But Donald Trump and his operatives are up to something qualitatively different. Armed with the weaponized resources of social media, Trump has radicalized this strategy in a way that aims to subvert our relation to reality in general. To assert that there are “alternative facts,” as his adviser Kellyanne Conway did, is to assert that there is an alternative, delusional, reality in which those “facts” and opinions most convenient in supporting Trump’s policies and worldview hold sway. Whether we accept the reality that Trump and his supporters seek to impose on us, or reject it, it is an important and ever-present source of the specific confusion and anxiety that Trumpism evokes.

Donald Trump’s relation to Vladimir Putin is one area where our sense of bewilderment is particularly pronounced. Whatever may or may not be going on between the two authoritarian leaders, similarities in their style are striking. A recent BBC documentary, “HyperNormalization,” by Adam Curtis — who is often as over-the-top as he is insightful — is suggestive in this context. Curtis calls our attention to Vladislav Surkov, whose official title is “the vice head of the presidential administration” and has been referred to as the “puppet master” of Putin’s Russia. Surkov has a background in avant-garde theater and is a devotee of postmodern culture, and has adopted theatrical and artistic techniques of “subversion” to unleash a full frontal attack on Russian society’s sense of reality. According to Curtis, Trump has taken his stratagems for spreading pandemonium from Surkov’s playbook, with Steve Bannon — a product of Hollywood and Goldman Sachs who now sits on the National Security Council’s Principals Committee — acting as Trump’s Surkov.

As opposed to the Soviet Union or contemporary North Korea, Surkov, as Peter Pomerantsev observed in The London Review of Books, does not seek to generate and maintain the regime’s power exclusively through the exercise of overt terror (though there is plenty of that). On the contrary, his “fusion of despotism and postmodernism” comprises “a strategy of power based on keeping any opposition there may be constantly confused,” creating “a ceaseless shape-shifting that is unstoppable because it’s indefinable.” To keep his opponents off-balanced and powerless, he might, for example, sponsor “nationalist skinheads one moment” and “human rights groups the next.” In a similar vein, Surkov could have provided the seating arrangements for the N.S.C., where Bannon, a right-wing white nationalist who has provided a platform for anti-Semites, sits on one side of Trump, and his son-in-law Jared Kushner, an orthodox Jew, sits on the other.

After observing Donald Trump for all these exhausting months, it is clear that, whether he is as calculating as a puppet master like Surkov or simply functioning on a showman’s intuition, the law of noncontradiction does not apply in his universe.

By continually contradicting himself and not seeming to care, Trump generates confusion in the members of the media and political opposition that has often rendered them ineffectual, especially in speaking to those outside the liberal base. They were slow to realize that he was playing by a different set of rules. This is why they, like Hillary Clinton before them, have had such difficulty gaining traction against him via appeals to facts and other cherished norms of liberal democracy. He has proved adept at deflecting well-intentioned fact-checking, regardless of how often it has caught him in a contradiction, and rational counterarguments, which can bounce off him like rubber. As long as Steve Bannon and his colleagues continue to destabilize our sense of reality, and their opponents fail to recognize how these techniques work, those who oppose him will continue to stumble.

In the psychiatric setting, it only becomes possible to treat a patient in the psychotic range of the diagnostic spectrum when an analyst does not focus on the “manifest content” — on what actually happens on the surface — but finds a way to address the underlying dynamics in order to work them through and establish, first in the analytic setting, and then hopefully in the patient’s life, a less compromised relation to reality.