The path to authoritarianism

"The first thing to understand about Mr. Trump is that he does inhabit a completely different mental world, and he inhabits it naturally... he lives in a world of fiction. Mr. Trump is not a traditional person who has made his career where he has to deal with the world around him. He's never actually been that successful in grappling with any particular sense of reality. He's been successful playing a character on television. He understands not the rules of reality but the rules of fiction. For him there is no such thing as lying because there's no such thinga as the truth. We're all in this story together. So the ways in which he's able to bring us into the world are first just saying things that aren't true. A typical politician will lie now and then, but a typical politician will realize the principle that there is truth so when caught in a lie he might apologize, but with mr. Trump that never happens because he intentionally wants to fill up the whole space with untruth until we are confused. The second stage is once we get there, once he changes the office of the presidency so there's no longer talking about the world but creating the story, then he says distrust everyone else, there's nothing that's really true, there's just my opinion and your opinion, and since I'm the president and I have the media behind me, in the end it's only going to be my opinion that matters. Once we get to that point where everybody doubts everything and it's only the person that has the most media and the biggest Twitter account it's hard to have anything that's like a democracy."



https://youtu.be/qZ-bifYqK_Q