A Warning

When constructing the American republic, the history of Ancient Greece weighed heavily on the minds of the Founding Fathers and is relevant for understanding the implications of the Trump presidency. You see, Athens was the cautionary tale of how self-government could go wrong. It was an example of “direct democracy,” a society where the majority ruled and where citizens participated personally in the assembly, voting on the issues of the day by raising their hands. At first this was revolutionary, but in time, a herd-like mentality overcame the system. In the heat of the moment, the passions of the people could turn them into an angry mob, leading the majority into destructive decisions that proved to be their undoing.

The Greek experiment with democracy reached a memorable turning point in 427 BC. Athens was at war and tensions were high. The decisions the Athenian people faced were not mundane matters of bureaucracy, but life and death. Debates in the assembly were contentious, and powerful orators stirred up public anxiety. That year one of their long-standing allies—a city-state called Mytilene—defected and joined Athens’s enemy Sparta. The Athenians quashed the revolt, but they feared that if they didn’t punish the Mytilenians, other allies might abandon them, too. So the Athenian Assembly voted to kill all the city’s men and enslave its women and children to prove a point. The next day, citizens got cold feet and called for another meeting to reconsider the hasty decision.

One of the most vocal speakers in the debate was Cleon. He will sound familiar to readers. A prominent Athenian, Cleon inherited money from his father and leveraged it to launch a career in politics. Historians have characterized him as a populist, one of the era’s “new politicians.” Cleon was a crass and blunt public speaker, an immoral man who frequently sued his opponents, an armchair critic of those in power, and an orator who preyed upon the emotions of the people to whip up public support for his opinions. Although some accounts characterize him as charming, his speaking style was said to be angry and repugnant. Aristotle later described Cleon as: “[T]he man who, with his attacks, corrupted the Athenians more than anyone else. Although other speakers behaved decently, Cleon was the first to shout during a speech in the Assembly, [and] use abusive language while addressing the people….”

Cleon argued for slaughtering the Mytilenian rebels. He disparaged the “foolish” public intellectuals opposed to the decision and urged Athenians to ignore them. The educated politicians couldn’t be trusted; he suggested they might have been “bribed” to mislead the public. Government was best left to plain-speaking “ordinary men,” like himself. Cleon argued that no one had ever hurt their empire as much as Mytilenians, whose defection was an “attempt to ruin us.” He warned that if they didn’t make an example of the rebels, Athens would waste more money in more foreign wars, fighting people who defied them. Cleon closed by telling the assembly not to be “traitors to yourselves,” to show no “mercy” or “pity,” to listen to their original gut instincts, and to “punish them as they deserve.”

A man named Diodotus responded. He argued that ill-tempered decisions were reckless. Deliberation was necessary before taking action. Anyone who argued otherwise was either “senseless” or was trying to scare the people with false statements, such as Cleon’s insinuation that the other side in the debate had been bribed. “The good citizen ought to triumph not by frightening his opponents but by beating them fairly in argument,” Diodotus shot back. He said mass slaughter would be contrary to Athens’s long-term interests and that being lenient would instead allow Athens to win over many Mytilenians whom they still needed as supporters.

The assembly took it to a vote: Kill and enslave the Mytilenians, or show mercy by holding only the rebel leaders accountable? There was no consensus. With a show of hands, Athenians were almost evenly split. According to historical accounts, when the counting was completed, Diodotus secured just enough supporters to carry the day. With that, a horrific atrocity was prevented.

The story doesn’t have a happy ending. The split vote demonstrated how persuasive Cleon’s rhetoric had been, flashing the dark underbelly of majority rule. It was a preview of Athens’s descent. Within a decade, Athenians faced a similar decision. This time, they chose to throw mercy to the wind and annihilated the island people of Melos. Within three decades, a mob assembly voted to put to death Socrates, the so-called “wisest man” to have ever lived. The latter was an exclamation point on the death of Athenian democracy, which never recovered its former glory and eventually slipped into tyranny.

Like Athens, we face a turning point. The tone of our national conversation has taken a nosedive. We’ve grown impatient with our bureaucracies, with our Congress, and with one another. We’ve retreated into ideological corners. At the same time, the decisions we face are not routine; they are of the highest consequence, from an exploding federal debt to protracted foreign conflicts. Resolving them requires us to come together to set the nation’s priorities through conversation and compromise. Yet we are more divided than ever. The foundations of our democracy, which were meant to set boundaries on majority rule, are being tested.

