Buckle In for the Hyperreal Presidency
We're all in the reality distortion field now.
Tonight, Donald Trump announced tariffs on on three nations on, where else, his social media platform Truth Social:
Immediately liberals cried out in shock — such tariffs would be devastating, politically unpopular, and result in a trade war spiral! A million tariff explainers were immediately birthed, MSNBC clicked into high gear, scurrying to predict the coming disaster. People asked whether this would be constitutional, or a violation of an Obama-era Supreme Court decision that suddenly everyone was an expert on. Others pressed for details of implementation — how possible is this? What would first steps look like?
Yet most ignored another possibility. Trump can come into office in January 2025, declare that his threatened tariffs have already solved the dual problems of fentanyl smuggling and illegal immigration — then “call the tariffs off.” Tariffs and Trump, successes on day one.
Older politicians and political commentators still exist in a world where problems have to be solved in reality. The theory of the Biden presidency was, more or less, you deliver material gains voters, they learn or experience the results of those gains, give you credit, and reward you with a vote. This theory of elections may not be dead yet, but 2024 put it on notice. Much post-election analysis has been about how such real gains could be better communicated to the citizenry. How do you move from policy to impact to public knowledge of that impact?
What I call the Hyperreal Presidency explores what is possible if a politician shamelessly adopts the opposite approach. What if a leader skips the gains and just does the communication? I don’t claim this is the right lens to use on this issue, but one that must be considered.
Consider the threat to impose tariffs unless the “border crisis” is solved. What prevents a president from declaring the problem solved? Is it the TV news? We have an FCC chairman that is threatening to pull broadcast licenses if stations are unfair to Trump. MSNBC? It’s up for sale; Elon Musk is trollingly suggesting he might buy it, but if not him, it may be another billionaire with agenda. Newspapers? Their owners are already signaling their compliance. Social media? A years long campaign has cowed most social media from applying any corrective context to the misinformation that spreads throughout their platforms, many now downgrade news altogether. Twitter? Don’t even start. Academics? The funding, livelihood, and sometimes more have been threatened if they find that the right has engaged in spreading falsehood.
Would it be professional TV commentators? Many of the experts you see on TV make part of their living consulting for the government; there is a move afoot to indicate that those that criticize the Trump administration risk the security clearances to do their job, via a move on those that signed the Biden laptop letter. Would it be our own statistics producing agencies, in some ways the heart of good governance? Project 2025 looks to have those agencies run by loyal partisans.
Can it work? I honestly don’t know.1 I have doubts about the arc of justice, but my experience is gravity kicks in eventually on any propaganda effort. Alliances fracture, leaks ensue. Like all networks, information environments eventually route around damage. Reality can be delayed, not defeated. But it’s difficult to look at this list of recent actions and see anything but a wholesale attempt to remove the barriers to a Hyperreal Presidency, so one way or another, I guess we’re going to find out.
And on the question of tariffs, I don’t claim to know the future here. Maybe Trump is just dumb enough to send grocery prices through the roof on day one of his presidency. I doubt it, but sure, it could happen. I just ask people to consider the possibility that all these efforts around removing guardrails over the past four years offer another possibility.
Mike - I saw some Bluesky Posts just a bit ago that Trump was crowing on Twitter Lite that the Mexican president had called him up, no doubt flattered him, with the result sounding initially like what you describe above. The problem is nearly solved! All Hail Trump! The reactions suggested your view is shared. It's difficult for me to believe any reasonably sane human in possession of their faculties could seriously believe that anything that comes out of Trump's mouth can be taken as indicating anything other than he can still jabber at that moment. As many folks have pointed out the tariff power simply gives him the opportunity to be sucked up to - and that's very important to him psychologically - while greatly magnifying his opportunities to grift. I see that Zuck flew in to see him yesterday. Studying the history of the Tudor Court offers some instructive examples of how things will work around Trump, for a while anyway. I'm reasonably confident there is this thing called reality. Granted, when it comes to human relations you can ignore it for some amount of time, but it will assert itself eventually. I assume there are some acolytes who are prepared to fully buy the current line although I do wonder how they deal with the dissonance induced by the ever shifting message coming from their idol. But I don't think most people are sufficiently deluded or energetic enough to mainline the grift continuously. As you say, I guess we'll be getting another opportunity to find out!