Reality Part I: Selling A Fake World
What can happen when hard reality collides with fake reality
We know Donald Trump lives in a world of his own creation. We know his partisan enablers defend that world even when they know better. We’ve seen too often how false claims can get processed by right-wing media and come out looking real to millions of people. And because we lived through the first Trump administration, we know that we are about to be bombarded by claims ranging from the absurd to the delusional.
It will be a continuation of what we saw in the campaign. Only now the context will be different.
Campaigns can be breeding grounds for falsehoods as the public tries to sort through promises and assertions with little guidance. Because everything voiced in a campaign is hypothetical, it can be hard to identify exaggerations and lies. But governing presents a different context for evaluating claims made by candidates. Few winning candidates in history have escaped being stung by promising too much to voters or misrepresenting their agendas. And the more their promises and assertions deviated from what they delivered, the higher the risk in lost political support.
As George Washington says to the title character in Hamilton, “Winning was easy, young man. Governing’s harder.”
So the question I’d like to raise—here and in my next two posts—is about the extent to which reality will pose an impediment to Donald Trump as he reassumes the presidency.
The short answer is we don’t know, because we don’t know yet how abnormal the second Trump administration will be. But I think there is sufficient reason to consider the possibility that Trump will be subjected to some version of the restraints experienced by other presidents. We may be about to jump through the looking glass, but reality is not likely to be suspended entirely.
Today we’ll look at potential challenges to Trump’s ability to sell his fabricated version of the world. On Friday, we’ll look at the possible limitations of claiming an invisible mandate. And next Monday we’ll consider how voters who were drawn to the idea of disruption might react if their lives are upended in unanticipated ways.
I recently addressed some of the strategies we can employ to go on offense in an effort to undermine Trump’s agenda, while simultaneously playing defense to preserve democracy. And I have written about the tools we have available to do these things. But the ability to challenge Trump’s determination to be an autocrat will be shaped to a great extent by the way people process what’s happening to them—that is, the way people perceive reality in the Trump administration will form the context for our efforts. Reality may prove to be just an impediment to Trump or something more substantial. The more unnerved people are by what he does, and the more his actions deviate from their expectations, the easier it will be for us to push back.
Trump always asserts his own reality, which is magnified in some social media circles to promote a fake reality that guides the right wing ecosystem. I call it fake reality and not fiction because many people believe it is real. And as long as enough people believe it, then it can profoundly affect how they feel and act. Even though more people live outside the bubble than within, it is large enough to have a distorting effect on our politics.
For Trump, asserting his own reality is a function of his pathology. For his enablers, it is a strategy.
Trump believes the world emanates from him, so whatever he declares to be true must be true by definition.
For their part, Republicans and media influencers invested in Trump’s success are happy to amplify his self-deception. Those who found it inconvenient to oppose the objectively successful Biden administration were eager to embrace the failed Joe Biden of Trump’s imagination. And of course the fake failed Biden will have to be followed by a (fake but) wildly successful Donald Trump. We could probably write the narrative now.
With Trump twice elected to the presidency, and with Republicans about to be in control of every branch of government, it’s easy to believe that enabling Trump’s fantasies is a political winner.
That may have been the case during the 2024 campaign (although notably not during the off-year campaigns that preceded it). When it comes to governance, however, the record suggests a more complex story.
Trump was hamstrung by reality in his first term—and I’m not talking about the obstacles he faced by personnel who won’t be there to stop him this time. I’m talking about limitations imposed by events he could not control and by his own shortcomings, and about ramifications of his failures that touched people outside the right wing bubble.
Hard reality intervened on much of Trump’s agenda. He was going to build a wall at the southern border and have Mexico pay for it. He was going to pass a gigantic infrastructure bill but lacked the political skill or interest to make it happen. The same applies to repealing and replacing Obamacare.
To an extent, Trump was able to distract from these failures by bombarding the country with attention-diverting outrages—but not entirely and not always. He never once earned majority approval for his job performance (something even Biden was able to do during the first months of his administration). In the case of the border wall, Trump did little and just claimed victory, although that was a fairly easy lie to sustain because for most people the border is a distant abstraction.
Then in 2020, people started dying of Covid in large numbers, and Trump’s lies that the pandemic was going to magically disappear ran headlong into a competing reality people could see and feel. That November, he was turned out of office.
In 2025, Trump returns with a more extensive and disruptive agenda, threatening to reshape everything from the price of goods and services to the lives of millions faced with deportation, which in turn could have pronounced economic effects. In other words, things people are likely to see and feel.
And of course he intends to ignore sound reasons to abandon this agenda. In yesterday’s post, Chris referred to the interview Donald Trump gave on Meet the Press this past weekend, where he reaffirmed that he has no interest in modifying his objectives. Trump dismissed economists’ claims that tariffs hurt consumers because he believes he knows better, he made the baseless assertion that members of the House January 6 committee should face jail time, and—as Chris noted—he expressed his intention to end birthright citizenship using an executive authority he does not have. Delusions like these are ripe to be blocked by obstacles in the real world or rejected by people for their real consequences if Trump succeeds in implementing them.
We can’t say how much the world as it is will impose itself on Trump’s efforts to get us to live in the world he will try to create. But we do know that past presidents who lied about or misrepresented important facts paid a political price.
There are numerous examples of presidents who suffered political blowback for asserting meaningful falsehoods to the American people. LBJ and Vietnam. Nixon and Watergate. George W. Bush and Iraq. Trump and Covid.
Of course Trump will fabricate. He will lie. He’s not capable of doing otherwise. The question is how much success he will have. Trump can’t be stopped from doing a lot of harm by abusing the executive powers he will inherit, but there are many junctures where reality could seek to impose its limits, and the more hard reality pushes back the better our chances for pushing back as well.
On Friday, we’ll look at the real world consequences of ignoring what the voters said in November.
Matt: Even if Trump runs headlong into undeniable realities and facts, that process of reckoning is slow, and his diehard MAGA base will simply ignore inconvenient truths. As a survivor of the Bowlinggreen Massacre, I recall well many such events from his first term. The opposition will chuckle while Rome burns. The mad emperor will toast marshmallows and weenies and the oligarchs will laugh all the way to the bank.
I've found that the fake reality he has perpetuated is one of the hardest things to counter about Trump. It reminds me of what we talked about in class: people disagree on the facts and actual facts can sound partisan in this weird world. One thing that I've been wondering in particular is about the tariff promise. Is it possible he's been spouting things about tariffs on China, Canada, and Mexico to try and drive a harder bargain? In which case he won't enact them? Personally I think he does want to enact them, but it's just another possibility I've thought about.