Hitting pause on horrors

In 2015, I flew to Guantanamo twice while researching my book on concentration camps. On one trip, I visited most of the detention facilities there. The second time, I went to observe pretrial hearings for the five defendants accused of plotting 9/11 and aiding the hijackers. While there, I served as the courtroom artist.

Though the detention areas and the courtroom had additional layers of security, everything sat not far away from the more conventional parts of the Navy base itself. The area was more or less a self-contained town with iguanas zooming around. Souvenirs were even for sale.

I visited sites where representatives of the US government had tortured people. Yet everyone at the base went about their work, cogs in the vast bureaucracy required to detain the hundred-plus remaining prisoners. The question of whether evidence gathered through torture could be used to convict anyone was the subject of heated courtroom arguments by prosecutors and defense attorneys. But responsibility for those early abuses in the war on terror has gone unaddressed, year after year.

***

A few months after I went to Gitmo, Donald Trump rode down an escalator and announced he was running for president. Right out of the gate, he spouted racist, anti-immigrant rhetoric. About detainees who had been tortured, he later said that he would bring back waterboarding and “a hell of a lot worse.”

Not long before election day in 2016, I interviewed a man who'd been assigned to Guantanamo in the earliest weeks of war-on-terror detention at the base. He'd been horrified by the deliberate introduction of torture in interrogations at the time, but had been unable to stop the turn toward illegal methods. He soon found himself shut out of the project.

He felt some relief when, upon arrival in the White House, Barack Obama immediately put a stop to extralegal interrogation. It had seemed then to the Guantanamo staffer as if justice might be done, that the system would kick in to investigate the abuses and bring perpetrators to justice.

But five years passed before Obama directly addressed what had happened and acknowledged that "we tortured some folks." No one was held accountable. The remaining detainees, including those who'd been tortured, continued to sit behind bars and barbed wire and attend pretrial hearings that would play out again and again, like some endlessly renewed reboot of Bleak House. There was no hard reset, no precise ending.

***

This witness to the early days at Gitmo told me that during Obama's second term, an idea began to trouble him. What if the window after 9/11—the widespread use of kidnappings, black sites, torture, and everything that followed—what if all that wasn’t the aberration? What if it had been the years under Obama that were the anomaly, just a pause button until the horrors would resume?

Weeks after our conversation, Clinton lost the election, and Trump began to try to carry out his swaggering threats against immigrants, Muslims, pregnant women, and more. By the time he took over, border policy had been a debacle for decades, and Gitmo was still open. Abortion rights had been slowly fenced in across the country and were a prime target to lose more turf.

Any number of poisoned apples already lay around, ready for Trump's allies to use toward their own ends. The chief obstacles seemed to be overreach and incompetence. And by the time Biden managed to keep Trump from a second term, three new justices were sitting on the Supreme Court. They would soon bend the arc of history more sharply toward the interests of reactionaries and oligarchs.

***

In the days after the 2020 election, I thought about those early Gitmo interrogations and the pause button, and how by refusing to concede, Trump had sown chaos—and this was even before the mayhem of January 6.

It turned out that Biden couldn't effectively even hit pause across the board. Millions of people insisted they were still living inside a Trump presidency. Elected officials and the Supreme Court were willing to further his agenda, even in his absence.

Now that another election is imminent, Trump is already promising to pick up where he left off four years ago. From immigration to abortion bans and deconstructing citizenship laws, a second Trump presidency would aim for more radical results than he was able to achieve at his first rodeo.

But I would argue that a more fundamental shift is happening—one that's bigger than any particular policy or basket of them. Biden ceding the office to a second Trump administration would end the pause phase in a much broader way than my Gitmo interrogator envisioned in the shift from Obama to Trump. A second Trump term would not just be a return to underlying weaknesses but would accelerate a broad degradation of American society.

There are three ways in which Trump is visibly, dangerously driving societal breakdown: moral panics, corruption, and delusion as a way of life. Each of them feeds on and benefits from the other. We have to find a way to break that cycle.

***

The US has long been susceptible to moral panics, in which residents are encouraged to believe their existence is threatened by a group or thing in a way that encourages them to target it irrationally or even violently. Racism is often at the root of this, as was obvious throughout the Jim Crow era and Japanese American internment during World War II. It was also visible in the crusade against homosexuals in government early in the Cold War and Satanic panics in the latter twentieth century.

Since Trump’s emergence as a political figure, he has furthered moral panics in the crudest terms, with calls for violence and lurid lies about many vulnerable groups. Elected officials who might have nodded along with moral panics in some minimal way in the past, to further their own political futures, have lately begun to broadcast and even launch them.

Courts, government agencies, state legislatures, churches, and the media have all taken part in these panics at some point. But in this century, it’s common for them to do it in concert, from national office to the local level. This trend is the harvest of a crop seeded in part by George W. Bush with the war on terror, a planting that flourished under Trump, who has been an incendiary force in demonizing immigrants and targeting trans people.

Many have benefited from moral panics in the past, but no president before Trump ever presented himself as the Messiah, the only one who can save America, the answer to every moral panic he simultaneously feeds. This cult of personality is his most malignant contribution to existing American traditions.

