Surviving Trumpworld

While he was on the campaign trail, Donald Trump was asked an intriguing question by Bob Lonsberry of WHAM 1180 AM, a local radio station in Rochester, New York.

‘Is there a favourite Bible verse or Bible story that has informed your thinking or your character through life, sir?’ Lonsberry said.

Trump’s answer? ‘An eye for an eye.’

If you wanted a quick glimpse inside Trump’s brain, that quote’s as good as any. It captures his narcissism, his thin skin, his exponentially cranked-up aggression.

Harry Mount and Michael Segalov debate the merits of getting angry about President Trump:

It still isn’t clear whether the Trump administration is genuinely deluded, in its creation of pretend crowds, its all-out assault on the media, its anger at supposed illegal voters in an election it won; or whether the administration is just pretending to be deluded to send the left apoplectic.

Because Trump isn’t the only one pumping out the rage and the confected ‘facts’. The world has gone bananas in its response to his tactics, and his enemies have responded in kind, moulding the truth to suit their aims, belting out the same foam-flecked rhetoric. To misquote Trump’s favourite passage of scripture, it’s a lie for a lie.

In his 1837 history of the French Revolution, Thomas Carlyle wrote, ‘It is unfortunate, though very natural, that the history of this period has so generally been written in hysterics. Exaggeration abounds, execration, wailing; and on the whole, darkness.’

We’re in danger of doing the same with Trump’s American Revolution. We used to laugh at the comments below online articles — see how nuts how they are! — but now public discourse at the highest levels has become little more than an internet slanging match. It isn’t so much the loner’s isolated echo chamber as two separate, enormous, hermetically sealed silos, each crammed with opposed supporters screaming, unheard, at the other side.