About a year ago I vowed to ignore Donald Trump in my professional writing, a vow I broke but once before the November 8 election—and then to comment less on the person than on the phenomenon he represented. My vow turned on the fact that everyone else seemed obsessed by the man, the mainstream press very counterproductively so. I also expected that, for most practical purposes, the whole bad dream would just up and go away before summer’s end.

It didn’t. The bad dream has become instead a highly realistic and exponentially expanding irritation. I have not yet completely given up on the possibility that I remain in a dream state from which I will soon happily awake, but the prospect is looking dimmer with every passing news bulletin. And so, since November 8, what passes for reality has left me little choice but to ponder and pen about both the man and his associates, and about what it is fair to call the movement he heads.¹

I stress the pairing of man and movement because, in my view, there has been too much focus on the psychological/psychiatric aspects of the man, and too little social-psychological focus on the movement. After all, the nation has never lacked for narcissistic personalities, even those of the megalomaniacal fabulist variety; yet until January 20 of this year none of them had ever gotten anywhere near the Oval Office. Trump is endlessly interesting from a clinical point of view, true, but the movement is no less so. It is also potentially more important as we look ahead, counting off the years to come, since it may outlast Trump’s own White House tenure. Let me start here with the man and, except for a very light hint, leave comment on the movement for another time.

When my wife hears Donald Trump’s voice come over the radio in the morning as she breakfasts, she viscerally cringes. When my daughter-in-law hears that voice, she switches off the offending device and takes several deep breaths to recover her emotional balance. I can’t blame them, but when I hear his voice I force myself to focus like a social science Ph.D. who, with Medicare card in pocket, has been around the block a few times. So what do I hear?

I hear basically two things. First and least interesting, Trump sounds like a typical union boss from forty or so years ago. He sounds to me a lot like Jimmy Hoffa, a loud and guttural purveyor of short, direct sentences and short paragraphs. You can almost hear the punctuation, Victor Borge-like. He is assertive, brusque, close to angry much of the time, dismissive of those who might disagree with him and, all in all, aggressive to the point of bullying. The adjective petulant comes to mind, too, in the sense of how a loser flails about desperately in trying to target some real or imagined assailant.

This tonal trope, and the paralinguistic cues that go with it, are very popular with Trump’s base. It allows him to associate with, mobilize, and then harvest the frustrations turned to anger of whole cohorts of Americans who, not without reason, believe that for years on end they have been varyingly ignored, betrayed, insulted, and humiliated by the political and media elites of both Left and Right. Trump is not affecting this tone; it comes natural to him, which is why it works for him politically.

Note further that the tone is the presentation; the meaning of the words is secondary. There’s a story about Judy Woodruff, who was in 1980 a young up-and-coming CBS reporter tasked to interview candidate Ronald Reagan on film. After the interview Woodruff thought she had skewered the Governor with questions he failed to answer very well. A little while later Roger Ailes, then a media consultant to Reagan, called Woodruff up on the phone and thanked her effusively for the interview. Woodruff was nonplussed, which Ailes sensed. He asked her if she still had the tape of the interview. She did. “Well,” said Ailes, “perhaps you might look at it again, this time with the sound off.”

Woodruff was puzzled but intrigued. She did as Ailes suggested, and then it hit her: On camera she looked stern, with jaw clenched and eyes narrowed—downright inquisitorial; Reagan looked jovial, gregarious, and unfailingly polite. She got Ailes’s point: When the subject matter gets even a bit esoteric, the typical American does not mainly listen to the words. It’s the pictures that matter, and the affect that rises from them. What was true in 1980 is, if anything, even truer today as an image-suffused electronic media has all but suffocated the influence of print.

Trump and those around him understood this during the campaign. The media sophisticates thought that the more they gave Trump free air time, the more the absurdity of his political pretentions would become manifest. They had failed to learn what Judy Woodruff learned eight election cycles earlier.

