Against the Gaslight

Trump's darkness visible.

There is an historically grounded scene in the Oscar-nominated Nuremberg that resonates with terrifying clarity in this moment.

Hermann Göring, suave and defiant even in defeat, calmly tries to persuade Allied prosecutors that the Nazi program that exterminated six million Jews was really about emigration. Not murder. Not annihilation. Just administrative relocation. A matter of paperwork and necessity. The lie is not crude. It is chillingly elegant. It asks listeners not merely to disbelieve the charge, but to doubt the meaning of words, the testimony of bodies, the evidence of their own eyes.

I kept thinking about that scene as Donald Trump and his gang of gas lighters set about persuading the nation that newly memorialized January 6 was a peaceful demonstration; that a slain motorist in Minneapolis was an anti-immigration terrorist who endangered ICE agents; that the overthrow of Maduro was merely a police action to disrupt narcotraffickers allegedly threatening the United States.

I thought of it again as Trump’s minions attempted to excuse the slaughter of two shipwreck survivors as the necessary elimination of a terror threat, rather than what it plainly was: a violation of the Uniform Code of Military Justice and every shred of common decency.

Words, for Trump, are not mirrors of truth but masks for its opposite—red cast as green, coercion as normalcy, violence as order.

Earlier this year his regime weaponized the word antisemitism and the entire concept of DEI, recasting both as violations of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, and used that sleight of hand to terrorize and extort liberal universities convulsed by protest over Israel.

At the same time, the president’s “big, beautiful” giveaway to the wealthiest Americans and his ruinously quixotic tariffs were sold as benefactions to the very voters they punished, accompanied by stern lectures that disbelief amounted to surrender to lying eyes and left-wing conspiracies.

He told us he barely knew Epstein and labeled all reporting to the contrary a hoax, even as damning photographs and corroborated facts piled up in plain view.

The crowd-size absurdities of the first administration metastasized into a looping prevarication about virtually anything that displeased him. Reality itself became the enemy.

Now his brutal efforts to rip harmless undocumented, green-carded, or probation-compliant brown and Black workers out of our communities are cast as nothing more sinister than justified “immigration measures.”

If there is a hell, Hermann Göring would recognize the script.

This is not ordinary political lying. Lying asks you to accept a falsehood in place of a fact. What Trump practices is something more corrosive. Gaslighting demands that you stop trusting the evidence of your own senses and the independent verification of institutions designed to tell us what is real. It is not enough that you be deceived. You must be unmoored.

We have seen this most vividly in the rebranding of visible coercion as normalcy. Masked, heavily armed federal agents appear on sidewalks and doorsteps, detaining people without warrants, transferring them across jurisdictions, and leaving families and lawyers unable to locate them for days. The videos are public. Affidavits are filed. Timelines are documented. Yet the administration insists these are routine administrative arrests in which due process is fully observed. This is not a dispute over interpretation. It is a denial of procedure itself.

The same tactic appears in the denial of policy reversals that exist in signed documents. Executive orders and agency memoranda resurrect Schedule-F-style classifications that weaken civil-service protections and invite loyalty testing. The language is explicit. The intent unmistakable. Still, we are told no purge is underway, that protections remain intact. Citizens are instructed not to believe what they can read.

When the evidence is audiovisual rather than bureaucratic, the maneuver shifts but the aim remains. Statements preserved on camera—about enemies, crackdowns, punishment—are waved away as jokes, metaphors, or context-free misunderstandings. But the context is the video itself: tone, repetition, audience response. The public is asked to deny the meaning of words history has already taught us to recognize.

Nowhere has this been more brazen than in the attempted rebranding of January 6. The footage is exhaustive: forced entry, assaults on police, smashed windows, evacuated lawmakers. Hundreds pleaded guilty. Courts established facts beyond dispute. And still we are invited to believe it was orderly, overblown, or equivalent to routine protest.

This is not revisionism at the margins. It is an invitation to reject sworn testimony, criminal convictions, and hours of video because accepting them would carry consequences.

A subtler version of the same poison is administered to investigative reporting. Stories based on independent sourcing expose firings, loyalty screens, funding freezes, or covert diplomacy. Officials denounce the reports as fake, then days later confirm the underlying actions while claiming the coverage was misleading. The purpose is not rebuttal but confusion; by the time facts are acknowledged, trust is already damaged.

Even the physical world is conscripted into the lie. Climate data, satellite imagery, insurance withdrawals, emergency declarations—everything points in the same direction. Agencies rely on this information to manage disasters. Yet officials publicly deride climate links as hoaxes.

The public is asked to accept a contradiction: models are valid enough to save lives, but not valid enough to be named.

Taken singly, these might be dismissed as spin. Taken together, they reveal something far more ambitious: an effort to dismantle the very idea of a shared factual baseline. Courts are recast as political actors. Media are imaginary. Documents do not mean what they say. Video lies.

This is not persuasion. It is epistemic sabotage. If citizens can be induced to doubt what they see, read, and hear, especially when those observations are corroborated across institutions, then accountability becomes impossible. Power no longer needs justification. It needs only exhaustion.

Authoritarian systems have always understood this logic. The goal is not to convince everyone of a single lie, but to convince enough people that truth itself is unattainable. Once that threshold is crossed, loyalty replaces evidence, disbelief becomes a civic duty, and complicity wears the disguise of neutrality.

As someone who relishes mentoring young journalists and candidates for government intelligence work, I am at a loss for easy counsel in this fact-averse environment. It is no longer enough to identify and call out each falsehood. Every lie must be parsed and contextualized, stripped bare under the glare of the gaslight, until shame is the only reward for repeating it.

If you are part of the intelligence community, it is not enough to deliver honest assessments to a president who refuses to accept anything that contradicts his own narrative. You must be prepared to push back, up to and including leaking or walking away. To play along to get along is to corrupt yourself.

If you wear the uniform, it is not enough to salute and recite your duty to the Constitution as though ritual absolves responsibility. Mark Kelly is right. Obligation to that Constitution requires readiness to defy unlawful orders that violate the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the covenants that give military service its moral legitimacy.

We are not a nation where euphemism sanctifies cruelty or relieves us of complicity. What happened at Nuremberg is not a hoary lesson entombed in black-and-white film. It is an abiding testament to the cost of looking away, of pretending not to see the lies blazing before us.

The final danger is not that Americans will be fooled into believing a falsehood, but that they will be trained to believe nothing at all, except the voice that tells them their own eyes cannot be trusted. That is the moment when gaslighting ceases to be rhetoric and becomes tyrannical rule.