Like Athens, we also have a Cleon in our midst, a foul-mouthed populist politician who uses rhetoric as a loaded gun. I’m not the first to see the similarities. Donald Trump’s words are powerful, and we are suffering three primary consequences from them. First, his words are hardening the national discourse, making it more difficult to sustain civility. Second, they are undermining our perceptions of the truth, making it challenging to find common ground. And third, they are fanning the flames of the mob mentality our Founders tried to prevent, making reasonable people once again consider—and lament—democracy’s greatest weakness.

Nasty Man

The words of America’s chief executives are captured after every administration, bound into volumes known as Public Papers of the Presidents. The compilations become the official record of each leader’s writings and speeches, published after they leave office. When I walk into the West Wing of the White House, the Papers are one of the first sights that catch my eye, displayed inside an ornate bookcase directly inside the official entrance. The volumes contain the words that shaped our nation and shook the world, reverberating through history.

Flipping through the pages, readers might encounter President Lincoln’s stirring remarks, which steered the United States toward reconciliation after a bitter Civil War. “With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right, let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan, to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.” They might find Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s speech after the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor. “No matter how long it may take us to overcome this premeditated invasion, the American people in their righteous might will win through to absolute victory… We will not only defend ourselves to the uttermost, but will make very certain that this form of treachery shall never again endanger us.”

What will the future volumes of President Trump’s Public Papers tell us about him and this moment in our political life? Will they inspire us and record a new birth of unity in our country? Or will we read them years from now as if they were the Mytilenian Debate, words that marked a turning point toward greater division?

We don’t know yet how his Public Papers will end, but we certainly know how they will begin. They will open with his inaugural address, which was characteristic of President Trump’s coarse style. That day he painted a bleak view of the country, of “mothers and children trapped in poverty in our inner cities; rusted-out factories scattered like tombstones across the landscape of our nation; an education system, flush with cash but that leaves our young and beautiful students deprived of knowledge; and the crime and gangs and drugs that have stolen too many lives and robbed our country of so much unrealized potential.” He said our money had been “ripped” from our homes and “redistributed” around the world, while countries were ravaging us by “stealing our companies and destroying our jobs.”

It was a scene of “American carnage,” Trump explained. With him in charge, we would “start winning again, winning like never before.” We would be “unstoppable.” His presidency would make us “strong,” “wealthy,” “proud,” and “safe” again. The carnage would end. Those of us watching the event on the West Front of the US Capitol Building were perplexed. This was a moment to unite and inspire. But his remarks were resentful and foreboding. Looking back, I find it oddly fitting that the very moment he started speaking it began to rain.

Ironically, his grim portrayal of America will be among the more eloquent statements in President Trump’s Public Papers because he read what he was handed. As we know, he usually speaks less cogently. He meanders off script, focusing on a main idea only in fits and starts, and revels in distractions, especially broadsides against his critics. This is a constant annoyance for aides who spend time crafting speeches so his words are more artful and less offensive. He often scraps those prepared remarks on the spot, allowing us to hear from the real Donald Trump—a man whose natural oratory is crude and mean spirited.

Why does this matter? Because words matter. As a student of history, I’ve always believed a president’s words are especially important because he (and one day, she) speaks for all of us. They shape how we engage with one another and how we meet the country’s needs. They influence the way we address challenges and how we cooperate within the same government. A leader’s words become the rallying cries for our shared causes, from what we stand against (“No taxation without representation!”) to what we stand for (“We choose to go to the moon in this decade!”). Unfortunately, Trump’s words don’t foster national civility. They corrode it.

His words sound more like those of a two-bit bartender at a rundown barrelhouse than a president. At any given event, Trump might praise someone who assaulted a journalist: “Any guy that can do a body slam, he’s my kind of—he’s my guy.” He might lambast his opponents as “low testosterone” or “low IQ.” Or he might mock a sexual-assault accuser’s testimony, mimicking her voice and the lawyer questioning her: “I had one beer. How did you get home? I don’t remember. How’d you get there? I don’t remember. Where is the place? I don’t remember. How many years ago was it? I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know. I don’t know… But I had one beer. That’s the only thing I remember.” He writes off her accusation as false.