But the words do matter, too. They matter most when they are simple, direct, bold, and concrete. And that brings us to the second and far more important thing I hear when Trump’s voice tremulates toward my ears. It starts with a question: Listening to Trump all campaign long, reaching a shrill crescendo in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention and continuing into his Inaugural, where exactly does his dystopian image of the “carnage” of American society come from? It’s not an image that I or anyone in my circle credits as being even remotely accurate. The answer, though, should be obvious: television.

Yes, Trump did not write either of these two speeches—Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon did. But both speeches align with the distorted images of American society to which Trump returned time and again this past year, so one has to conclude that whatever the speechwriting phraseology turned out to be, these expressions were authentic Trump.

All of the data points mentioned in the “carnage” discourse lack evidence: The murder rate is not what Trump et al. say it is; the propensity of Hispanic immigrants—illegals or green card holders—to engage in violent crime is no greater than is the case for the general population in those socio-economic strata; voter fraud was not any more extensive in 2016 than it had been in earlier election cycles; and so on and so forth. But that’s actual reality, not reality filtered through what George Gerbner documented meticulously as the “mean world syndrome.”

Gerbner, a professor at the Annenberg School of Communications at the University of Pennsylvania, showed that people who watch a lot of commercial television think that there is far more violence, perversion, infidelity, misogyny, and the like than there really is. Why? Because commercial television is about garnering market share for advertisers, and script writers and producers do that by being edgy—by using astounding complexes to evoke those little but frequent adrenaline squirts of excitement that keep our Stone Age human brains glued to the screen in a textbook example of stimulus-reward feedback loops.

It works so long as it escalates, as with the neurophysiology of any addiction. In my lifetime I have seen an endless competition among television shows to be edgier than thou, constantly raising the shock quotient to the point that one wonders how much edgier it could possibly get. We’ve gone from Father Knows Best to Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and Breaking Bad in just two generations. Television—along with Hollywood, of course—has played no small part in dragging us from Bedford Falls to Pottersville in the process. The more people view these kinds of behaviors on television the more insidiously “normal” they seem, and hence arguably to some extent the more frequent they actually become.

Gerbner wondered what it meant when children in particular were exposed to more narratives designed by distant advertising professionals than narratives delivered by their own parents and grandparents. He wondered whether the same value hierarchies were being socialized into children, and he tellingly referred to the process as “industrial folklore.”² As one of his students, Joseph Turow, summarized Gerbner’s thinking years later:

Based on his folklore studies, he understood that telling stories is fundamental to every society. Folklorists emphasize that tales of all sorts serve up norms, reinforce values and moral definitions, and tell people how to frame the world. To the immigrant Gerbner, who combined the idealistic soul of a Hungarian poet with the breadwinning practicality of an American journalist, the similarities and differences in storytelling between traditional and modern communication stood out starkly. The key difference lay in folklore’s “handicraft” nature. Created and diffused organically through society, folklore is a product of “the people.” Modern media tales, by contrast, are industrial products in which the concerns of advertisers and other “patrons” take precedence over all else. . . . Gerbner’s ideas about media content resonated with those of anthropologists such as Hortense Powdermaker of New York’s Queens College, whose 1947 book Hollywood: The Dream Factory seems to have influenced him. “The dreams of sleep”, he later wrote, “are individual and private in any society. But the popular daydreams of our industrial culture are privately mass produced for a public market of shared desires.”

Gerbner believed it was crucial to understand the social impact of these mass-produced daydreams because they likely influenced the hierarchy of values as they developed in our minds, particularly in the minds of young people. The key was not to dwell on the positive or negative aspects of individual television shows, movies or songs. Instead, Gerbner insisted, because popular culture is mass-produced, it should be analyzed as a system of industrially patterned, rather than idiosyncratic or artistic, messages. With the “message system” as a central concept, communication research should pursue three fundamental goals: Explore the forces that shape the pattern of messages; examine the overall nature of those message patterns; and understand the social roles or functions that those patterns play in society.

