During two campaigns and four years in office, writes Haberman, Trump treated the country like a version of New York City’s five boroughs. His aides soon realised he had imagined a presidency that functioned like one of the once-powerful Democratic Party machines in those boroughs. A single boss controlled everything in this kingdom and knew his support alone could ensure electoral success for others. This was an “us” versus “them” realm where racial dynamics changed from one block to the next.

The argument has explanatory power. But so too, to take one example, does James Poniewozik’s view, in his 2019 book, Audience of One, that the key to Trump’s worldview is his symbiotic relationship with television. Trump did seem to govern in much the same way as he behaved in The Apprentice, the reality TV program he starred in – making contestants beholden to his every whim and impulse.

As Poniewozik puts it, the Trump administration soon became a “dogpile of competitors, cronies and relatives throttling one another daily for survival”.

Trump greets contestants on The Apprentice in 2004.
Jennifer Szymaszek/AAP

Haberman tells readers that on top of her daily reporting, she conducted 250 interviews for the book, including three with Trump, either in person or in writing. For the latter, Trump annotated her list of questions in his customary black “Sharpie” pen with comments like “False”, “Totally false” and “Fake News”.

Because Haberman has known Trump for so long she has been derided as a schill. Because she enjoyed good access to him on the campaign trail and during his presidency she has been called a “Trump whisperer”. She may at times have been both, but like almost any journalist who has reported on Trump her work has been labelled “fake news”.

She has borne, too, Trump’s seemingly casual but calibrated barbs: “Did you ever notice that her glasses are always smudged?” he said to his aides.

More precisely, she reports him saying this to aides, but there is no source for the comment in the book’s end-notes. Does that mean he didn’t say it? Does Haberman take the same insouciant approach here to sourcing as the authors of Plagued, political journalists Simon Benson and Geoff Chambers, did in their recent book about the Morrison government’s response to the pandemic?

Like the authors of Plagued too, Haberman has fielded criticism for withholding information from her newspaper readers and saving it for her book. (Benson and Chambers knew about Morrison’s multiple ministerial portfolios but held onto that information for up to two years before it became public.)

Read more:
In Plagued, journalists have traded their independence for access, resulting in a kind of political pornography

In Confidence Man Haberman recounts Trump telling one aide days after the 2020 presidential election, “I’m just not going to leave”, and another, “We’re never leaving. How can you leave when you won an election?” (She also reports him in other conversations seeming to accept he had lost but does not probe the contradiction further.) Should she have reported those comments at the time rather than saving them for her book?

The information gathered by Haberman was clearly important and could, perhaps should, have been published in The New York Times contemporaneously but we don’t know the circumstances in which it was obtained. Perhaps the information was only revealed on condition it would not be published immediately. There is little doubt that people being interviewed for a book published well after the news cycle has pedalled on are willing to speak more candidly. If the aim of a book is to provide context and nuance about contested current events, then the trade-off between news now and understanding later may be worth it.

Responding to the criticism that she had witheld vital information from the public, a spokesman for The New York Times said,

Maggie Haberman took leave from The Times to write her book. In the course of reporting the book, she shared considerable newsworthy information with The Times. Editors decided what news was best suited for our news report.

Devastating observations

Returning to the “smudged glasses” barb, we know Trump has publicly insulted women and journalists countless times. The comment has the ring of truth, so it is probably not as important that this quote was unattributed. The end-notes of Confidence Man do run to 63 pages (providing a good deal more information than the sparse end-notes in Plagued.)

At several points Haberman also tells us about news stories she has written, how they were received, those whose accuracy was later vindicated and, occasionally, those that contained errors of fact or context. In other words, she is reflective and concerned to be as fair as possible in her reporting and judgements.

When Haberman’s book was released in early October, New York magazine listed 22 revelations from it while acknowledging they “feel less like bombshells and more like laundry lists of erratic presidential behaviour”.

For many readers the coverage of New York City’s property world will be unfamiliar, but the bulk of the book covers Trump’s political career and is very familiar: the 2016 campaign, the presidency, the unceasing stream of controversies – large, small or confected – the impeachment trials, the pandemic response, the 2020 campaign and the January 6 riots at the Capitol.

