Trump and Musk constructed an alternate actuality and now we’re all residing in it | EUROtoday

My fellow Americans, that is Liberation Day,” President Donald Trump stated from the White House Rose Garden, utilizing a time period of his personal making as he unveiled a sweeping tariff plan towards all U.S. buying and selling companions.

The day will “forever be remembered as the day American industry was reborn, the day America’s destiny was reclaimed, and the day that we began to make America wealthy again,” the president stated.

Wednesday’s fanfare stood within the face of recommendation from droves of specialists, who warned in regards to the “catastrophic” results these taxes would have on U.S. shoppers. One day after “Liberation Day,” world inventory markets plummeted and world leaders vowed to retaliate.

In his inaugural deal with, the president stated “like never before” 5 occasions, and the tariffs plan is simply the most recent instance of his skill to assemble an alternate model of actuality.

“We really haven’t seen anything like this,” Chapman Rackaway, a political science professor at Radford University, instructed The Independent. He known as this degree of reality-bending “unprecedented” in trendy U.S. historical past.

Trump has all the time accomplished this. In April 2011, the Celebrity Apprentice host instructed his community colleague Meredith Vieira he had “real doubts” that President Barack Obama had been born within the United States.

The interview revived the racist “birther” conspiracy, which had first emerged throughout Obama’s 2008 presidential run, and helped Trump lay the bottom for a political actuality the place info had been irrelevant — and on which he has now constructed two presidencies.

Now, nonetheless, he has the backing of one other fan of distorting the reality: Elon Musk. The tech billionaire and now presidential adviser purchased Twitter, fired its content material moderators, and reinstated suspended accounts (together with these of QAnon supporters). He has even personally amplified different fringe theories, resembling “Pizzagate.”

Together, Trump and Musk have fused a brand new political panorama: one wherein the president declares himself a “king,” and the Constitution is ignored. In this actuality, there are solely two genders, Canada will be the 51st state, and Greenland will be purchased.

This could also be due partly to Trump’s and Musk’s histories on the planet of enterprise. Trump overcame six bankruptcies to turn out to be the wealthiest president within the nation’s historical past, and Musk, founding father of Tesla and Space X, now finds himself advising a president.

Their habits within the White House has adopted the norms of enterprise leaders – relatively than the kind which can be usually adhered to by presidents and their advisers, like following checks and balances and respecting the rule of legislation.

In enterprise, “you pretty much do what you want and what you feel like, and the ultimate measure of success there is profit,” Rackaway stated.

For instance, the pair have been calling for the impeachment of judges who rule towards the Trump administration, not for causes “based in constitutional principles or the established norms over the last 230 years,” Rackaway added, however as a result of they merely don’t like the selections.

Throwing out the usually sluggish bureaucratic course of, Trump and Musk, via the Department of Government Efficiency, have moved swiftly however not cautiously. As a end result, the federal government has tried to rehire essential staff after “accidentally” firing them, has sown chaos and confusion, and has been accused of “likely violating” the Constitution in one among many authorized battles it now faces.

Steve Hanson, a professor of presidency on the College of William & Mary, believes Trump is working the federal government like a “family business.”

Using a time period coined by German sociologist Max Weber, Hanson described Trump as a “patrimonial” chief, who workouts energy primarily based on private loyalty. “Patrimonial leaders, including not only Trump but also politicians like Vladimir Putin in Russia, Viktor Orban in Hungary, and Benjamin Netanyahu in Israel, treat the state as their own personal property and run it like a ‘family business’ of sorts,” Hanson stated in an e mail.

That second when Trump posed subsequent to a pink Tesla on the White House garden, as the electrical automobile producer’s share value tumbled, was a return to pre-modern occasions, which noticed “the use of the state to promote the economic interests of the ruler and his ‘extended household,’” Hanson argued.

Patrimonial leaders rule as they see match, he stated. “For this reason, they see independent sources of expertise and professionalism as a threat, and aim to undermine them as forcefully as possible.” The president has questioned journalists, judges, and prosecutors.

Trump even barred a reporter with the Associated Press from attending occasions within the Oval Office after the information company refused to discuss with the Gulf of Mexico because the Gulf of America — one other reality-bending transfer in and of itself.

“There were clues” to his rhetorical fashion lengthy earlier than he took workplace, Rackaway stated, pointing to Trump’s time on The Apprentice. “Everything is about there being an enemy… There was always a ‘good guys versus bad guys’ kind of approach [on the show].”

Trump tends to personally assault those that disagree with him as a result of “it increases this loyalty from his supporters, who feel he is not only right, but being persecuted for being right,” Rackaway stated.

Musk himself has turn out to be a misinformation machine. In simply the three months between Musk endorsing Trump and the November 2024 election, the X (Twitter) proprietor’s “false or misleading” posts garnered 2 billion views, in line with a report by the Center for Countering Digital Hate.

It’s not simply X, although. Meta introduced it was scrapping its fact-checkers on Instagram and Facebook in favor of a system just like X’s “community notes” weeks earlier than Trump returned to workplace. Truth Social, a social media platform majority-owned by Trump, goals to “create a free speech haven” and encourages “unencumbered free expression.”

The president makes use of this platform equally to fireplace off tariff threats, announce cupboard appointments, and share different sorts of content material, together with a weird AI-generated video of the Gaza Strip if it had been to comply with Trump’s imaginative and prescient and turn out to be “the Riviera of the Middle East.”

The fanbase he and Musk have constructed is akin to a spiritual following — no matter they are saying turns into the “truth” to those that consider them, no matter how factual it’s.

“One should not underestimate President Trump’s genuine emotional connection to his followers, many of whom see him as a leader chosen by God to save the nation,” Hanson stated. “And even Musk has followers who see him as a uniquely brilliant entrepreneur, able to break old bureaucracies that were previously thought of as untouchable.”

Five years after his interview with Vieira, Trump acknowledged that Obama had been born within the United States — a fragile admission that hinged on one other alternate model of actuality. “Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy,” Trump stated, with out proof, in September 2016. “I finished it.”