“I think one of the greatest terms I’ve ever come up with is fake news,” President Donald J. Trump said in his recent 60 Minute interview with CBS News host Laura O’Donnell.
Fake news is indeed a great term to summarize the interview, which was par for the course for the president: full of grievances, complaints and lies—that each of the alleged “drug boats” the United States has illegally targeted “kills 25,000 Americans,” that he ended eight wars, that “our groceries are down,” that Democrats shut down the government because they want to give healthcare to undocumented migrants, and that the 2020 presidential election was “rigged” and stolen.”
It’s tempting to fact-check these claims. But trying to debunk Trump’s lies and correct the record misunderstands what these lies are really about. For they are best understood as an attempt to create what the German-American political theorist Hannah Arendt called “the consistency of a lying world order.”
I was reminded of Arendt’s claim when I read her essay, “On the Nature of Totalitarianism,” in preparation for a political theory course I’m teaching this semester. One of the hallmarks of totalitarianism, Arendt suggests, is its emancipation from reality and simultaneous effort to create an alternate one.
According to an influential philosophical view, reality is the basis of truth: a statement is true when it corresponds with the facts. What totalitarian dictators like Stalin and Hitler took from this was that the truth or falsity of their convictions was irrelevant, because they could be made true by making reality conform to their worldview.
Take Arendt’s example of Nazi race ideology, which was both untethered from and at the same time imposed on reality. It did not matter to the Nazis if Jews were, in fact, “beggars without passports.” True or not, the Nazis were determined to make it so.
This totalitarian relationship with reality is ubiquitous in the current moment. Vice President J.D. Vance made its logic explicit during the 2024 election campaign when he defended preposterous claims about Haitian immigrants eating their neighbors’ pets.
“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people,” Vance said at the time, “then that’s what I’m going to do.”
We also see this logic at work in the administration’s definition of sex as determined at conception by whether one produces eggs or sperm.
We see it in attacks on diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, which are said to be illegal and immoral forms of discrimination.
We see it in the administration’s review of the Smithsonian Institution to remove allegedly divisive content from its exhibitions.
We see it in Trump’s firing of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics over weak job numbers.
And we see it in the campaign to Make America Healthy Again by restricting access to life-saving vaccines and bogus investigations into Tylenol causing autism.
This list is not exhaustive.
What’s at issue in all these actions is not truth and sanity, as the president would have it, but making reality conform to a worldview in which there is no room for trans people, people of color, disabled people or sick people. It’s about fabricating reality so that there are, in fact, no trans people, no people of color, and no disabled people because they have been defined out of existence, excluded from the public sphere or eliminated by means of neglect, withdrawal of care and violence.
There is a pristine logic to this kind of thinking. Hitler called it “ice-cold reasoning:” Whoever accepts that the Aryan race is the sole source of human culture and civilization must also accept that human civilization requires the defense of Aryans against inferior races. And whoever accepts that must accept the exclusion, removal and annihilation of those races.
What makes this kind of reasoning so attractive to so many people, Arendt argued, is not its content but its uncompromising, unfeeling necessity — the strict logic by which conclusion follows from premise.
Arendt suggested that this way of thinking appeals to people who are deprived of meaningful experience and human connection. She called this loneliness, a condition of isolation in which one is stripped of all possibility for collective action towards shared goals.
And the loneliness that was rampant in the early 20th Century has only intensified. Just think of how the internet has separated us from others. Once hailed as a means to help us maintain social relationships, it has transformed those relationships into online transactions. We curate our profiles like personal brands, swipe left on whoever doesn’t suit us, and even start romantic relationships with ChatGPT.
This is not what meaningful human relationships look like. It is what loneliness looks like.
The result: None of us feel like we’re in it together, pursuing something bigger than ourselves. And with nothing else to hold on to, the ice-cold rationality of totalitarianism offers firm ground on which one can stand.
Arendt’s account might also go some way toward explaining why over half of white women and almost half of Latino voters supported Trump, despite his sexist remarks and anti-Latino rhetoric. Sure, these groups voted for Trump for many reasons, above all the economy. But it’s worth considering, too, if part of the appeal, especially in our uncertain times, is the complete predictability of a worldview that ruthlessly imposes its vision on the world.
What Arendt can teach us is that politics really is about creating reality. But it is about doing so together, based on a shared vision for a world in which, for better or worse, we have to live with each other.