President Donald Trump as he returns to the Oval Office after speaking on the Ellipse on January 6, 2021.
House Select Committee/AP

Familiar though these events are, their sheer volume means they are not discussed in any great depth and what discussion there is does not venture beyond the political journalist’s inside-the-Beltway frame of reference. This can be frustrating but the value of reading Confidence Man, in my view, is not in the explosive revelations or the private, never-seen-before details. It is how Haberman uses anecdotes to build up a devastating picture of character.

It is true there is some extraordinary material in the book but Haberman does not badge it up Bob Woodward-style. Instead, she quietly but frequently enough for it to look like a deliberate strategy, drops in eye-popping anecdotes and devastating observations about Trump’s behaviour.

You have to be on the lookout for them because they are nestled within 597 pages of detailed coverage of his life and career. Some come from her own reporting while others are drawn from earlier journalists’ and authors’ work.

Trump as a child.
Photo: Confidence Man

Haberman spends little space on Trump’s childhood but enough to show his bullying began early: a neighbour in Queens, New York, was horrified when her baby sitting in a playpen in the backyard was pelted with rocks over the fence from a five-year-old Trump. Later, Trump proudly recalled gluing together his brother Robert’s blocks to build his own tower.

That Trump is profligate with others’ money but tight with his own is well known but Haberman reminds us that one of his early antagonists, the satirical magazine, Spy, used to mail cheques to his office for steadily diminishing amounts to see whether he would keep cashing them; he did, down to one for 13 cents.

When the Trumps moved into the White House in 2017, Donald loved being able to press a button on his desk to order a valet to bring him a Diet Coke. He remade the White House to suit his tastes, installing plenty of television sets, even in the bathroom, and telling guests he had renovated the entire area, including the toilet.

“You understand what I mean,” he said to one visitor, who interpreted it to mean he did not want to use the same bathroom as his African-American predecessor. Apart from the apparent racism, Trump’s statement was also untrue as officials told Haberman it was customary for toilet seats in the White House to be replaced between one administration and the next.

Trump may not be a book reader but, Haberman reports, he has near perfect recall of anything written about him in the media. He knew little and cared less about policies or how government actually operated but staff noticed he absorbed policies far better from television coverage than from their briefings.

Trump, pictured here on Air Force One in 2018, absorbed information better from television than from briefings.
Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP

They noticed his “singular interest” in whether those representing him on television appeared persuasive, and on their appearance full stop. He would comment on the lighting, the make-up, the women’s dresses, their hair. Trump had always been preternaturally aware of the appearance of things. Sleeping over at a friend’s house during primary school, he earnestly commented on the “wonderful” quality of the bed-sheets.

Extra ice cream and special glassware

Trump himself noticed how he could say almost anything and supporters at his MAGA rallies would forgive him. Haberman compares this revelation – and two others – to the scene in Jurassic Park when the velociraptors learn how to open doors.

Similar penny-dropping moments happened when Trump learned how to communicate by Twitter unburdened of staff controls and when he discovered presidential pardons. “For Trump, who never really accepted the fact that Congress was a separate and equal branch of government, the ability to deliver ‘justice’ on a case-by-case basis hit like a revelation,” writes Haberman.

The Faustian pact Trump appeared to strike with his MAGA base, though, was that just as they would forgive him if he shot someone on Fifth Avenue, as he infamously remarked, so he would shape his administration to suit their every demand, no matter how misconceived, extreme or counter-productive they might be.

Trump’s callousness and cruelty is well documented. (Haberman reports that one of the very few times Trump has cried was in private after his father, Fred, died.)
When he began building the notorious wall on the southern border of the US to keep out Latino immigrants and asylum seekers, he urged officials to put spikes on top and to paint it black so as to burn the skin of those trying to climb the wall.

John Kelly, one of the revolving door of chiefs of staff who tried and failed to bring order to the Trump administration, had a son in the military who died while on duty in Afghanistan, and Kelly had been a general himself. Once, when he and Trump were standing together at the Arlington National Cemetery grave site where Kelly’s son was buried, Trump wondered aloud why anyone would want to join the military.

Kelly, left, and Trump in 2017.
Evan Vucci/AP

Trump’s petty, venal behaviour has also been well documented, but the details Haberman has marshalled can still surprise. After winning the 2016 election, he invited a group of moderate Democrats to join him for dinner to discuss various pieces of legislation, but he couldn’t help needling them throughout. For dessert, he made sure he received one more scoop of ice cream than any of his guests.