Most notably, President Trump’s Papers will be filled with the pugilistic social media commentary that has dominated our public conversations. Future historians will need only to throw a dart at the calendar to find the vitriol. Let’s say April 1, 2018. That week his Papers will record that the president blasted ABC News, CBS, CNN, MSNBC, NBC, and the Washington Post (all individually) as “fake news”; blamed online retailer Amazon for stores closing “all over the country”; ridiculed the “money-losing” US Postal Service; mocked former US trade negotiators as “foolish, or incompetent”; denounced Mexico on immigration and threatened to cut off their “cash cow, NAFTA”; lamented his own Justice Department and FBI as “an embarrassment to our country”; and rounded it off by deriding his predecessor as “Cheatin’ Obama.”

That “April Fools” week was not special for any reason. It was like every week. The overall volume of the president’s sensationalist rhetoric is astounding, and it will all be archived for posterity, showing Donald Trump to be the least articulate president of all time. It’s not just that his style of communicating is rambling or contentious. It’s that he’s laid waste to public decency. During the presidential debates, Trump told us not to elect Hillary Clinton—“Such a nasty woman,” he said of her. Well, he got it his way, and instead we ended up with a nasty man.

Not a single day goes by that President Trump’s outrageous statements don’t confound someone on his team, if not all of us. I know other administrations dealt with this every once in a while. Obama’s cabinet officials complained quietly that their boss would talk an issue to death and couldn’t make up his mind. Bush aides winced at the president’s foot-in-mouth moments. However, I also know that none of them had to deal with these frustrations on a daily basis.

Past presidential appointees didn’t have to wake up each morning to discover, in a full-blown panic, that the president woke up before them and was making wild and vulgar pronouncements to the world. When you bump into former officials in the course of Washington business, they ask what it’s like to operate in this type of environment. I’ll tell you. It’s like showing up at the nursing home at daybreak to find your elderly uncle running pantsless across the courtyard and cursing loudly about the cafeteria food, as worried attendants try to catch him. You’re stunned, amused, and embarrassed all at the same time. Only your uncle probably wouldn’t do it every single day, his words aren’t broadcast to the public, and he doesn’t have to lead the US government once he puts his pants on.

Donald Trump’s words do more than drive his team crazy. They are dividing Americans. He may start fights on Twitter and at the microphones, but we are continuing them at home. Political differences between Americans are now at record highs. Studies show that Republicans are becoming more partisan, unwilling to veer from the party line, and Democrats are doing the same. The one thing the two sides can agree on is that the phenomenon is real. A Pew Research Center survey released in 2019 found that a whopping 85 percent of US adults said that “political debate in the country has become more negative and less respectful,” and two-thirds said it is less focused on the issues. Where do they pin the blame? A majority believed President Trump “has changed the tone and nature of political debate for the worse.”

The verbal acrimony has real-world consequences. Our divisions make us less likely to engage with one another, less likely to trust our government, and less optimistic about our country’s future. When asked to look outward to the year 2050, Americans were deeply pessimistic, according to another survey. A majority of respondents predicted the United States would be in decline, burdened by economic disparity and more politically polarized. Nearly the same percentage of Democrats and Republicans agreed on the last point.

In the nation’s capital, the president’s bull-in-a-china-shop language is inhibiting his own agenda. He can’t get consensus on Capitol Hill, even on previously uncontroversial issues, because his style has alienated potential partners on both sides. Democrats aren’t exactly trying to restore bipartisanship, but there might be more hope if the figurehead of the Republican Party were not treating them as mortal enemies rather than political opponents. Instead, every big idea becomes radioactive upon release. Every line of the budget is a trench on the political battlefield. We constantly struggle to sell the president’s priorities because he is his own worst enemy. Just when it seems like there is a breakthrough behind the scenes on a tough issue, the president might blow it up by verbally assailing the person we’re negotiating with or changing his position.

For instance, there was the time we’d painstakingly sketched the broad outlines of a nearly $2 trillion agreement with the Democrats to repair America’s aging infrastructure. Fixing America’s roads and bridges is a popular, bipartisan policy and could have been a slam dunk for Donald Trump, who is an actual builder and understands the issue. Many of us in the administration cared about it. Trump claimed he did, too. Then the president, angry at what he’d seen on cable news, walked into a White House meeting with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, threw away his talking points, and said he couldn’t work with them until they stopped investigating his administration. They didn’t get a word in edgewise. He stormed out to the Rose Garden after a few minutes and angrily told reporters that Democrats couldn’t “investigate and legislate simultaneously” and that they needed to “get these phony investigations over with” before he’d talk. Prospects for an infrastructure pact vanished in an instant. Next time you’re stuck in traffic or on a pothole-ridden federal highway, remember this episode.

