There existed in ancient Athens two schools of intellectual thought: philosophers, such as Plato and Aristotle, made up one school characterized by a devotion to serving justice and seeking epistemic truth. The second school was that of the sophists, a group of rhetoricians known for manipulating public opinion through fallacious language and skepticism towards fact. Simply put, sophists were exceptionally skilled at arguing and using any means necessary—even openly flouting the truth—to convince others of their correctness.
Donald Trump and his administration reside in a sophistic world. Kellyanne Conway and Sean Spicer’s frequent denunciation of the media and coinage of “alternate facts” destabilizes the public’s preexisting ideas of equity and justice, and dizzies them with messages of racially-tinged urgency and nationalism. That is, after all, how Trump found his way into the White House: he authenticated people’s fears and feelings without regard to what is actually true.
What the Trump administration must soon realize is that what worked on the campaign trail doesn’t fly in the White House. His voters are expecting guidance where charisma used to satisfy, and they are coming up empty handed. Trump’s keynote address at the Conservative Political Action Conference offered no substantial information on how he plans to rework NAFTA or drastically improve our national security. What the public heard was a slew of bizarre assertions and a reminder that, if you didn’t know already, things are still “very bad.”
I had hoped that the tone of Trump’s presidency would shift under pressure to become less antagonistic and more informative, but the opposite has happened. One of Trump’s advisers stated that the powers of the President should not be questioned. Steve Bannon has called the media the “opposition party.” Major news outlets were barred from attending a White House briefing last week. Trump will condemn federal judges before he utters one word against a murderous, foreign dictator.
Evidently, the immaculate democracy that Trump promised to harness and hand to the people has fallen out of the dream from whence it came.
The irony here, which I imagine is lost upon the President, is that by ignoring the facts—denying the legitimacy of climate research, falsifying crime and unemployment statistics and misrepresenting historical events—we only isolate ourselves from our own sensibilities, and the stabilizing systems that the world relies on to achieve peace.