More importantly, as early as 23 February 2020 Trump was not only aware of the dangers of COVID-19 but was taking precautions against it. On a trip to India Trump was reluctant to eat, pushing food around his plate and drinking only from “special glassware that he said Melania [Trump] had the White House staff pack for the trip, primarily for fear of contracting the coronavirus”.

During the pandemic he sometimes acknowledged the seriousness of COVID but mostly he downplayed or denied its impact on public health, with catastrophic results.

A deeper malaise?

Carlos Lozada, in his survey of all those Trump books, identifies many that seek to explain the Trump phenomenon through a single overriding cause, and he finds that limiting. Haberman tacitly acknowledges this when she quotes Trump saying he always aimed to “put some show business into the real estate business”. When he did, she writes, Trump learnt that “he could win as much press for projects he never completed as those he did”.

Poniewozik, from his vantage point as a television critic, makes the same observation: namely, that Trump enjoyed more success playing the role of a business titan on television than actually being one, before citing Fran Leibowitz’s acid line that Trump is “a poor person’s idea of a rich person”.

Closing Haberman’s book, I do think Trump knew he had lost the election quite soon after the results came in. Just how much his years in New York’s property development world shaped that decision is hard to say. It seems part of the explanation but only part.

In my mind her book jostles alongside Poniewozik’s work and for that matter, James Zirin’s Plaintiff in Chief, which underscores how Trump sees the law not as a “system of rules to be obeyed” but “as a potent weapon to be used against his adversaries”. We’re still seeing this play out in Trump’s unremitting efforts to stave off multiple investigations of his business and his behaviour.

Lozada prefers explanations of Trump as a symptom of longer term problems in American politics and society, an approach exemplified in BBC correspondent and historian Nick Bryant’s excellent book, When America Stopped Being Great.
Surely both explanatory approaches need to be deployed.

Trump may be a symptom of a deeper malaise afflicting American democracy but has there ever been a symptom quite like him? In 2020 the majority of voters opted to be cured of their Trump symptoms, but the treatment failed and the bacillus rages on. More

When former Vice President Mike Pence declared, in a speech to a conservative group, that “democracy depends on heavy doses of civility,” several attendees stood up and walked out of the Georgetown University auditorium.

That speech came just three weeks before the midterm elections as commentators and candidates around the country were calling for greater civility in politics.

This is no surprise.

Civility is popular with the American people. Across the political spectrum, citizens agree that politics has become dangerously toxic, and they think the problem is worsening.

That is one political issue we all agree on – democracy needs to regain civility. If it’s going to, the effort has to start with each of us individually, rather than waiting for someone else to make the first move.

Bipartisan hypocrisy

This unanimity that more civility is needed in politics may be an illusion.

Citizens tend to lay the blame for political incivility solely on their political opponents. They want civility in politics, but say they think compromise is a one-way street.

They want politicians to work together, but also want the opposition to capitulate.

Former Vice President Mike Pence visits Fox News on Oct. 19, 2022.
Shannon Finney/Getty Images

They value civility, but hold that their partisan rivals are uniformly immoral, dishonest and close-minded.

Pence reflected these us-versus-them attitudes himself during his Georgetown speech when he claimed that powerful institutions have “locked arms to advance a woke agenda designed to advance the policies and beliefs of the American left.”

Defining civility

Despite the multiple pleas for civility, little is said about what civility is.

That probably explains why civility is so popular.

Each citizen gets to define the term in their own way, and no one believes their own side to be uncivil. But if we believe that the U.S. needs to restore civility, we must define it.

It cannot be the demand to always remain calm in political debate. It’s generally good to keep one’s cool, of course. But when engaging in political disagreement, it’s not always possible to do so.

Our political opinions typically reflect deeply held values and commitments about justice. We tend to regard those who disagree with us about such matters as not merely on the other side of the issue, but on the wrong side. We should expect disagreements about important matters to get heated.

Civility might be better understood as the avoidance of undue hostility and gratuitous animosity in political debate. This could be something as simple as calling out inflated rhetoric, as John McCain famously did during his presidential campaign when his supporters claimed that Barack Obama was untrustworthy and not an American.

This idea acknowledges that heated debates can be appropriate within reason. It allows for some degree of antagonism, while at the same time prohibiting unnecessary vitriol.

In a sense, this makes civility a matter of judging whether our subject’s behavior calls for an escalation of hostility. The problem is that, when it comes to evaluating the behavior of our opponents, we are remarkably poor judges.