The inability to bite his tongue is the second-worst trait any president can have when he’s trying to make deals on behalf of the American people. The worst is dishonesty.

Big Little Lies

Fact-checking is an important function in any White House. Before draft remarks ever hit the paper, ideas are discussed in staff meetings and vetted. Perhaps it’s a speech about space travel. A data call goes out to different offices and agencies looking for facts to build around a core narrative. Then a speechwriter takes a first pass. It gets farmed out to policy experts to make sure it’s consistent with administration policy. A second draft is made before it’s passed to an internal fact-checker to independently confirm each detail. Then aides read it again, including maybe the chief of staff, before it goes to the president or vice president for final review.

This is what happened in March 2019 when Vice President Mike Pence made a rousing speech about the US space program in Huntsville, Alabama. NASA helped supply the facts in order to craft a big announcement. “At the direction of the president of the United States,” Pence declared, “it is the stated policy of this administration to return American astronauts to the moon within the next five years. The first woman and the next man on the moon will both be American astronauts, launched by American rockets, from American soil!” The crowd was ecstatic.

You know what happened next. It’s the twist in every Trump story that we all hope never comes but always does. The president stepped in, made a statement that no one fact-checked beforehand, and screwed it up. A few weeks after the Pence speech, Trump tweeted, “For all of the money we are spending, NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon - We did that 50 years ago. They should be focused on the much bigger things we are doing, including Mars (of which the Moon is a part), Defense and Science!” First, the tweet was misleading. The president himself had approved NASA’s lunar plans; he was acting as if he hadn’t. Some of us speculated it was because the moon wasn’t big enough for him. Second, he made the very scientifically inaccurate claim that the moon is a part of Mars, despite being separated by nearly fifty million miles. Pence’s staff, a bit befuddled, flagged the tweet internally to ensure someone corrected Trump. “There’s no need to go to Mars,” one aide messaged. “We’re already on it!”

Earlier, we touched briefly upon President Trump’s tenuous relationship with the truth. He makes outlandish claims, is drawn to conspiracy theories, and regularly spreads half-truths and demonstrably false information. That was not news to anyone when he joined the presidential race. Trump has been prone to misstatements for as long as he’s been in the public eye. His family members laugh it off as harmless. Everyone knows it’s his “style,” they say, so what’s the big deal? When it’s bad facts about the solar system, they’re right. It’s harmless and even comical, but it’s worse when it’s a disproven claim that “millions” of people voted illegally in a national election.

The problem is that people believe what he says because he’s the president, and Trump regularly—frequently—spreads false information that large majorities of the country accept as the truth. I will be the first to say that political opponents have clouded our ability to judge the president’s statements fairly because they have a knee-jerk reaction to everything he says. To them, it’s all a lie. That’s not accurate. Everything the president says is not a lie, but an awful lot of it is.

A Washington Post analysis found that after nearly nine hundred days in the White House, the president made a staggering eleven thousand junk claims. This averages out to more than ten half-truths or untruths a day. While some Americans have grown skeptical of a media that seems to attack President Trump relentlessly, this figure is based on objective analysis of his own words, words that can be proven inaccurate or flat-out wrong.

You can randomly search the databases of his claims and find everything from easily dismissed white lies (“I’m running the best economy in our history”) to obvious whoppers (“I won the popular vote”). The president has repeatedly claimed he got NATO countries to spend $100 billion more on the alliance’s defense. This is false. Countries were increasing their defense expenditures before Trump took office, and the increases are less than half of his claim. The president also said violent crime was surging in the two years before he took office—with murders up “by more than 20 percent”—and that he’s brought crime down, even though two years before he was inaugurated the violent crime rate was at one of its lowest points in forty-five years. The list goes on and on.

