Lisa Van Dusen/For The Hill Times

February 8, 2017

“Getting along with people is very important to success.”  

                      Donald Trump, from an episode of The Apprentice

My favourite Donald Trump parody Twitter account is @MatureTrumpTwts. It presents a parallel, sane-reality Trump who tweets nothing but reasonable, reassuringly presidential tweets during nothing but Eastern standard time waking hours. The profile photo shows Trump, sans comb-over, boldly embracing his baldness and conveying a Terry Bradshaw-esque, all-American, executive coachy-ness. “I recognize campaign rhetoric will soon fall flat if our actions don’t help us all move forward in a unifying way as promised,” reads one recent tweet. Sad.

For those of us who love our news real, our politics civil, our democracy uncorrupted, our diplomacy diplomatic, our narratives organic, our neighbours compos mentis and our America beautiful, the overture of the Trump presidency has felt like the second chase scene in Mad Max Fury Road only with the new leader of the free world as Immortan Joe and one wife in the backseat instead of five.

(I actually walked out of Mad Max: Fury Road, not because it wasn’t a perfectly fine piece of entertainment, which it was, but because the relentless onscreen destruction induced an inescapable flashback to childhood road trips. I know, caveat emptor…it wasn’t called Mad Max: Hope and Change Road.)

We long ago passed the point beyond which politicians have been able to gauge the emotional impact of their words and actions on the public with the help of focus groups, hand-held dial-testing devices, electroencephalogram monitoring and polling.

So why is Donald Trump, a man whose previous reality show persona, while brash, projected competence, control and an appreciation for risk-benefit ratios now scaring the bejeezus out of America and the world?

Trump keeps America and the world in a constant state of fight-or-flight, cortisol-fuelled anxiety in which all thinking is reactive, short-termism clouds the big picture and our amygdalas are in perpetual overdrive.

In political terms, fear — especially fear of the other — has long been recognized as a potent weapon of persuasion. That reality is now embedded in modern political warfare, going back in post-war lore at least as far as the notorious 1964 Daisy ad deployed by Lyndon Johnson against Barry Goldwater. Fear is so universally recognized as a political tool that by the end of the pre-apocalyptic 2016 US presidential campaign, both candidates were filling far more of their rhetorical bandwidth inducing fear — Hillary Clinton peddling fear of Donald Trump and Donald Trump peddling fear of everything else — than selling anything resembling vision.

But now, Trump seems to want us to fear not only Muslims, Mexicans, journalists, refugees, judges and Meryl Streep but the president of the United States himself. By concocting an environment of post-truth confusion, disbelief and uncertainty presided over by a history-denying, protocol-eschewing, custom-flouting, prediction-thwarting rogue POTUS, Trump keeps America and the world in a constant state of fight-or-flight, cortisol-fuelled anxiety in which all thinking is reactive, short-termism clouds the big picture and our amygdalas are in perpetual overdrive.

In a weekend tour de force of fearmongering, Trump trolled a federal judge for ruling against his fear-generating Muslim ban, doubling down on fear in the process by pre-emptively blaming the judge for any future terror attacks on US soil. He also said of the suggestion that Vladimir Putin is a killer, “We’ve got a lot of killers…What, do you think — our country’s so innocent?”

Way to alarm the foreign policy establishment by parroting the boilerplate propaganda of America’s geopolitical rivals while terrifying your own citizens by reminding them they now have a president who will say, and therefore possibly do, anything.

Why aren’t we getting the Donald Trump who knows that getting along with people is important to success? Maybe his definition of success has changed. Maybe in the post-truth, thug-respecting fear-a-thon of the New World Order, failing as president of the United States is actually a WIN.

Lisa Van Dusen is associate editor of Policy Magazine. She was Washington columnist for the Ottawa Citizen and Sun Media, international writer for Peter Jennings at ABC News, and an editor at AP National in New York and UPI in Washington.