By: Dan McLaughlin – nationalreview.com – April 24, 2023

Trump’s latest attack on DeSantis and Florida is not merely untrue but an assault on the entire concept of truth.

On DeSantis’ watch, Florida has become one of the least affordable states to live in the country. Under Ron DeSantis, Florida has become among the worst states. . . . To Live. . . .To Find Economic Opportunity. . . . To Work. . . . To Retire. . . . To Raise a Family. . . . To Pay Taxes. . . . To Be Safe. . . . To Rent a Home. . . . To Have A Baby. . . . To Afford Energy. . . . To Die. . . . To Be a Teacher. . . . To Be a Doctor. . . . To Be a Police Officer. . . . For Millennials. . . . For Working Dads. . . . For Working Moms. . . .

Among the sources cited by Trump: ESPN, Oxfam, the National Low Income Housing Coalition, the left-wing Florida Policy Institute, the Hill, and NBC News. He followed up by touting a quote from Joy Reid. Yet again, as he has done so often in attacking DeSantis, Trump is amplifying the arguments of Democrats and the Left and demanding that his supporters agree with those arguments.

One could attempt to rebut the individual charges against Florida’s life and governance point by point, and others are at work doing so. But that entirely misses the point. None of this is intended to be treated as an assertion of any fact that is capable of being proven true or false.

To the contrary, the falsity is the point. Trump knows perfectly well that his “misery and despair” portrait of Florida is false. He knows perfectly well that the audience for this statement knows it, too. Floridians didn’t endorse DeSantis and the state’s Republican leadership — which has now run Florida for 25 years — because the state is a hellhole that has gotten worse. That’s not why Florida has the fastest-growing population in the country and is booming with refugees from other states. Americans nearly anywhere else know that their neighbors are moving to Florida, and chances are, they’ve thought about doing it, too, at some point in the past three years. Trump himself lives in Florida, having made it his legal residence in September 2019, after DeSantis became governor.

It should be obvious that, if you care about conservative policy and the fortunes of the Republican Party, you would not do what Trump is doing. If you’ve paid any attention to American politics in recent years, you know that there is an enormous and consequential public argument contrasting the red- and blue-state models of governance. Florida, under DeSantis, has decisively supplanted Texas as the national icon of how Americans should be governed rather than ruled — an icon that draws fire from everyone on the other side. Gavin Newsom of California and J. B. Pritzker in Illinois have repeatedly sought contrast and conflict with DeSantis and the Florida model. Even in Minnesota, Governor Tim Walz last week went on an extended rant in his state-of-the-state speech against “folks like Florida” and how “I’m pretty glad we do it our way here and not that way.” Trump is siding with these arch-progressive governors in their case against conservatism.

Trump is, as always, sticking up only for himself, even when that means endorsing the reasoning of the left. And he is willing to run the risk of alienating Florida voters, just as he lost Iowa in 2016 after insulting its voters by suggesting that they were brain-damaged following a good poll for Ben Carson. But then, just as Trump doesn’t care that his facts are wrong and his larger narrative is false, he also doesn’t care that his reasoning helps Democrats and progressives and hurts Republicans and conservatives. In order for him to care about facts or reasoning, he would first need to treat either of those things as real or important.

Why is Trump doing this? Analyzing the frame of mind of Donald Trump is a famously futile endeavor, but we can see three different ways in which this is consistent with his past modus operandi.

First, there are different ways to think about why Trump says things when he knows that his audience already knows he’s lying. The term “gaslighting” has become overused these days, but this is really the core meaning of gaslighting: making your audience doubt their own grip on reality by insisting to their faces something they can see to be false. At the margins, that can turn into a form of persuasion. Again, Nazi analogies are vastly overused, but the psychological underpinning of the “Big Lie” theory was precisely that even relatively cynical people don’t expect public figures to tell lies so massive that they have no grounding in reality, so on some level, the listener adjusts his or her own sense that maybe reality is closer to what’s being said. Reality is shifted in the liar’s direction not by belief in the lie itself, but by the moderating human tendency to believe that the truth usually lies in between two things.

Second, being fearless on the attack even when visible reality is against you is a signal of strong will. It tells the audience that you will say or do just about anything to win — and that has a persuasive force all its own. The philosophy behind this is one explored in some of our classic films. Consider this exchange in the The Godfather Part II on the Cuban revolution:

Michael Corleone: I saw an interesting thing happen today. A rebel was being arrested by the military police. And rather than be taken alive exploded a grenade he had hidden in his jacket. He killed himself, and took a captain of the command with him.

Johnny Ola: These rebels, you know, they’re lunatics.