***

The Trump era likewise ushered in new depths of corruption, with the open selling of everything from the Trump grifter "God bless the USA" bibles printed in China to NFTs, trading cards, and what looks disturbingly like policy positions available for purchase by oil executives at Mar-a-Lago.

The money flowing to Trump Tower DC from visiting dignitaries represented perhaps the most iconic symbol of graft, but the crassest face of his crimes is the perpetual fleecing of the American public. Witness the original plan for those bibles: through what appears to have been a carefully engineered request for proposals, the state of Oklahoma was in line to buy millions of dollars' worth, with royalties going to Trump—until media attention forced the state to revise the vendor requirements.

Was there corruption in the US before, even huge, legendary corruption? Absolutely. Democratic Senator Bob Menendez, for instance, appears to have received literal gold-brick emoluments.

Menendez, it’s important to note, was convicted in July. But the Supreme Court has been muddying the waters between bribes and “gratuities” of late. The longer that corruption occurs visibly at the highest level, a thousand new Menendezes will bloom—and mostly go unpunished.

Already, we've seen that while president of the University of Florida, Ben Sasse channeled money to Republican friends and allies who did not even live or work in Florida, offering many startlingly high salaries. There are leaders, elected and appointed, who stoop to such things, even without encouragement. In a second Trump administration, the example set by the sitting president will spur more public servants to stoop to similarly subterranean depths.

Anyone who's spent time in a country where corruption goes largely unpunished knows the degree to which it can be difficult to do anything without bribes. Once this kind of corruption sets in universally, it is a Sisyphean challenge to undo.

Trump's policies further promote corruption. If even a fraction of his deportation plan is put into action, it will require an exponential expansion of the kind private partnerships that already play key roles in US detention. Mass deportations would not only lead to abuse on a vast scale, they would be a massive self-driving grift.

***

But the heart of Trump's active degradation of the country is his embrace of conspiracy theory. These theories have always been the underground caves and streams of our national discourse. But Trump binds them together and calls on Americans to live inside a delusional twilight horrorscape that does not exist.

A founder of Women for Trump, upon learning that a Hurricane Helene picture she had posted movingly about was not real, said she would not correct the record, because the image was "emblematic of the trauma and pain people are living through right now."

JD Vance lies openly and regularly about nearly every aspect of the Republican platform. Trump himself entered the presidential fray as a birther conspiracist, and makes up so many lies that at times his lies become incomprehensible.

I talked in Monday's post about how, in a small town like Springfield, to accept the kind of national-level misrepresentation about your own community that Trump regularly makes causes a kind of cognitive dissonance. Everyone has to choose whether to accept reality or to pretend the lies Trump tells are true—to enter into a conspiracy of lies in which everyone else knows you're lying.

Some people are tethered enough to the actual world that they can't do it. Others find more meaning in that delusional world than they do in their everyday lives. But the turn in this century toward easily disproven fabrications about FEMA and hurricanes or litter boxes in classrooms has been shocking, not because of any individual one, but because Trump is transforming these myths into the bytes of information upon which an entire universe of lies is being built. Trump is telling his followers that if they put him in charge, they can bring their shared delusional world into existence in a way that no one will be able to deny.

Hurricanes are created by the government. Haitians are eating your cat. Obama is secretly still running the country. No longer are the individual conspiracies the main point. The point is to completely erase reality.

After November, Trump assures his followers that they will never have to vote again. The promise is that everyone who matters will be inside that conspiracy of lies with them, a bond stronger than political parties, able to break religious traditions, more powerful than their ties to family and the people who love them most. Trump's promise is that there will be no more pause buttons to make room for painful reflection, no halt to the victory march, no mercy in the punishment of enemies, whoever they are declared to be that day.

***

We have to find a way to dismantle the architecture that leaves underlying threats dormant but in place. We need to find better ways to defuse moral panics. We need to uproot and punish corruption at every level. And we need to bring people back into reality and discredit the lies that comfort them so much they would give up agency to those who would destroy democratic rule.

The country operated as this lesser version of itself for most of its history, embracing the willful blindness that allowed a society to establish its greatness via the twin engines of slavery and native dispossession. In fits and starts, we’ve looked toward a reckoning.

What we're facing now is an across-the-board effort to reverse the world in which that kind of introspection can be done. Moral panic makes the alternate reality possible; corruption makes it lucrative. Set in motion on a large scale, as is happening today, these forces can generate their own momentum. They will perpetuate themselves. This time, we need to do more than hit the pause button.

Gitmo is still there, still with its beautiful beaches and iguanas, holding detainees, some of whom have been held there without trial for more than two decades. For those stationed at the base, it appears to be much like any other overseas post, though servicemembers cannot cross into Cuba proper. For visitors—myself and many journalists who have gone—the history that undergirds the activities of daily life feels unsettling, incongruous.

Over time people can learn to live inside almost anything. It's important to remember that we don't have to.

[You can find out more about me and this newsletter in my introductory post.]