The president’s falsehoods are especially problematic when they change public attitudes. Misstating defense budgets and crime statistics is one thing. Every president slips up. But convincing the masses to share the absurd views we’ve discussed—that his opponents are actual criminals, that the FBI is corrupt, and that the judicial system is rigged—is far more consequential, with real-world social implications. You, the reader, might be more enlightened and dismiss these statements when you hear them, yet millions of people accept them as fact, changing the way they engage in politics.

The president has been called a pathological liar. I used to cringe when I heard people say that just to score political points, and I thought it was unfair. Now I know it’s true. He spreads lies he hears. He makes up new lies to spread. He lies to our faces. He asks people around him to lie. People who’ve known him for years accept it as common knowledge. We cannot get used to this. Think of what we must “trust” a president to do as our chief executive. That’s why we spent the beginning of this book assessing character, because it is so critical for our commander in chief to have it.

His appointees have the humiliating chore of defending him when he’s wrong. If he says something false, he asks us to spin it closer to the truth. Advisors try to avoid admitting Trump was “wrong,” and hilariously, this creates a second round of misleading statements, as aides create new lies about the president’s old lies in order to bring them more in line with the facts. The ripple effect of excuses actually distorts reality. Because it’s too confusing to follow, it’s easier for people to either accept what the president said in the first place, or not. In the meantime, the truth lies unconscious and bleeding in a ditch along the side of the road.

President Trump is fundamentally undermining our perceptions of “truth.” He has taken us down a dark, subjectivist rabbit hole. To him, there is no real truth. If people believe something is true, that makes it true. A scientist will tell you a tree is a tree. It cannot be both a tree and a sheep at the same time. Not for the president. A tree is only a tree to him if we all agree it is. If he can convince us it’s a sheep, then it is a sheep!

Kellyanne Conway unintentionally summed up this Trumpian philosophy beautifully. She went on Meet the Press and was forced to defend the president’s absurd boast about having the largest ever crowd at his inauguration. To be clear, the president’s claim was easily disproven by facts and photographs and numbers and recorded history and basic human reasoning. Still, Chuck Todd pressed Conway on the subject, to which she responded: “You’re saying it’s a falsehood… [but] Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts.”

“Wait a minute,” Todd interjected. “Alternative facts?… Alternative facts are not facts. They’re falsehoods.”

She chided the host: “Your job is not to call things ridiculous that are said by our press secretary and our president. That is not your job.”

In other words: We said it, so it’s true.

Kellyanne is not a dumb person. She’s smart, well-read, and normally quite considerate, but like everyone who hangs around Donald Trump too long, she’s been forced to become a reality contortionist. This is what he asks of her, of anyone, to stay in his good graces. He enjoys watching people go out and compromise their integrity in order to serve him.

The president’s untruths resonate with supporters due to their “confirmation bias.” Humans tend to interpret new information as evidence to support preexisting views. For example, if you think dogs are dangerous and someone tells you that a rabid canine is roaming the neighborhood, you are more likely to accept it as a fact and less likely to question it as a rumor, because you already believe dogs are vicious. The social media age has put this cognitive defect on steroids. We can now reinforce our opinions instantly with supporting “facts” found in tweets, on blogs, on liberal or conservative websites, and beyond.

Donald Trump exacerbates this phenomenon by pandering to common prejudices with false information. When he does, the “false” part gets ignored by followers because of their confirmation bias. The “information” part gets absorbed. They are willing to march with him in lockstep if what he says validates what they already believe. This happens on both ends of the political spectrum, but the president exploits it to a level heretofore unseen. You think your government is corrupt? Donald Trump agrees with you, peddling conspiracies about a faceless Deep State secretly pulling the levers of government. Worried about illegal immigrants stealing US jobs by the millions? You should, he says, because they’re swarming America and will probably be cleaning out your desk on Monday.

The epistemological crisis means Americans can’t find common ground because they can’t agree on the same set of facts. The president fudges the truth so frequently on so many issues that we have difficulty reaching a common starting point when we debate one another. Consequently, Americans can’t move from the what to the so what—from the facts of a problem to a course of action for how to solve a problem. Even the little lies President Trump tells, when repeated over and over, have a big impact by gradually changing public perceptions of what is true and what matters.

