Trump’s Toxic Toolkit: Lies, Corruption, Idiocy, Loyalty, Propaganda

As for idiocy: Some authoritarian leaders in history were intelligent men, but that doesn’t matter. Anyone with an army and police force and propaganda network behind him can be made to look smart. But intelligence is hardly a prerequisite. In fact, it’s kind of better if the Dear Leader is dumb, because then his plain idiocy can be molded by the propaganda team to make him seem like an esoteric genius.

So Trump makes a complete ass of himself on the world stage on tariffs. He obviously has no idea what he’s doing. Canada, Brazil, copper! Liberation Day. Oops, not Liberation Day! A July 9 deadline becomes August 1 (and of course, he never said July 9!). Yet out trot press secretary Karoline Leavitt and Treasurer Scott Bessent to assure us that it’s all going to plan, and Trump is playing a game of multi-dimensional chess we mere mortals can’t begin to follow.

Leavitt, Bessent, and so many others exemplify the loyalty, which must be total and cover everything from embarrassing rhetorical genuflection to the “random” choosing, by his male Cabinet members, to wear a red tie to work today and let it dangle below the belt just a bit lower than usual. At the FBI, employees are being pressured to take polygraph tests, sometimes being asked if they’re loyal to Kash Patel (side note: polygraphs are notoriously unreliable, and federal law even prohibits most private employers from using them on employees). In a move that didn’t get much attention at the time, on May 29, Trump released a federal hiring plan requiring all applicants above the GS-5 level (that’s entry level, folks) to write an essay describing the new policies they were eager to implement.

Finally, none of it would work without the propaganda network. It ensures that a significant chunk of the population believes the opposite of the truth at all times. It’s Trump’s enemies who lie relentlessly. It’s the Democrats who are corrupt (and of course a few are, but not as a matter of principle, like Trump). Trump is in fact a genius. And loyalty is not demanded but is in fact a natural consequence of the reality that Trump is the most truthful, honest, upright, and brilliant leader in American history. Probably world history.