Anyone who doubts the social effects of the escalation of television edginess or the daydream character of industrial folklore must logically contend that human adults, at least, are perfectly capable of distinguishing fiction delivered through mediated images from normal waking reality. So then consider that back in the day, well before the coarsening explosion of violence and sex-crime/forensic medicine serials on television, Sanka hired Robert Young, the star of Father Knows Best (1954–60) and later of Marcus Welby, MD (1969–76), to sell coffee in television commercials during the late 1970s and into the 1980s. The script mavens dressed him up like a doctor, with white coat and stethoscope around the neck, gave him a pointer and furnished a blackboard as a prop, and had him tell of the healthful, relaxing, non-caffeinated delights of Sanka (which to me tasted a lot like warm liquid cardboard). So viewers of that era saw a lot of Robert Young as Marcus Welby, MD (and Lena Horne, too, just by the way) selling Sanka. And sell it did.

Did adult viewers know the difference between the actor and the “doctor” in these commercials? If you pressed someone to bring his or her critical facilities to bear on that question, you’d probably record a distinction most of the time. But in a semi-darkened room, with unmoving eyes glued to what in those days was a 25,000-volt cathode ray tube aimed at your head—a ray tube that remodulated your brainwaves from Beta (13-30 Hz) into a semi-hypnotic Alpha state (8-13 Hz)—the answer was, in a nutshell, “no way.”

Solomon Asch’s famous conformity experiments suggest further that a person’s grip on wide-awake reality can be influenced decisively by peer context and associated powers of suggestion, so that the potential blurring between unmediated wide-awake perceptions of reality and mediated versions has a social dimension as well. Think what this means. If an untruth is repeated often enough in fictive form and then echoed back to a person frequently enough in face-to-face peer cohort transactions, it will displace truth if truth is not expressed as often or in similarly socially reinforcing ways.

So now the point: Donald Trump does not read books or long-form magazine essays. We know that because he has proudly told us so. So where does he get his images of social reality? From television and movies, from sensationalized online news sources that rely more on images than on lexical content, and from a constant flow of mostly context-free cable news that reportedly blares now even on Air Force One.

And he’s from New York City—from Gotham. The combination conjures those tenebrous Batman movie sets.

That is, apparently, what Donald Trump thinks reality looks like, and of course the key here is that he’s definitely not alone. To my knowledge there is no data to support any empirical conclusion, but my guess is that Trump’s core supporters, particularly those who have for one reason or another not been able to go to college, tend to watch more television fiction and get more of their news from television as opposed to newspapers than those who have been to college and—just reading the data we do have on this—tend not to be Trump supporters. This is not necessarily or mainly because non-college attendees are less intelligent; this is a class lifestyle divide, not one sharply defined by IQ scores.

Moreover, Donald Trump is a reality television celebrity. What makes reality television work? The ur-model for it goes back at least to the Jerry Springer Show, which first aired in September 1991. The basic formula was (and remains) simple: drama and conflict sprinkled liberally about every 120 seconds. And each episode was freestanding; there was no connection between them aside from the looming presence of Springer himself. Trump’s The Apprentice first aired in the spring of 2004: The formula was basically the same, even though the talk show setting was replaced by a mock job-interview setting. Again, each episode was freestanding: drama and conflict, drama and conflict, drama and conflict, end. Rinse and repeat; and, by all means, do not connect.

All entrants to high political office in the United States bring aspects of their former professional lives with them. That goes for Senators, governors, military officers, academics, and now reality TV celebrities. If Trump’s discourse as President, taken together thus far, exudes oscillations of artificial dark drama and zero-sum conflict in which individual episodes never connect to one another, it’s not really such a great mystery to figure out how this came to be. This is just another example of (political) life imitating art, only in this case it’s mostly very bad art.

So consider further: Why do Trump movement supporters think ordinary newspapers are full of “fake” news? Because many are so deep into the mean world syndrome, thanks to their quotidian obsession with television, that any data points which do not fit their artificially assembled, mediated-image world are rejected as being at odds with an accumulated set of central premises about what constitutes reality—and that, very importantly, is shared fairly widely among much or most of that person’s immediate socio-economic cohort. And that now is shared and legitimated by none other than the President of the United States.