Partisan civility

Americans’ assessment of political behavior tightly tracks our partisan allegiances.

We cut our allies slack while holding our opponents to very high standards. When our allies engage in objectionable behavior, we excuse them. But when members of the opposition engage in the same behavior, we condemn them. In one experiment, when partisans were told of an ally stealing an opposing candidate’s campaign signs off neighborhood lawns, they chalked it up to political integrity. But when those same partisans were told that an opponent had stolen their signs, they condemned the act as undemocratic.

We over-ascribe hostility, dishonesty and untrustworthiness to our political opponents. Consequently, we will almost always see fit to escalate hostility when interacting with our opposition. When civility is understood as the avoidance of unnecessary rancor, it fails.

I’ve argued in my recent book “Sustaining Democracy” that civility isn’t really about how we conduct disagreements with political opponents.

Instead, civility has to do with how people formulate their own political ideas.

The GOP elephant and Democratic donkey are going toe-to-toe on Election Day.
Getty Images

We are uncivil when our political opinions do not take due account of the perspectives, priorities and concerns of our fellow citizens.

To better understand this idea, consider that in a democratic society, citizens share political power as political equals. As democratic citizens, we have the responsibility to act in ways that respect the equality of our fellow citizens, even when we disagree with their politics.

In my view, one way to respect their equality is to give due consideration to their values and preferences.

Of course, this does not require that we water down our own political commitments – or always try to meet our opponents halfway.

It calls only for a sincere attempt to consider their perspectives when devising our own.

People are civil when we can explain our political opinions to our political opponents in ways that are responsive to their rival ideas.

A civility test

Here is a simple three-part test for civility:

First, take one of your strongest political views, and then try to figure out what your smartest partisan opponent might say about it.

Second, identify a political idea that is key to your opponent and then develop a lucid argument that supports it.

Third, identify a major policy favored by the other side that you could regard as permissible for government – despite your opposition.

If you struggle to perform those tasks, that means one has a feeble grasp on the range of responsible political opinion.

When we cannot even imagine a cogent political perspective that stands in opposition to our own, we can’t engage civilly with our fellow citizens. More

In January 2017, Donald Trump’s advisor Kellyanne Conway was quizzed on White House press secretary Sean Spicer’s false claims about the number of attendees at the president’s inauguration. When pressed on why Spicer would “utter a provable falsehood”, Conway said that Spicer was offering “alternative facts”.

Her wording was widely characterised as “Orwellian”. Everywhere from Slate to the New York Times to USA Today, journalists were linking the new administration to George Orwell’s dystopian fiction. Less than a week after Conway’s claim, the sales of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four had gone up an estimated 9,500%.

In a serious case of “I know you are but what am I?”, Republicans have gotten in on the act, accusing the left of being the fulfilment of Orwell’s dark prophesy. In April this year, for instance, Donald Trump Jr. tweeted: “Historically, was there ever a despotic regime that didn’t have the equivalent of a Ministry of Truth?”

Almost everyone in every quarter sees Orwellian undertones in the manoeuvrings of their opponents. Like Elvis, Orwell has been spotted everywhere.

But we should be suspicious, not simply because the designation is thrown around so freely and is plastic enough to fit almost all political phenomena indifferently, but because one of the legacies of Nineteen Eighty-Four itself is to leave us with a more finely tuned sense of what such propaganda looks like. Orwellian strategies are harder to propagate because of, well, the overwhelming success of Nineteen Eighty-Four.

The Orwellian paradox

Some historical nuance is required. Orwell was responding to mid-twentieth century political regimes – Stalinist Russia, in particular. He was ringing the alarm bells on a new phenomenon: state control had moved beyond speech to thought and perception. Winston Smith, the protagonist of Nineteen Eighty-Four, reflects:

The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.

There is a paradox here.

Propaganda is a mode of communication – pervasive, insistent, controlled. Orwell shows it flooding the airwaves, invading every workspace and living room through the screens on which the image of Big Brother is ever-present. Yet the goal of this kind of propaganda is to move beyond the phase of control through language to a regime of thought control where such communication has become redundant.

The world of Big Brother is austere in every way – colourless, devoid of all entertainments and sensory pleasures – so language itself is subject to the principle of reduction and elimination. The Party officials in charge of Newspeak are in the business of “cutting language down to the bone”. They are destroying scores of words every day so that “thoughtcrime” will ultimately become impossible, because there will be no means of articulating it, even inside the confines of your own mind.

