What's Tony Thinking

But Not Through Me

The great danger of Donald Trump is that he creates his own reality. He does this through lies, partial truths, distortions and appeals to people’s fears and hopes. “America will be rich again, America will be great again,” he purred on Tuesday.

I listened to some of his talk to the Congress where all of this was on full display. He creates the world as he wants it to be with Donald J. Trump at its center. With a straight face he can talk, in the U.S. Capitol where officers were assaulted on January 6, about “protecting our police.” He is really very seductive.

The problem with this is that he needs all of us to participate in his false and distorted version of reality, to make it the truth. To buy the lie. Those who refuse to participate, as President Zelensky did in the now infamous Oval Office confrontation, are met with outrage. They are treated as enemies and given the boot.

As Trump has lied about the Russian War in Ukraine, he has embraced the false interpretation of that war propagated by Putin and Russia.

The journalist, Eli Lake, recently took readers back to the role of the internal dissidents in bringing down the Soviet Union, and the empowering alliance that Ronald Reagan forged with those dissidents. His piece is titled, “Truth Mattered In the Cold War and It Matters Now in Ukraine.”

“One of the most famous was Alexander Solzhenitsyn, who defined the life of dissidence in these words: “Let your credo be this: Let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph. But not through me. The simple step of a courageous individual is not to take part in the lie.”

Lake goes on to pay attention to other dissidents, particularly the Czech playwright and poet, Vaclav Havel, who embodied Solzhenitsyn’s words, Once upon a time, not so long ago, Havel was honored by both U.S. political parties and the U.S. Congress. The story of dissidents and their courage that Lake tells is a critical reminder to us at this moment.

There may be some policies of the Trump administration that have merit. But the overall operation, and basic problem, is that it rests on lies, distortions and coercion — a requirement that the lie is accepted, and if not parroted, then glossed over.

It is true that we do not live in the same world as the one where the Soviet Union was crumbling in the 1980’s. Nor do we live in the post-Cold War world of America’s unipolar dominance. The U.S. and Europe do need to recognize and adjust to those changes. But some things have not changed. We do live in a world where there is truth and there are lies. Here’s Lake:

“Right now, Trump is proposing a peace so dishonorable it’s not really peace at all. It is a capitulation, not to mention a betrayal of a nation fighting for its life. Where is his demand that Russia make concessions? But perhaps the most unsettling shift was Trump’s relinquishment of the truth itself. Over the last month, he has sounded like Putin’s lawyer, repackaging the dictator’s crimes as justifiable. He even went so far as to repeat Putin’s lie that Ukraine was responsible for beginning the war. “You should have never started it,” he said to President Zelensky.”

We need not object in a knee-jerk way to every policy or action of the Trump administration, but we must object to the lies which are at its heart. And we must object to the requirement that everyone accede to Trump’s distorted version of reality. We need to hear Solzhenitsyn’s words and his vow, “Not Through Me.”

Many accuse Trump of sowing division among us. Yet he thinks of himself, touts himself, as a “uniter.” But what he means by unity is everyone acceding to his version of reality, united in and by that distorted view, accepting the lie. Those who don’t accept his version of reality are labeled enemies of America, enemies of the American people. So there is a kind unity, but not the unity in diversity of E Pluribus Unum, out of many one.

The irony of our current situation is that we have to hope that things go bad. That is, that reality, not Trump’s version of it, catches up to Trump and MAGA so forcefully and thoroughly that his seductive lies are revealed for what they are. But “reality catching up to Trump” will mean pain and problems for everyone — a more dangerous world, a faltering economy and crippled government, with leaders who have lost their moral compass.