Don't tell lies about Donald Trump

You will be asked to participate in the conspiracy to make the abnormal normal. Do not do it.

The most important rule for the next four years, and the one that will be hardest to follow, is to not tell lies about Donald Trump.

There will be immense social pressure to pretend Trump is not what he is. There will be immense pressure to treat the abnormal as normal. You will be asked to pretend that dangerous things are safe, and unremarkable. You will be expected to pretend that deeply inhumane acts of cruelty are smart, or acceptable.

This pressure will come in many forms. It will come as a whispered suggestion to be polite: "We must use understatement to look like the more reasonable party. We should hold to norms of comity. We should adhere to the well-rehearsed boilerplate of politics."

It will come as a threat: "You are ruining your own credibility. You never talked this way about other presidents. You have Trump derangement syndrome. You are being hysterical."

And more than anything, it will come as a bland, blunt refusal to see or acknowledge what is clearly happening. Horrifying acts of corruption will be unveiled, and many of our leaders, unable to talk about it in the terms they think are appropriate, will simply not talk about it at all. Americans will be harmed, and since they cannot be discussed in normal terms, they will be ignored. The president will do things that would disqualify any other elected leader anywhere in the world, and everyone will continue as if he had not done those things.

You will be urged to underreact. The wisdom of underreaction will be restated to you endlessly. Usually it will be defended with cliches: “You need to keep your power dry,” or “not react to every little thing.” Sometimes it will be “he wants us to respond to this.” Or “he’s looking for attention.” In the end few will be able to explain why muted underreaction is preferable to a genuine response to real events. Why is it to our benefit to prop up a world of make-believe about a president who cannot satisfy the barest requirements of office? No one will be able to say. This is because these arguments are not really about political tactics or propriety. They are rationalized inaction in the face of social pressure to preserve the fiction that everything is normal.

This was the defining quality of 2017-2020. The president was incompetent, corrupt, and criminal. But other institutions and leaders were unsure of their place, or their obligations, in a world where such an important role was occupied by someone so profoundly unfit. So they adopted a posture of artificial normality: they simply talked and acted as if nothing strange was happening.

At the time I called it the “Great Age of Pretending.” But I was wrong, because the current age will be greater.

Trump ended his previous presidency at the peak of his narcissistic and authoritarian derangement, having taken four years to purge his circles of any stabilizing influence. This time he is starting his presidency in that same place. Despite this, our institutions - political, media, and corporate - have all decided to pretend that this is a happy moment. They have completely caved to the social pressure to normalize Trump, so much so that they have found themselves in a headlong rush to celebrate him. They have worked themselves into a frenzied competition to prove who can most effusively praise the emperor’s new clothes. As if, through the power of their words, they can delete his past, remold his character, and turn Trump into some great and benevolent leader.

They can’t. Trump remains incompetent, criminal, corrupt, and unfit. There will be an effort across the whole of our society to disguise this fact. You will be asked to participate in this conspiracy of lies. But the conspiracy only works if enough people participate in it. It only takes a few loud voices honestly describing what everyone can see to threaten their world of pretend.

Don’t participate. Tell the truth.