President Donald Trump’s authoritarian rampage has relied on a bold and cynical strategy to bend the public’s perception of reality: abject stupidity.
Just look at the White House’s website right now. There’s a new “Major Events Timeline,” which begins as a seemingly standard sequence of events depicting the evolution of the People’s House, all the way back to George Washington selecting the site, rebuilding after it was set aflame in the War of 1812, and all the way through Richard Nixon’s bowling alley renovation. When the timeline gets to 1998, though, it abruptly transforms into a crude MAGA troll job with a caption highlighting Bill Clinton’s Oval Office sex scandal.
Trump’s “big lie” is, at its core, a witless tantrum thrown by a malignant narcissist who lacks the integrity to accept defeat.
That’s followed by a caption reading “Obama hosts members of the Muslim Brotherhood, a group that promotes Islamist extremism and has ties to Hamas.” This is an apparent reference to a 2012 meeting between mid-level National Security Council officials and political representatives of the Muslim Brotherhood in the aftermath of the overthrow of Egypt’s longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak. If the trolling weren’t obvious enough, the caption is accompanied by a photo of Barack Obama wearing a turban during a visit to Kenya in 2006 — nowhere near the White House and years before Obama was president.
From there, the timeline hails Melania Trump’s tennis pavilion, mocks Hunter Biden’s cocaine use and rails against Joe Biden hosting a “Transgender Day of Visibility” celebration. Finally, the site gushes over Trump putting tacky gold stuff all over everything in the White House, paving over the Rose Garden, and leveling the entire East Wing.
There is something telling about the official White House website being casually debased by people working at the direction of the most powerful person on the planet — and for no other reason than to “own the libs.”
Trump and MAGA are attempting to rewrite history right before our eyes. They’re also trying to normalize untruths as facts — and they’re weaponizing vulgarity and stupidity to do both.
Take Texas’ lawsuit against the current and former makers of Tylenol, filed by the state’s attorney general Ken Paxton, alleging the companies knew that taking the drug during pregnancy can cause autism. This echoes a conspiracy theory frequently put forth by (who else?) Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy, despite studies and major medical groups asserting there’s no evidence such a link exists. But RFK Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” movement isn’t based on facts or science — it’s strictly vibes, and the MAHA vibes essentially say all modern medicine is bad, including your vaccines, antidepressants and over-the-counter pain medicines.
Pretty much no one — and certainly not craven Mitch McConnell — thought Donald Trump would be a viable political candidate after he attempted a self-coup following his 2020 election defeat and his incitement of a deadly riot at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. The conservative-leaning Supreme Court, including the three justices Trump appointed, declined to even give his evidence-bereft claims of a stolen election a hearing. The Washington Post published an audio recording of him badgering Georgia’s Republican secretary of state to “find 11,780 votes” to overturn the state’s results.
And if Fulton County, Georgia, district attorney Fani Willis hadn’t bungled the case, there’s a chance the president would be serving prison time in Georgia today. Good luck for Trump, bad luck for justice and the future of American democracy. Trump waited out the storm and retook the presidency. President Donald Trump’s authoritarian rampage has relied on a bold and cynical strategy to bend the public’s perception of reality: abject stupidity. Trump’s “big lie” is, at its core, a witless tantrum thrown by a malignant narcissist who lacks the integrity to accept defeat. It should have been consigned to the dustbin of history half a decade ago. Instead, it’s fully canonized in MAGA lore — with tens of millions of Americans believing a thoroughly disproven falsehood. And some of those Americans are now in positions at the federal and state level with authority over elections. The Justice Department last week said it would send monitors to New Jersey and California ahead of next week’s elections at the request of the Republican Parties in both states. They’ll be looking for voter fraud that’s so exceedingly rare that when the Heritage Foundation (of Project 2025 infamy) attempted to create a comprehensive database of cases, it accidentally disproved its own theory of widespread malfeasance. “To come up with thousands of instances of voter fraud around the country, Heritage staff had to go back decades in time where there have been hundreds of millions of votes cast and a very small number of cases of election fraud have been found, none of which affected election outcomes,” Elaine Kamarck of the Brookings Institution wrote. And as Trump muses about staying in office beyond the expiration of his term on January 20, 2029, there’s a tendency among many people who ought to know better to blow it off as oh-so-much harmless Trump bluster. But Trump’s smart enough to know that overwhelming the public with seemingly asinine ideas and actions creates a disorienting, even blinding effect, blurring the lines between reality and fantasy and making it harder to challenge his lies. In essence, the stupidity is the point.
Anthony L. Fisher is a senior editor and opinion columnist for MS NOW, often covering free speech, civil liberties and extremism. He was previously the senior opinion editor for The Daily Beast and a politics columnist for Business Insider. 
