America’s choice: Do voters want to live in reality, or a dangerous dream world?

Donald Trump stopped Friday at a plush mountain hotel called Gaylord Rockies Resort and Convention Center just outside Aurora, Colo., to launch a Western weekend getaway — from basic reality. His rally at the resort’s convention center before thousands of true believers was real, but the story that he told this riled-up mob, and the American electorate writ large, was utter baloney.

After his audience had been worked into a mini-frenzy by immigration propaganda czar Stephen Miller pointing at photos of a handful of Latino immigrants accused of crimes — “Are these the neighbors you want in your city?!” — in what one critic compared to the Two-Minutes Hate from George Orwell’s 1984, the GOP nominee took the stage in front of a poster, “DEPORT ILLEGALS NOW.”

Over the next rambling 80 minutes, Trump twisted a tiny kernel of truth — in a growing community of refugees fleeing to Colorado from an oppressive Venezuelan government, no more than a dozen youths flashing gang ties have been arrested in a situation police have well under control — into an “Occupied America” that demands a war of liberation. In a flood of racist, dehumanizing language, he called immigrants “animals,” “barbaric thugs,” and “sadistic monsters” while claiming Democrats led by their nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, have “infested” Aurora with these new arrivals.

Trump had come to cattle country to spread pure manure. It was telling that he stayed in the cloistered bubble of the resort and went nowhere near the apartment complexes he claimed are occupied by violent Venezuelan gangs — since they aren’t. “He is — and other political figures — are treating them like political pawns, which they are not,” a local housing advocate, V Reeves, told a local TV station. “They are real people with real needs.” Aurora GOP officials joined the police chief in attacking the premise of Trump’s rally, saying in an official statement, “It is tragic that select individuals and entities have mischaracterized our city” — where major crimes have fallen by 17% year to date.

Yet, the solution that Trump — naming it Operation Aurora — proposed for a fake, invented problem was both real and terrifying. The 45th and wannabe 47th president pledged to jump-start a slumbering 1798 law called the Alien Enemies Act that gives the government power to round up and detain noncitizens and citizens alike and was last invoked for one of the most immoral moments of American history: the mass internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

“We have to live with these animals,” Trump told the resort ballroom. “But we won’t live with them for long.” A voice called out from the crowd:

“Kill them!”

It’s possible to view Trump’s hateful words, rooted in a history of strongman-style fascism that peaked in the 1930s rise of Nazi Germany, and his gross fabrications as a dramatic escalation of the xenophobic rhetoric that seemingly helped him first win eight years ago. But what is actually happening as the 2024 campaign winds down is far, far worse.

As this life-and-death presidential election has devolved, warnings about rising disinformation from artificial intelligence and “deep fake videos” and foreign, bad actors have proven true, yet also fail to capture the magnitude of America’s crisis as it stands on the brink of chucking democracy for a modern brand of autocracy.

Trump and his millions of true believers have chosen to spin an utterly fictional America of a migrant invasion (even as border crossings plunge) comprised largely of criminals (even as actual crime also plunges) who want to eat your pets (not true) and were egged on by Democrats who gave border crossers all the money meant for hurricanes (they didn’t) and probably even caused the storms because they control the weather (they don’t). This as inflation rises (it’s falling) and the climate change fueling these deadly and costly storms isn’t real (it is).

The problem isn’t so much that half of America has chosen to live inside a hermetically sealed bubble of unreality, but that — as history has shown us, when the Nazi fantasies about the Jewish people led to the six million deaths of the Holocaust — fake beliefs can and will lead to real-world nightmares. Trump is barnstorming America telling us exactly what he is going to do: create an American gulag archipelago of mass detention camps by abusing sweeping presidential powers already on the books and involving the U.S. military, which will likely expand to include not just undocumented migrants but his growing enemies list. And yet, the other half of the nation is also delusional — in thinking it’s a slam dunk that voters will reject this dystopia on Nov. 5.