We are now living in different realities. As evidence, a 2019 survey found Republicans and Democrats are further apart than ever on the issues they say should be the government’s top priorities. The most recent study found “there is virtually no common ground in the priorities that rise to the top of the lists” between the two sides. Democratic respondents said our nation’s biggest challenges were health care, education, the environment, Medicare, and poverty. Republicans said they were terrorism, the economy, Social Security, immigration, and the military. It’s the least amount of crossover the Pew Research Center has found since it began tracking these metrics more than two decades ago. Trump’s rhetoric reinforces these divisions.

The president’s unconcern about the truth has terrible implications for a free society. The Book of John says, “Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free.” Our capacity to reason—to see through falsehoods—is one of our sturdiest ramparts against threats to democracy. Without it, our republic is vulnerable to creeping encroachments of authoritarianism. Trump’s words have already undercut the independence of the judiciary, excused the overreach of executive power, and chipped away at public trust in government. They are also being used to attack our last hope for truth: the free press.

The president is engaged in an all-out, guns-a-blazing rhetorical battle against journalists. I know there are many Trump partisans who have no problem with the media getting its comeuppance for long-simmering bias against the GOP. That’s the feeling inside the Trump administration, too. The communications team is gleeful when the president lobs a grenade at the press, yet the media, for all of its flaws, exists for a reason in a democracy. They are our defense against the government, a source of power that can’t be censored. But since he can’t censor them, President Trump has tried to do the next best thing and discredit them.

Trump has attacked the media on Twitter well over a thousand times since taking office and tweeted the phrase “fake news” five hundred plus times. His definition of “fake news” has evolved from outlets that report inaccurate information to outlets that criticize him. Privately and publicly, Trump has fumed at his coverage and looked for ways to retaliate against the news media, ranging from taking away access privileges for White House reporters to suggesting the government should open federal investigations into their reporting.

Trump’s views on freedom of speech are most charitably described as perverted. He once said, “See, I don’t think that the mainstream media is free speech either because it’s so crooked. It’s so dishonest. So to me, free speech is not when you see something good and then you purposely write bad. To me, that’s very dangerous speech, and you become angry at it. But that’s not free speech.” That, of course, is the very definition of free speech—being able to criticize a president when he doesn’t like it.

His attitude has trickled down to staff. I remember a rambling ninety-minute press conference in fall 2018 when the president got into it with CNN’s Jim Acosta, who started asking uncomfortable questions about Russia. The president told him to sit down and called him a “rude, terrible person.” Later in the day, Bill Shine, one of the many White House communications chiefs we’ve had, sauntered into a meeting. “Guess what I just did,” he baited aides. “What?” they asked. “I blocked Acosta from getting into the White House. He’s supposed to be on TV tonight from here, but he’s about to find out that Secret Service won’t let him in!” The team laughed and gave him high fives. Acosta could be a jerk sometimes, but I don’t remember the part of civics class where being a jerk was a limitation on the freedom of the press.

Eventually the president adopted a more incendiary view of the media, “the enemy of the people,” a term routinely used by the Soviet Union when imprisoning or torturing journalists who told the truth about the totalitarian state. After Trump first used the phrase, the United States Senate unanimously (as in every Democrat and Republican in the chamber) passed a resolution rebuking it. “Resolved, that the Senate affirms that the press is not the enemy of the people,” it read, “reaffirms the vital and indispensable role the free press serves,” and “condemns the attacks on the institution of the free press and views efforts to systematically undermine the credibility of the press as an attack on the democratic institutions of the United States.”

Donald Trump’s media hate is infectious. By the spring of 2018 more than half of all Republican voters polled said they agreed with the president that the media was the enemy of the people, while only 37 percent believed the free press was “an important part of democracy.” These attitudes will have long-term repercussions on our ability to return to truth, perhaps even violent ones. A few months following the aforementioned poll, pipe bombs were sent to thirteen media outlets and personalities. All of them were figures President Trump had attacked by name, a chilling example of how his words can jump the tracks from careless rhetoric to real-world danger.

Pixelated Pitchforks

One of the Founders’ deepest fears was the public mob mentality. That’s why the direct democracy of Athens became the opposite of what it was supposed to be. “Mob-rule is a rough sea for the ship of state to ride,” an American historian once wrote. “Every wind of oratory stirs up the waters and deflects the course. The upshot of such a democracy is tyranny or autocracy; the crowd so loves flattery, it is so ‘hungry for honey,’ that at last the wiliest and most unscrupulous flatterer, calling himself the ‘protector of the people,’ rises to supreme power.” That’s when self-government implodes. The Founders set out to remedy this. They created representative government instead of direct democracy, staggered elections every few years to avoid the momentary impulses of the masses, and counted on the country’s large size to make it hard for the demands of angry factions to spread from state to state.