Thought is already being suppressed in the novel through an embargo on logic and evidence, which starts with a simple reversal of anything that might be regarded as an established truth. This means, conversely, that the regime of Big Brother is threatened by any and every expression of reality-based knowledge. And so:

Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two makes four. If that is granted, all else follows.

Big Brother’s propaganda is thus a self-eliminating program, working constantly and assiduously to make itself redundant. Eventually, there will be no words to protest with, or even to think with; there will be no perceptions to express and no realities to intrude upon the counterfactual world the Party is creating.

The counter-Orwellian paradox

The principles of glasnost (openness) and perestroika (restructuring), which began to take hold in Soviet culture from the end of the “real” year 1984, served to dismantle the regime that prevailed in the USSR for much of the 20th century. Alternatives became possible again; enquiry and conjecture were licensed; inventiveness was set free.

And here is the counter-Orwellian paradox. Under the new policy of openness, propaganda could thrive again. For what is propaganda if not a system of alternatives, as Kellyanne Conway so astutely grasped?

The principle here is not to force one alternative on a population. By rendering any alternative as a priori plausible, this form of propaganda casts doubt on “official” accounts. All they can offer is a version of truth, one that will necessarily reflect their own agendas.

In February this year, Dmitri Kiselev, a fast-talking Russian version of Fox News commentator Sean Hannity and a prime-time host with the Kremlin’s official media outlet Rossiya Segonya, stated this outright:

Objectivity is a myth that is proposed and imposed on us.

Similarly, in 2017, Fox News’ version of Dmitri Kiselev, Sean Hannity, went on CBS and told Ted Koppel:

I don’t pretend that I’m fair and balanced and objective. You do.

When the program went to air, Hannity blasted CBS and called it “fake news”.

Russian theorist Alexander Dugin, author of The Fourth Political Theory.
Mehdi Bolourian/Wikimedia Commons

If we want to understand what is going on here, Orwell is not our guide. We would do better to turn to the writings of Russian political theorist Alexander Dugin.

Dugin is an ideologue who aligns himself with Vladimir Putin’s visionary sense of Russian destiny. While he dismisses the suggestion that he is “Putin’s brain”, he is the most influential analyst of the cultural environment Putin has sought to create.

In his book The Fourth Political Theory, Dugin makes the case for a new political direction, one that moves away from the modernist regimes of Marxism and fascism, whose extremes of ideological conformity he calls “uninteresting” and “worthless”. The literalism of such regimes of control, he says, makes them “entirely useless”.

Without making direct reference to Nineteen Eighty-Four, Dugin’s critique at times echoes the debates at the core of Orwell’s novel. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the Party official O’Brien makes an extended doctrinal statement. He foresees a world with no need for art, literature or science, a world where curiosity and all forms of “enjoyment of the process of life” are eliminated. Such a world would never endure, protests Winston Smith:

It would have no vitality. It would disintegrate. It would commit suicide.

Dugin would no doubt take Winston’s side in this exchange. He proposes a cultural model that is much more flexible, cunning and resourceful than anything O’Brien and his masters might envisage.

The Fourth Political Theory draws its “dark inspiration” from postmodernism, an ethos Dugin despises, but uses as a Trojan horse to penetrate the defences of the world of liberalism (Dugin’s anathema). All the pleasures and enjoyments banished from the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four come surging back.

“I do not really understand why certain people, when confronted with the concept of the Fourth Political Theory,” Dugin writes,

do not immediately rush to open a bottle of champagne, and do not start dancing and rejoicing, celebrating the discovery of new possibilities. After all, this is a kind of a philosophical New Year – an exciting leap into the unknown.

In this brave new world – which is not Aldous Huxley’s any more than it is Orwell’s – “nothing is true and everything is possible”.

The journalist Peter Pomerantsev, a more congenial guide for those who find Dugin’s new ideology hard to stomach, uses this phrase as the title of his book on the propaganda culture surrounding Russian television, where “Everything is PR” is a declared principle.

The “postmodern” influence here is, more specifically, the influence of French theorist Jean Baudrillard, who proposed that the “real” was no longer accessible in a world where layers of image replication – “simulacra” – had evolved into an autonomous pseudo-reality. This is the world in which a television celebrity becomes president and the presidency becomes a celebrity media game.