Michael Corleone: Maybe so — but it occurred to me. The soldiers are paid to fight — the rebels aren’t.

Hyman Roth: What does that tell you?

Michael Corleone: They can win.

Or Colonel Kurtz, in Apocalypse Now:

I remember when I was with Special Forces. Seems a thousand centuries ago. We went into a camp to inoculate some children. We left the camp after we had inoculated the children for Polio, and this old man came running after us and he was crying. He couldn’t see. We went back there, and they had come and hacked off every inoculated arm. There they were in a pile. A pile of little arms. And I remember . . . I . . . I . . . I cried. I wept like some grandmother. I wanted to tear my teeth out. I didn’t know what I wanted to do. And I want to remember it. I never want to forget it. I never want to forget.

And then I realized . . . like I was shot . . . like I was shot with a diamond . . . a diamond bullet right through my forehead. And I thought: My God . . . the genius of that! The genius! The will to do that! Perfect, genuine, complete, crystalline, pure. And then I realized they were stronger than we. Because they could stand that. These were not monsters. These were men . . . trained cadres. These men who fought with their hearts, who had families, who had children, who were filled with love . . . but they had the strength . . . the strength . . . to do that. If I had ten divisions of those men, our troubles here would be over very quickly. You have to have men who are moral . . . and at the same time who are able to utilize their primordial instincts to kill without feeling . . . without passion . . . without judgment . . . without judgment. Because it’s judgment that defeats us.

This is the message that is conveyed, and received by Trump’s supporters, when he does this sort of thing: that he is a man with the will to go there, just like when he brought Juanita Broaddrick, who accused Bill Clinton of raping her, to a debate with Bill’s wife. Ratcheting up his aggression to levels unseen since the 2016 campaign suggests that Trump is finally shaking both the constraints of his time in the White House and the rust and self-absorption of his post-presidency.

Third, Trump is engaging in a show of dominance. Some observers, such as Michelle Goldberg of the New York Times, argue that Trump is trying to showcase his superior will and aggression compared to how DeSantis can or will respond in kind, and that certainly suggests why Trump is going so hard at DeSantis during the period in which DeSantis is not even an announced candidate and is trying to maintain a polite fiction about not going head-to-head. The fact that Trump feels the need to attempt this is a sign of weakness, not strength; you don’t hear him going after Nikki Haley’s South Carolina this way, or Asa Hutchinson’s Arkansas. But that underlying fear and weakness is precisely why Trump needs to make a conspicuous show that he’s still in charge and still the alpha dog, and DeSantis isn’t.

But much more important is how Trump uses brazen falsehoods as a way to dominate the people who support him reluctantly but fear confronting him alone. My colleague Michael Brendan Dougherty has aptly compared Trump’s use of obvious lies to a gang initiation, in which a young man commits an otherwise pointless crime that compromises himself in order to show that he can be trusted to place demonstrations of loyalty to the group above his own interests or his own self-respect.

In this regard, it seems not to be coincidental that Trump unloosed this assault on Florida and its governance immediately after rounding up endorsements from eleven Florida Republican members of Congress. The message is clear: Trump wants the people endorsing him to be humiliated into testifying publicly that their state is a dystopian hellhole and that their party has run it into the ground. If a normal politician did this, he would immediately lose some of those endorsements in protest. But Trump is banking on the same dynamic that dictators bank on when they know that there is enough discontent beneath them to support a conspiracy or a coup: try to smoke out the malcontents one at a time or force them deeper into cover because they fear that standing up prematurely and alone will leave them to face the tyrant’s wrath.

There are worse aspects of Trumpism than all of this, notably his contempt for rules, which we saw so graphically after he lost the 2020 election, or when he called five months ago for “termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.” But there is possibly none that offends or enrages me as profoundly. I have, as a lawyer and a writer, made facts and reason the tools of my professional trade for all of my working life. I confess that I cannot imagine having so little self-respect as to just go along saying things without ever caring that everybody can see that I have my facts wrong or am arguing nonsense.

Lies and emotional manipulation have always been a part of politics, but to build an entire political identity and movement around the wholesale rejection of reason or reality is an assault on something even deeper than rules. Without those things, we lose not only democratic self-rule but also the very things that separate humans from the lower species.

Recovering a place for reason and reality is thus one of the stakes of this primary. One need not regard Ron DeSantis as a Platonic philosopher-king of pure reason and unblemished factual accuracy — what politician is? — in order to recognize in him a man of the law, a student of history, and in general, a guy who cares about getting things right. And he is matched against a man who has no interest in being right, or even in reality itself.

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Source: Donald Trump’s War on Reason & Reality | National Review