Enter the Trump administration, with a penchant for gall that makes Tea Party politicians look like liberal arts professors. The weekend following the inauguration, when White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer gathered reporters to announce that two plus two is five, we learned that we have an administration cartoonishly oblivious to facts. Kellyann Conway fabricates massacres and accuses the press of not covering them, Rience Priebus lies about National Security Adviser Michael Flynn, who lies under oath, as does Attorney General Sessions and several other cabinet nominees, who get approved. Vice President Pence, who pretends to be uninformed, is periodically sent out as the Voice of Sanity, while Trump continues to tweet whatever he feels, and Steve Bannon, who’s been salivating to get his hands on a country, says not a word.

Transitioning from a propaganda candidacy to a propaganda state, which is what I believe is being attempted, would require undermining any organization of information capable of competing with the administration’s narrative: the press, the arts, the internet, public education, the Federal Elections Commission, PBS, libraries, the Congressional Budget Office, science, the Justice and State Departments (where Trump has purged career employees), the courts (where Hitler started), and most tellingly, the FBI and intelligence community, whom Trump has compared to “Nazi Germany.”

At times when the Trump administration has gone out of its way to fabricate, the very obviousness of their fog machine has pulled attention from the scandal du jour. This would normally discredit a presidency, and it may yet bring this one down, but if it doesn’t, it could have the opposite and Orwellian effect of loosening our standards around the notions of truth and fact. From this standpoint, Speaker Paul Ryan’s go-to reaction line — “It’s going to be an unconventional presidency” — is haunting, as was House Intelligence Committee Chair Devin Nunes’s comment on Trump’s wiretapping claim: “I think a lot of the things he says, you guys sometimes take literally.”

Both major parties, along with the press, ought to wonder: what rough beast has slouched into Washington?

Since the election I’ve thought often of Atticus Finch, the gifted and unusual father in To Kill a Mockingbird. Specifically: the scene where a rabid dog is wandering down their street, a vicious creature (oddly named “Tim Johnson”) demon-possessed and no good to itself. The townspeople have gathered their children indoors, as has Atticus. Then the sheriff hands his rifle to Atticus, and Scout, his daughter, is shocked to see him kill the dog expertly with one shot. Everything she had previously seen about her father was gentle, nonviolent, impeccably compassionate, even toward those who’d mistreated her. But the sheriff knew something Scout didn’t: Atticus, who he hadn’t picked up a gun in 30 years, was still the deadliest shot in Maycomb County. She also didn’t recognize — not at first — that this facet of her father was every bit as loving as the others.

Trump’s bullying presidency is a pack of rabid dogs, staggering down a lot of streets, where many children play. 15 other candidates in the Republican primary field, many of them accomplished bullies themselves, couldn’t figure out how to stop him. I suspect we will need a lot of Atticus Finches, which is to say, people willing to be unpredictable (as Trump is) in order to practice a love of country perhaps unrecognizable in ordinary times.

I’ve been observing public discourse between right and left, which is normally quite predictable. But recently we witnessed the rise and fall of one Milo Yiannopoulos, the violence-inciting Breitbart golden boy who’d managed to get himself kicked off Twitter. (Why can’t they do that to Trump?) Yiannopoulos appeared on HBO’s Real Time with Bill Maher to perform his hate speech with arresting speed, while wagging his finger at the audience (“You’re very easily triggered, it’s pathetic”). Maher, as if struggling to keep up, signed onto Milo’s transphobia, while the panel waited — perhaps trying to determine if this was supposed to be a conversation, or just a food fight.

Bullying right wing pundits are nothing new. The last few decades have given us Limbaugh, Coulter, Beck and O’Reilly, and legions of copycats, courtesy of Fox News and Clear Channel. Trump’s conservative supporters are every bit as nasty as previous iterations of right wing punditry — except that now, given the backing and resources of the White House, which has already erased Jews from Holocaust Remembrance Day, what comes from their mouth is fully weaponized speech. So the game has changed, and both major parties, along with the press, ought to wonder, paraphrasing W.B. Yeats: what rough beast has slouched into Washington?



In the middle of Yiannoupolos’s snarky romp on Real Time, he made the mistake of calling his fellow panelists “stupid.” Among them was comedian Larry Wilmore, who said without skipping a beat, “You can go fuck yourself. This man [referring to intelligence expert Malcolm Nance] can talk circles around your pathetic douchey little ass.” The crowd of course loved it, but more importantly, Wilmore changed a dynamic. The video of the moment went viral, leading to the unearthing of another video — of Milo advocating pedophilia — and his career (along with a Simon & Schuster book deal) is now over.