» READ MORE: The only freedom that matters to today’s Republicans is the right to lie | Will Bunch

“I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is” is the remarkable headline on a new piece in the Atlantic by the iconoclastic writer Charlie Warzel, who argues that what we are seeing in the fateful autumn of 2024 has gone way beyond propaganda and disinformation and that, after the rapid spread of ridiculously fake information about Hurricanes Helene and Milton, “the events of the past few weeks stand out for their depravity and nihilism.”

Writes Warzel: “To watch as real information is overwhelmed by crank theories and public servants battle death threats is to confront two alarming facts: first, that a durable ecosystem exists to ensconce citizens in an alternate reality, and second, that the people consuming and amplifying those lies are not helpless dupes but willing participants.” A key element of this massive fantasy world, he notes, is the growing hostility inside the MAGA bubble toward anyone — journalists, scientists, public health experts, veteran government workers — who try to break the barrier with facts.

“I have had a bunch of people saying I created and steered the hurricane, there are people assuming we control the weather,” Michigan meteorologist Katie Nickolaou told the Guardian, in a remarkable report on death threats against her profession, inspired by the right-wing hurricane lies. “I have had to point out that a hurricane has the energy of 10,000 nuclear bombs and we can’t hope to control that. But it’s taken a turn to more violent rhetoric, especially with people saying those who created Milton should be killed.”

Yet, the growing chasm between these two Americas — what a then-George W. Bush aide famously dismissed as “the reality-based community” and those who live in the alternate universe writer Joe Killian has compared to the ridiculous but entertaining fantasies known among pro-wrestling fans as “kayfabe” — has also created a number of this problem: Too many of the folks threatened by MAGA world seem, unfortunately, to lack the language or the imagination to describe what is happening. Especially the journalists so critical to calling out the problem.

The New York Times, which sits atop the information food chain, published a fairly hard-hitting article about Trump’s Colorado speech and its plethora of lies, but buried it under a milquetoast headline that the rally was “marked by nativist attacks” — not conveying the danger of either his rhetoric or his proposal. This just a couple of days after a shocking Trump interview with a Hitler-flavored comment that immigrants have “bad genes” was headlined in the Times, “In remarks about migrants, Trump invoked his long-held fascination with genes and genetics.”

What’s shocking about this tepid coverage that fails to meet the moment is that the Times’ top editor, Joe Kahn, last week told NPR there’s no guarantee of a free press in a second Trump term. So why the blasé headlines about rising fascism in America, and the lack of urgency in covering the right’s dangerous fantasy world? Does Kahn not worry that the 1798 Alien Enemies Act will eventually be applied to journalists? Because this reality-based journalist does.

Why can’t the rest of the media grasp what America’s most respected former top general, Mark Milley, who worked alongside Trump and played a role in deterring a worse outcome to the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, understands? “He is now the most dangerous person to this country,” Milley told author Bob Woodward, adding that the ex-president is “fascist to the core.”

How did we get here? There are books (I wrote one myself!) trying to explain what ripped a seemingly prosperous, if wildly unequal, America into two, and in a way no one fully saw coming. That a heavily white and somewhat more male and mostly noncollege half of the U.S. would direct their anger — both over real problems like the outsourcing of jobs but also fears of losing white supremacy and the patriarchy — not just at liberal elites but at knowledge itself. The immediate crisis is that this massive faction that produced 74 million Trump votes in 2020 has become a cult, an immovable force totally resistant to argument and reason. Deprogramming a small cult is difficult and controversial work; deprogramming a cult of 70 million-plus in 23 days is impossible.

Two things need to happen. After Nov. 5, we need to start the difficult conversation about long-term efforts to bridge the divide — by making public education better and expanding access to both universities and career training. At the same time, we must break down the walls of disrespect between Americans who didn’t go to college and those who did. But we won’t ever be having that conversation if “fascism to the core” wins. So right now, the media, the Democrats, and others need to sound the air-raid sirens about what is really happening and make sure every person in the reality-based community votes on Election Day.

Otherwise, the United States will get body-slammed by kayfabe.

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