Donald Trump deliberately warps reality around himself to create the image he wants. This goes far beyond simple propaganda or spin; this level of distortion literally commands everyone, to quote George Orwell’s words about the president in 1984, to “reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was his final, most essential command.” The MAGA base has decided that the truth is whatever Trump says it is, and Republican leadership has been purged of anyone who might gainsay that.
The latest evidence of this can be found in a kind of silly but actually instructive poll by YouGov that asked people who would win in a physical fight: themselves or Donald Trump. More Democratic women than Republican men thought they could win a fight with Donald Trump.
The president is 79 years old. He struggles to walk in a straight line, much less climb stairs. He has massive edema around his ankles, which is often a sign of congestive heart failure. There are mysterious bruises on the backs of his hands constantly now. He lives on Big Macs and Diet Coke and believes exercise is bad for you. He doesn’t listen to his doctors and takes too much aspirin. He brags constantly about passing the Montreal Cognitive Assessment, which is generally only given to people suspected of having dementia and features “very tough” questions like identifying a picture of a lion, a camel, and a giraffe. There have long been rumors that he is incontinent, and he may even have been caught on video audibly soiling himself.
This is the party that prided itself on containing the manliest of manly men during the 2024 election. Of rural dudes who don’t believe in pronouns, lesbians, or unnatural hair colors. Yet somehow, after a decade of being fed slop images of Trump as a ripped Rambo, as a UFC fighter, and even as buff Jesus, Republican men have bought into the notion that Trump is a superman.
This polling gets even weirder when you compare it to another poll—also by YouGov—asking Americans if they thought they could win a fight with various animals. Men in this poll were overconfident in their ability to win a fight with a chimpanzee. Though the poll did not include political affiliation, it seems a good bet that Republican men would be more likely to say they’d win than Democratic ones.
The 22 percent of men who think they could win a fight with a chimpanzee are very mistaken: A chimpanzee will easily and preferentially tear off your face, hands, feet, and testicles. At the same time, 25 percent of Republican men cannot all be wheelchair-bound invalids in hospice, which is roughly what it would take to lose a fight with Trump.
This state of shared unreality is something that Donald Trump has ruthlessly encouraged since before his first term. He was a prominent “birther” about Obama secretly being born in Kenya. The first thing that he forced Sean Spicer to do as White House press secretary was to march out onstage and tell the world that Trump had set an attendance record at his inauguration. This was a bald-faced lie, of course, but was also a flex to break Spicer and emphasize that the price of admission to power was to always make reality conform with whatever Trump said it was, even if it constantly shifted from moment to moment.
At one time there were Republicans willing to call Trump out. At this point, however, they’ve either been purged from the party (Denver Riggleman) or were from a different generation and have passed on (Senator John McCain). Today, no Republican can survive long if they do not echo Trump’s insanities. Most of them choose to be amplifiers of this reality-distortion field, insisting that the 2020 election was “stolen” and that the people who raided the Capitol and wanted to hang Mike Pence were merely peaceful protesters.
When Trump goes too far, many of them feign ignorance. This is particularly true of Speaker Mike Johnson, who almost always pleads ignorance when confronted by the press about Trump’s misdeeds or the consequences of things Trump has done. Trump is literally the alpha and omega of Republican thought: The party platform in 2020 and 2024 boiled down to “whatever Trump thinks it should be at this instant.”
The media is culpable, as well. Once upon a time, far-right-wing media was limited to A.M. talk radio, Fox News, and Breitbart. Today, there is an entire ecosphere of insanity that’s only getting worse. Pseudo-intellectuals like Ben Shapiro are fading, and Nazi-brained nutjobs like Nick Fuentes and Candace Owens are ascendant. The MAGA population that started out uninformed is now living in a separate reality that has nothing to do with our own. This reality is crafted by Trump, confirmed by Republicans, and further amplified by the media.
Previously, traditional media outlets could be counted on to at least pretend to be centrist. They are now under assault, or already institutionally captured by Trump’s billionaire associates. Viktor Orbán advised Republicans to “get their own media,” and they have done so. Larry Ellison’s CBS News is being run into the ground by Bari Weiss. The Jeff Bezos–owned Washington Post has eaten itself alive and is now primarily an editorial vehicle singing the praises of the billionaire class. The New York Times has written a slew of concern-trolling hit pieces on transgender people, without disclosing the beliefs of hate groups it cites, and is sanewashing the administration.
Social media sites and AI-generated content take the news and further warp it for the American public. Meta, TikTok, and X all favor conservative rage-bait articles, and seeing nonsponsored content is becoming rare. The algorithms carefully curate a separate reality where rampaging transgender people in bathrooms and immigrants stealing elections and murdering their way through a terrified public are the most crucial issues facing the U.S. today. The odds of a conservative man seeing something on social media that contradicts his priors is roughly the same as of King Charles abdicating and becoming a roadie for a heavy metal band.
The result is a country where a third of the population live in their own reality, supporting the administration no matter what. Another third are either uninterested or don’t know what to believe, so they no longer try. And the final third who understand what is happening are mostly powerless to do anything to prevent the slide of the U.S. into Idiocracy-style oblivion.
When Mythbusters host Adam Savage quipped, “I reject your reality and substitute my own,” it was funny. It’s much less funny when a right-wing authoritarian party of know-nothings is gaslighting the United States into oblivion. Your average Democratic woman could kick Donald Trump’s butt, but getting MAGA to reconnect to Planet Earth is another thing entirely given the entire multibillion-dollar system built to warp reality around Trump’s delusions.