Some may think it prurient and frivolous to focus on such encounters, and in a different era I might agree. But in this era, figuring out how to engage with Trump supporters is no parlor game. It is, rather, the task of neutralizing the propaganda wing of a dangerous regime. Yiannoupolos may appear to be a pearl-clad confection not to be taken seriously, but he also worked for Bannon, and he made the cut in the famous “The Deplorables” meme, a fake movie poster with Trump’s lieutenants arranged in victory formation along with Pepe the frog — the neo-Nazi mascot.

Liberal journalist Jeremy Skahill, who declined to be on that Real Time panel, had the conventional response. “I cannot participate in an event that will give a platform to such a person,” he proudly tweeted, straight from the liberal playbook. But if HBO, owned by media giant Time Warner, is going to give the Milos of the world a platform (which they will as long as it’s profitable), such people had better be met—by warriors unconcerned with moral posing.

New York Times columnist Charles Blow had a parallel encounter on CNN Tonight when Kayleigh McEnany, one of a seemingly limitless supply of pale blonde Trump surrogates, touched Blow’s arm as she spoke of left wing commentators “inserting sinister suspicion where it does not belong.” “Don’t touch me and then launch into your sinister motivations diatribe,” said Blow. “That’s not going to happen tonight ma’am.” McEnany theatrically offered to “scoot over this way a tad bit,” and Blow invited her to “scoot until you fall off that ledge.” It escalated (if that’s possible) from there, when McEnany said, “Look, we’re all Americans. Maybe you don’t feel that way — ” “That’s a personal attack,” Blow interrupted, “to say that maybe I don’t believe that

I’m an American. Don’t do that.” It is not lost on Blow what it meant for Trump to accuse Barack Obama of not being American (not to mention the iconography of a blond white woman caressing the arm of a black man while calling him sinister). During another exchange on CNN, another black liberal commentator, Keith Boykin had to instruct another Trump surrogate, David Urban, not to touch him.

Trump’s belligerent spokespeople have rocked some in the mainstream media from their perch of zombie-like neutrality. A few days after the affable Chuck Todd laughed at White House advisor Kellyanne Conway’s “alternative facts” presentation on Meet the Press, CNN’s Jake Tapper, known for his even-handedness, eviscerated Conway over fake news accusations, and lies about terrorism coverage and the murder rate, in a withering interview she hasn’t recovered from. The ever-gracious Mika Brzezinski, co-host of MSNBC’s Morning Joe, announced that Conway was no longer welcome on her show because she is “spreading fakery.” (I’m trying to remember the last time a TV journalist said no to airtime with a West Wing advisor.) Muslim travel ban author Stephen Miller, whom Brzezinski nicknamed “The Tiny Dictator,” replaced the wounded Conway on the Sunday shows one weekend, hollered, “The president’s power will not be questioned!” and has not been heard from since. I notice Vice President Pence, vulnerable to questions about the shaky Mike Flynn/Russia timeline and narrative, has also been benched.

The press seems to have woken up from its campaign stupor. Even The New York Times, which the last Republican administration played like a fiddle in the run up to the Iraq War, finally let loose with the L word: “IN MEETING WITH TOP LAWMAKERS, TRUMP REPEATS AN ELECTION LIE,” said our paper of record on January 23 (though they couldn’t manage to say Trump lied, just that he repeated a lie—which, when we read about it, turns out to have been his).

I don’t know the ratio of how many sign-wielding marchers or irate town hall participants it takes to equal one K Street lobbyist, but it looks like we may have, for the first time in a long time, stumbled on it.

A larger arena of political discourse — the everyday interactions of ordinary Americans — is much harder to track, let alone navigate. Before Facebook began surreptitiously corralling us into bubbles, we were already in other bubbles: geographic, ethnic, familial, economic, educational. Among liberals and moderates (types of people I tend to know), a frequent question during the campaign was, “How do we talk to them?” Despite our bubbles, everyone knew someone who was a Trump supporter, often a vocal one. My friend Erica asked this on Facebook when confronted with the prospect of “unfriending” her mother and other Trump fans from her hometown in Pennsylvania who were trolling her. She asked the question again at Thanksgiving. Cutting off family or longtime friends over politics seems radical and petty. Though it can be nauseating to watch people you’ve always known, or you thought you knew, callously indifferent to racism and misogyny. Nauseating and perhaps monstrous: like discovering a relative is a Nazi sympathizer.

Now that Trump is president, those who didn’t vote for him will have ample opportunity to learn how to talk to those who did. Though I don’t hear the question being asked much anymore, perhaps because we’re too busy marching. And to great effect: not only is Trump clearly rocked by the turnout, mass demonstrations have factored into the rejection of the Muslim travel ban and the failed Obamacare repeal. I don’t know the ratio of how many sign-wielding marchers or irate town hall participants it takes to equal one K Street lobbyist, but it looks like we may have, for the first time in a long time, stumbled on it.