The modern age is threatening our system in ways they could never have imagined. Representative government no longer insulates elected leaders from the sudden convulsions of the people. Today, members of Congress are harassed around the clock online. With every word and vote scrutinized, they are shying away from cooperation and adopting the tone of those who pressure them. Social media has allowed factions to form suddenly, cross boundaries virtually, and snowball, despite the large size of our nation. There is no longer any need for compromise when you can silence the opposition with virtual intimidation.

Our current president exploits the mob mentality, which is the most consequential aspect of his charged rhetoric.

Trump revels in the herd-like behavior of his followers. He uses his social media presence to inflame public debates and to dispatch supporters to attack politicians who’ve criticized him—or to rally followers in his defense. We all know that people are dumber and crueler in large groups. Trump plays this to his advantage by directing the violent energy toward whatever careless end he wishes. When the pixelated pitchforks get raised, truth becomes the first victim. Irrationality takes over. That’s how the president turns his own fake news into instantaneous reality. His falsehoods get retweeted by the tens of thousands before the fact-checkers wake up. Today, there is no limit to how many pitchforks he can put into the hands of the virtual mob because social media allows it to swell to unlimited sizes, spreading his words far and wide, for free.

People around Trump are also blameworthy. Some among us have too readily accepted the president’s offers to start Twitter wars to denigrate critics opposed to the administration’s policies, while others actively seek him out and ask Trump to send raw voltage into the news feeds of his followers in order to light up a new cause. The president knows he can make people angry about anything. Everyone on his team has seen it happen, and people try to take advantage of it.

The real threat is when the madness bleeds over from the digital world into the real one, as it does at Trump events. You should see the West Wing before a rally. It’s buzzing like a pre-game locker room. Trump doesn’t travel to these arena-sized events to talk policy. He goes to rile up the crowd with pull-no-punches attacks on his enemies. With a Marine One helicopter waiting on the South Lawn, aides might be trying to tell him about a stock market development, but he’s not hearing it. He’s in the zone and thinking about bombastic things to say from the podium tonight. Trump might pause the meeting to road test an incendiary one-liner by calling a confidant to see if it really stings.

Watch any Trump rally. Whether through chants of “Lock her up!” or “Send her back!” our president arms audiences with weaponized language. At an event in Florida, Trump asked the crowd how to deal with illegal immigrants. “How do you stop these people?” he asked, his frustration visibly mounting while talking about the challenges at the border. “Shoot them!” one rally-goer cried. Rather than temper the suggestion, the president smiled and chuckled. “That’s only in the Panhandle you can get away with that statement.”

Defenders have scoffed at the idea that the president incites clannish hatred. At the aforementioned rally, they say, he prefaced his question by actually clarifying that the United States couldn’t use weapons to fend off immigrant caravans. “We can’t. I would never do that,” Trump conceded, but those are the types of tongue-in-cheek statements he makes when he actually does want to do something.

In fact, it was Trump himself the previous year who suggested shooting immigrants found crossing the border. Yes, shooting them, real human beings, with bullets from guns held by members of our armed forces. “They are throwing rocks viciously and violently,” he said, discussing an incoming caravan of people, most of whom were fleeing poverty. They’d been on the march for weeks and had gotten past Mexican authorities. “We are not going to put up with that. If they want to throw rocks at our military, our military fights back. I told them to consider it a rifle. When they throw rocks like they did at the Mexico military and police, I say consider it a rifle.”

Some people listening thought this was just another Trump riff that carried him away for a moment, but it wasn’t rhetoric. It wasn’t facetious. He wanted it to happen. He’d deployed US troops to the border because he was trying to show a “tougher” response. Trump didn’t want to murder innocent people, but he thought injuring a few immigrants would serve as a warning to others. “Why not?” he asked advisors. Defense Department officials, in full panic, picked up the phone to forcefully remind the White House about the actual rules of engagement for our troops, which did not include opening fire on unarmed civilians.

