"Trump uttered over 30,000 lies in his first term, according to
The Washington Post. To understand how he has dissolved the relationship between accountability and public discourse, no need to look further than the
Financial Times which quoted what an evangelical leader said about Trump days after Biden’s catastrophic debate on CNN: “As President of the United States, he kept every single promise he made to us.” The next day,
FT journalist Martin Wolf pointed out that Trump’s ability “to define the truth for his followers is an example of the Führerprinzip — the idea that the leader defines the truth.” Wolf is alluding here to German jurist Carl Schmitt, one of the most influential thinkers on the new right, and his essay,
The Fuhrer Protects the Law. Whoever believes that the analogy is an exaggeration, and that Trump does not even have a Schmitt, should know that perhaps
Adrian Vermeule, the Harvard professor who promotes an “illiberal legalism” will suffice. The Supreme Court has already said that Trump is above the law.
Kraus understood that the aim of the message relayed by Nazi propaganda was not so much to appropriate “the atrocities as the clarifications,” just as Trump does not seek to appropriate anything in particular, except media attention, i.e. everything. When the real world ceases to be the reference, and speeches are only compared to each other, the triumph of truly self-referential politics becomes inevitable. The news is not that his running mate baptized him in 2016 as the “Hitler of the United States,” but that, if it was a criticism back then, today J.D. Vance could repeat it as praise and still appear coherent, because denouncing contradiction in Trump’s world makes no sense — contradiction is Trump’s
modus operandi.
Voegelin argues that it was against this background of indifference that National Socialism also triumphed, and relies on Kraus, and his dissection of the “doublespeak of Germany,” to try to “refute all the lies that have been told about [the concentration camps], that is, the second reality elaborated by (...) the German episcopate.” Hitler’s rise to power also highlighted the failure of Social Democracy, including Austrian Social Democracy which, even when it witnessed German comrades tortured and murdered, still preferred to oppose the Austrian Christian Democratic government rather than the German National Socialists.
“Devoted to the pastime of palaver and tactics, they have lost almost all material gains,” Kraus wrote of the Social Democrats and the Social Democratic intellectuals, who believed “they could break [the] magic circle [of Nazism] by means of the Constitutional Court.” Consequently, Kraus supported the Austrian Christian-Democratic Chancellor: anything other than Hitler.