In my home and, I suspect, several others, conversation often turns to Donald Trump’s cruelty and indecent behavior. Myriad neighbors and friends express outrage at his bullying. Their comments reflect the disenchantment of a large swath of the American population.
Regardless of their political orientations, many people are preoccupied with MAGA discourse, a sign that Trump is occupying the public mind.
Not known for his subtlety or penchant for deep reading, Trump acts on impulse and by whim. His intuition resonates with Machiavelli’s classic book, “The Prince” (1532), which holds that being feared is important for maintaining control, but it’s wise to be both feared and loved. He advises the ruler that a combination of coercion and consent is the optimum strategy.
Trump clearly grasps this point. While stirring fear by political and economic means, he is also implanting a new common sense.
Trump is drilling into people’s psyches. Potentially, his war on knowledge and his cultural crusade to embed authoritarianism and an imperial presidency will seep deeper, last longer and be more difficult to reverse than the use of brute force.
Trump deploys ICE to snatch critics, such as Mahmoud Khalil, a recent graduate of Columbia University, and to disappear immigrants like Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a legal permanent resident, to El Salvador. Deals for expulsions to third countries, reportedly South Sudan, Costa Rica, Libya and Rwanda, are in the offing.
Meanwhile, Trump’s thoroughgoing, multipronged strategy in the subjective realm is insidious. Casting himself in an AI-generated photo and donning vestments of the pope, he generates imagery of godly power.
This strategy of instilling a mindset materialized on day one of Trump’s second presidency, when he issued an executive order to declare a national emergency on the southern border. Even though his invention of an enemy is fictitious, many Americans have internalized this element of MAGA ideology.
The problem with declarations of emergency is that the exception can become the rule. These actions attempt to control not only the present and future but the past. Empowered by a tenuous alliance of billionaire oligarchs and the lower middle class, Trump is trying to erase memories of the shameful and painful legacy of enslavement and dispossession.
The target includes cultural institutions, particularly the Smithsonian museums and the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Arts. To remove “improper ideology,” Trump’s team has singled out memorials, monuments and sculpture exhibitions. These potent symbols shape thinking and can challenge dominant narratives. So, too, firings at the U.S. Holocaust Museum and changes on the board at the Kennedy Center reflect attempts to access inner recesses of the mind.
A second prong is the attack on universities. Seizing the pretext of antisemitism, Trump has waged a campaign to diminish higher education. In contrast to his imaginary world of conspiracy theories and disinformation, the academy stands for rigorous studies, evidence and reason. It is a sanctuary for critical thinking.
True, academe needs reform. It suffers from administrative bloat and has lost substantial public support. But these problems should not be used as a cudgel for injecting authoritarian politics.
There is no gainsaying that the assault on knowledge institutions threatens all civil society, a bulwark of democratic life.
The third prong for changing minds is an Orwellian, rhetorical strategy: scrubbing websites, cleansing databases, naming and renaming, and muzzling the media. Keywords that hint of racial, ethnic, and gender sensitivities are vanishing from government documents and speeches.
To drive the discourse, Trump is imbuing minds with narratives of strength and collaboration with powerful leaders in countries like Hungary and India. He is redrawing the map, coding territories, including the “Gulf of America,” “Our Land” instead of “Greenland,” and “Pana-MAGA” instead of “Panama Canal.”
The antidotes to this form of thought control are to reclaim the mantle of scientific evidence, decode coarse rhetoric and craft new narratives. Defensive postures are necessary but not enough. The challenge is to reimagine the future.
Our leaders should embrace humane values rather than Trump’s atavistic values. Contradictorily, he wants to withdraw from modernity and return to a make-believe, golden era while assuming the aura of a Machiavellian modern prince. To strengthen democracy, the public can exploit this and other fault lines among would-be autocrats.
Jim Mittelman, a Boulder resident and Camera columnist, is an educator, activist, and author. His books include “The Globalization Syndrome,” “Hyperconflict,” and “Runaway Capitalism” (due out in late 2025).
