Reality Distortion Fields Forever: Never Accepting Reality Sure Worked Out Great for Donald Trump
The phrase “reality distortion field” was used to describe Steve Jobs’ ability to get the people around him to accomplish the seemingly impossible through a combination of intelligence, will, charm, charisma, and pure will.
The idea was that Jobs could create his own reality through the power of his mind, his personality, and his imagination, and then society as a whole would reap the rewards.
A similar dynamic has long been at play with Donald Trump. The idea that a vulgar, brazenly unqualified reality TV clown like Trump would be elected to the highest office in the world over a former Senator and First Lady who had more or less been training to be the first female president since the moment she left the womb seemed crazy and impossible.
Yet Donald Trump insisted that he would win the Republican presidential nomination in 2016 and then the election. I am horrified to report that he was right.
Trump learned the limits of the reality distortion field when he was defeated in the 2020 presidential election. Trump held out delusional hope that, in a shocking, unprecedented, and undoubtedly illegal and unethical development, Mike Pence would refuse to certify election results that Joe Biden had won the election and open the door to a second consecutive Trump presidency. .
Trump was supported in this delusion by his personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, who reportedly told the disgraced, twice-impeached ex-president that he had a fifty-fifty chance of remaining in office for a second term DESPITE LOSING THE ELECTION.
Trump and Giuliani’s folie à deux regarding Trump’s fabled “landslide victory” eventually spread to the rest of the Republican Party, but for a brief, beautiful moment, Trump was held accountable for his actions by his own party.
Though the sentiment was far from universal on the right, there was a sense that the tragicomic events of January 6th were not just a tactical error or counter-productive but deeply humiliating to our country.
Even Republicans had to concede that January 6th was a dark day for Democracy as well as their party, a bleary nadir where the surreal ugliness of the MAGA movement was laid bare for all the world to gawk at.
It was like that episode of The Twilight Zone where the whole town lives in fear of a little boy who can control them and everything else with his mind. That is a pretty good metaphor for Trump’s relationship with the Republican Party: he’s the all-powerful magical man-child whose bizarre grievances and sense of persecution have been adopted by his entire party.
Republicans who dared to criticize Trump over the whole insurrection thing probably thought that, after everything, this would be a deal-breaker for the American public. They thought that January 6th would define Trump and his presidency the way Watergate and resigning did Richard Nixon’s.
There was also a hope that Trump would be vanquished by someone with less damage, like Ron DeSantis, and would no longer have ALL of the power in his party, but that obviously did not happen.
They foolishly assumed that humiliating himself on the national stage yet again would mark the end of Trump’s stranglehold on the GOP. They assumed, understandably, that the whole failed coup thing and Trump's unwillingness to accept reality would render him a spent force, a shell of himself.
Then, something predictable but deeply unfortunate happened. For much of the last four years, Trump’s reality distortion field has been dedicated to promoting the big lie that he won the 2020 presidential election by a landslide and the smaller lie that the people arrested on January 6th were blameless patriots interested only in ensuring fair elections who were persecuted relentlessly for purely political reasons.
People foolishly thought that Trump would not break with tradition and refuse to accept an orderly transfer of power by conceding that he didn’t win.
Trump’s childlike unwillingness to accept that he’s ever anything other than a winner sure has worked out well for him.
Over time, the idea that the 2020 presidential election was flagrantly stolen from Trump and that the January 6th rioters are innocent patriots has gone from being the ravings of a lunatic to convention wisdom for the entire GOP.
Trump has illustrated, by example, that there is a tremendous upside to not accepting reality and living in a world of delusion and lies. He’s bent the Republican Party to his will. His reality distortion field is so vast that it has consumed the entire country and will not allow for anything in the way of actual reality.
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