This is why Trump can repeatedly utter emotionally charged falsehoods and engage in argumentum ad populum canards without being called on it (yet) to much telling effect. If a politician, let alone a President, tells one huge lie and gets caught in it, he has a problem, but if he tells a continuous skein of lies (whether he realizes they are lies in the moment is an interesting side question) he can normalize the situation in time such that, as Bret Stephens put it the other day, outrage becomes the victim of its own ubiquity. And if he tells not just many marginal lies but Goebbels-like Big Lies that turn perceptual frames or paradigms on their heads, then he has achieved something remarkable, and remarkably evil: Reality flips like a Necker Cube such that false lesser-associated non-“facts” get pulled in train behind the flipped central premise. This of course is the very economical technique used by cults both religious and political.

But again, this sort of thing can only work if the target core audience has become so addled—in our case (as opposed to Weimar Germany’s) by mean-world fictional mediated images displacing reality—that the very definition of a fact dissolves into a pool of cognitive dysfunction. The insinuative world of television and Hollywood fiction, especially the frighteningly popular Three Days of the Condor conspiracy genre in which the U.S. Government [for Trump read: the establishment] is invariably the evil party, has made this possible—and the advent of constantly flowing, unfiltered social media in more recent times certainly has not helped.

In the 1979 film Being There, based on Jerzy Kosinski’s book of the same name, there is a scene about midway through the movie in which Peter Sellers, playing Chauncy Gardiner, emerges from a limo into a clot of reporters. One reporter shoves a microphone toward Chauncy and asks something like, “Mr. Gardiner, what do you think about today’s Washington Post editorial commenting on remarks you made yesterday?” Chauncy turns calmly to the reporter and answers, “I don’t read the newspapers. I watch television.” And with that director Robert Altman has the camera zoom in on the reporter, as if the film viewer is watching the news live from his living room sofa, and he has the reporter say something to the effect: “There you have it. One honest man in Washington who admits he doesn’t read the newspapers.”

Now this is hilarious in the context of the film because, by this point everyone watching knows that Chauncy doesn’t just not read the newspapers; he’s illiterate—he can’t read anything. Now, 37 years later, the humor in this scene has grown much darker, if indeed there is any humor left in it at all. Few members of the American political class these days—not just Donald Trump—have inculcated a serious reading regimen. Televisions blare, the internet beckons, and Twitter spurts derange the coherence of time in every office; most tendered books and atavistically subscripted magazines sit gathering dust as news cycles accelerate and principals and staff alike feel pressure to “keep up” with the frenetic pace. This is not the mean-world syndrome; it may be an equal and nearly opposite kind of neo-conspiratorial derangement, however, afforded by the social media flood in particular. It may explain why so much anti-Trumpism one now encounters carries such an hysterical, unreasoning tone. Good Lord, it’s bad enough as it is; exaggerating it by means of indulgent emotionalism only quickens the polar dialectic that’s bound to make things even worse.

How is anyone, whatever their view about Trump, supposed to actually think in an environment in which one’s attention is continuously yanked from one mediated image to another, punctuated by small fragments of language that arrive without context or, often enough, even the logical balm of grammar? Please don’t make me answer that question. Let me only note that it is precisely this environment that has enabled Donald Trump to pick a fight with objectivity itself and, so far, appear to be winning it with no little ironic assistance from the people who hate him.

Whatever else it is, this situation in which we Americans find ourselves today—primed for decades by television but now well beyond it—represents postmodern blather come round to bite itself in the ass. The argument that there are no foundational truths and no facts, only “hegemonic narratives” that convince thanks to the oppressive power structures supposedly laden within modern Western society, was supposed to be a sharp lance in the philosophical battle against demonic capitalism. Now the same implicit premise functions as a million stilettoes in advancing the deliberately destructive aims of a Steve Bannon-influenced White House.³ If Jacques Derrida is not spinning in his grave, he should be.

Post-Datum, February 24, 2017:  Today’s Washington Post headline, front page right, above the fold: “Bannon presses ‘deconstruction’.” Comment: “Spin, Derrida, spin!”