At a minimum, Trump’s language is alienating in a way that feeds hateful groupthink. It’s hard for my fellow Republicans to acknowledge this because the media is so sensationalistic. Television talking heads always assume the president’s actions are bigoted, hyperventilating about everything he does. Trust me, I feel tempted to write them off, too, but there is no avoiding the fact that his words have a striking undertone of racial animus. Is this so hard to believe?

Fellow Republicans called candidate Trump a “race-baiting xenophobic bigot” in the presidential campaign. Do those now-silent Republicans believe the magic of the Oval Office has somehow transformed the man into a champion for racial tolerance? Nothing has changed. Whatever you think of Donald Trump, his views are alienating and deeply ingrained. When the president talks about people he wants to keep out of America, he tends to bring up Latin America, Africa, or Middle Eastern nations. When he tells the public about places he loves—countries whose citizens he would happily welcome in large numbers—he tends to talk about European nations, especially white, wealthy Nordic countries. I still don’t think he’s a hardline racist, but draw your own conclusions.

Extremists are hijacking the president’s rhetoric to promote their movements. The killer responsible for the deadly mass shooting at an El Paso Walmart, for example, wrote that he was “defending my country from cultural and ethnic replacement brought on by an [Hispanic] invasion”—an “invasion” that Trump speaks about almost daily. Is the president culpable in such heinous acts? Absolutely not, but he is responsible for setting the tone on divisive issues, for failing to choose his words carefully, and for fostering a climate of intimidation that can cultivate violence.

Steady Staters were cognizant of this. Before a major speech or event, some would try to moderate the tone as best they could by editing the president’s public remarks. The effect was limited by the reality that Trump constantly goes off script. Afterward advisors might suggest to the president that he steer clear of a phrase or idea that could be perceived as a dog whistle to hate groups, or that was particularly offensive to an ethnic or religious minority. That doesn’t happen a whole lot anymore, and the fiery rhetoric is getting more atrocious.

Nearly three-quarters of Americans surveyed agreed that “elected officials should avoid using heated language because it could encourage violence.” It can, it does, and it has. They should also consider whether it could result in what our Founders feared: democracy’s foundations being ripped apart by mob rule.

Speaking to a group of Civil War veterans in 1875, Ulysses S. Grant speculated that if ever the nation were torn apart again, it would not be split North versus South along the infamous Mason-Dixon Line, the geographic boundary that separated free states and slave states. He surmised that in the future the dividing line would be reason itself, with intelligence on one side and ignorance on the other. Grant was a student of history. He knew that in societies where truth comes under attack, the fertile soil is tilled for violent conflict. Austrian philosopher Karl Popper took it a step further, writing, “The more we try to return to the heroic age of tribalism, the more surely do we arrive at the Inquisition, at the Secret Police, and at a romanticized gangsterism,” a horrible degeneration that begins with the push of a domino—“the suppression of reason and truth.”

It comes as a surprise to no one that political tribalism is surging in America. Our self-selected groups are becoming more partisan and less inclusive than ever before. Today we have a digital Mason-Dixon Line. It is splitting our country right down the middle, all the way to the household level. Donald Trump is not its sole cause. The line was drawn by the disruptive effects of technology and the fundamentals of human psychology, but the president’s demagoguery has worsened the problem. His words are reshaping who we are.

An early colonist branded America a “shining city on a hill,” an image that has defined our country for centuries since. In his farewell address, Ronald Reagan added more color to the analogy, saying the United States was “a tall, proud city built on rocks stronger than oceans, windswept, God-blessed, and teeming with people of all kinds living in harmony and peace… and if there had to be city walls, the walls had doors and the doors were open to anyone with the will and the heart to get here.” Unfortunately, if we continue in our current direction, America will start to look more like the scene of “American carnage” the president said it was on his first day in office. He is debasing our national conversation to that level, and it’s up to us whether it’s acceptable.

If Trump’s actions have turned the US government into one of his failed businesses, his rhetoric is turning our national stage into one of his reality television shows. It is no longer a preeminent forum for the debate of high-minded issues. The stage is fast becoming a drama-soaked series following the misadventures of a business tycoon navigating Washington in search of power and popularity, stirring up new controversies to capture the short attention span of a glass-eyed, zombie-like mob of spectators. They are desperate to be entertained, willing to be fooled, and easily provoked toward infighting by his unseemly antics. If you feel sick watching this production, imagine what it’s like to be a part of the cast.