In such a world, propaganda thrives and manipulation is rife. With no shared or objective reality, the individual subject of liberalism can gain no traction. According to Dugin,

If we lose our identity, we will also lose alterity, the capacity for “otherness”, and the ability to distinguish between self and not-self, and consequently to assume the existence of any alternative viewpoint.

The image here is not one of a strong difference being asserted, but of a fragile and slender one under threat; and the threat is real. As alterity is lost, the obsession with creating antagonists increases, as if it were a mode of survival.

Jean Baudrillard lecturing at European Graduate School, Saas-Fee, Switzerland, June 2004.
Wikimedia commons

Mirroring

One of the key insights of the French-American cultural theorist René Girard is that adversaries are often involved in an intense and escalating mirroring. They increasingly come to reflect each others’ logics, strategies, and rationales. That this state of affairs can invariably only be seen outside the viewpoint of antagonists (who see between themselves all sorts of radical differences) is of little import.

In the parallel cases of the US and Russia, we should look beyond the trivialities and psychopathologies of two men who have had toilets made out of gold for them, who brag about their wealth but evade questions about it, who view women as ornaments, who obsess over the smallest criticisms, and whose “strong man” bluster is always in the service of some nostalgia about a mythical era.

Putin and Trump have lavished each other with praise: Putin has described Trump as a “brilliant, talented person”; Trump has called Putin “a strong leader […] a powerful leader”. But the sincerest flattery, as we know, appears as imitation.

As Russian television has embraced the world of images, with all its extravagance and glamour and duplicity, it has become more like Fox News, and vice versa. When Russia launched its military operation in Ukraine, the news on Russian state media was editorially committed to official Kremlin positions. One of its methods was to echo Fox News. In February, a prime-time overview of the news of the week – presented by Kiselev – featured an opening monologue from Tucker Carlson’s Fox program.

The situation in America since Trump was voted out of office has, if anything, become more dire. As evidence unfolds of his involvement in the January 6 coup attempt and his appropriation of top secret documents as his private property, the legal case against him is fraught with obstacles created by the propaganda enterprise he continues to lead.

What should be clear cases of right and wrong under the US Constitution, and of guilt under law, have become a contest over truth in a hall of mirrors. Every accusation prompts an equal and equivalent counter-accusation. The confusion thickens with the strategy of the pre-emptive strike: whatever Trump has done wrong, he has already accused his opponents of doing just that.

With the prospects of a MAGA dominated election looming, no one can predict the consequences, but it is clear that American democracy is fighting for its life in a political environment that may be damaged beyond hope of recovery.

We need to entertain the idea that Orwell’s success in recognising the propaganda of his day might have incurred a cost – namely, that we are now too confident that we know what propaganda is. Good propaganda is precisely that because it is hard to pick; it rarely wears a neon sign around its neck. Enforced subscription to the Party’s messages has been replaced by voluntary consumption of the Kool Aid. The French philosopher Simone Weil once said that “truth is a need of the soul”. But we are often now satisfied with a more Trumpian, Twitterian logic: “A lot of people agree with me […] a lot of people are saying”.

It is not that nothing of the world of Nineteen Eighty-Four remains, or that the novel does not serve as a reminder of what a certain kind of political control can look like. There are, no doubt, statements by Trump and Putin that are, in some sense, “Orwellian”. Regimes with Orwellian characteristics still exist – like Bashar al-Assad’s Syria, for example, which is known for its compulsory slogans (“Assad or we Burn the Country”) and for torturing those who subvert them.

But large parts of the world now have fewer uses for the kinds of ideological strong-arming depicted in Orwell’s novel. And this is one of the reasons propaganda is harder to track. If our capacity to detect propaganda only surfaces in relation to what we oppose, we are all the more likely to respond in kind. In a post-Orwellian world, we are producers as well as consumers of the inflated rhetoric, sensational imagery and crazed dramaturgies promoted by those who are all too conscious of what they are doing.

As the philosopher Bernard Williams contended 20 years ago, we live in an uncomfortable era. On the one hand, we have a heightened sensitivity about being fooled; on the other hand, we are living with a general scepticism of whether anything at all might answer to “the truth”. We are deeply committed to something we don’t even know whether we believe.

How this tension will – or might – be sorted out is not something that will be resolved by philosophers or social theorists. It will be taken up and lived out in that increasingly murky domain that we still call, with less confidence than ever, “politics”. More