When Politics Becomes Fiction: How Republican Magical Thinking Shapes Reality
Magical Thinking
Magical thinking is a healthy and necessary cognitive skill employed by artists to create worlds, situations and characters that interest them. Writers turn roads into streams, angels visit sick people, Superman wins the day over evil, and E.T is loved by all. There is no creative art of any quality without magical thinking.
Magical thinking is imbued with imagination and disregard of reality, which it invents for creative purposes. Empirical reality is transcended in favor of make believe. A painter, for example, can paint a clock melting over a table. This is later recognized as the work of the surrealist painter Salvador Dali.
The problem arises, however, when magical thinking is applied to the realm of politics; when George Orwell’s 1984 becomes a totalitarian reality dominated by ‘double speak’; when Chauncy Gardner, the key character in Being There who learns only from television, becomes your next door neighbor—who only learns from social media, and when Hal the evil computer in Kubrick’s masterpiece film, 2001 Space Odyssey, actually takes over the ship instead of being defeated.
Magical thinking applied to politics creates narratives that are false in order to cover up the truth about the motivations of those in power, historical facts, and/or events. It appears to be bungled thinking, however, it’s highly calculated to achieve real political ends.
Republicans and Magical Thinking
President Donald J. Trump, and the Republican party win the magical thinking award for 2025. Their thinking, language, and image creation are full of magical thinking – wishful, data-less, uninformed by the nuisance of reality, science and complexity. These self-created and socially endorsed characters make writers of fiction stand up and take notice of a US government that creates reality beyond fiction—beyond 1984, full of Chauncy Gardner-like characters and the embodiment of Hal on steroids. Following are snippets of magical reality that occur daily for the purposes of naked power:
President Trump declares peace in Gaza, despite Israel’s continued killing of civilians, and video-like real game of Assassins – only with women and kids as victims; then, he suggests a hotel and casino development on the water in Gaza; and further suggests that the Palestinians would rather live somewhere else anyway. What the heck, bye-bye Palestinians, and hello to pitching for a Nobel Peace prize.
No surprise. This is the same President who claimed that he didn’t know Jeffrey Epstein or any of the young women that ‘Jeffrey’ offered up. This despite hundreds of personal emails, photos, and actual verified visits to meet some of the ‘girls’. There is even a rumor that ‘Donald’ has been considering letting Ghislaine Maxwell, the convicted sex-trafficker of young girls for Epstein, out of prison. Maybe on grounds of good behavior, or an act of care.
JD Vance, Vice President, made an authoritative statement to the press that the oil in Venezuela belongs to the U.S. even though it’s in the ground in Venezuela and protected by international law and the rights of countries to their assets. Mr. Vance is convinced that the U.S. paid to build Venezuela’s oil wells and therefore they belong to the U.S.; he actively supports invading Venezuela and claiming the oil for America. Goodbye to American ideals.
Trump and his administration also claim that the drugs that are killing Americans are coming from, you guessed it, Venezuela. All the drug dealers are getting rich off of killing Americans. The only problem is no evidence, and the evidence that does exist indicates that drugs that kill Americans are not produced nor primarily trafficked from Venezuela—or its evil neighbor Colombia. So much for the value of reality.
It’s curious to note, however, that Trump pardoned Juan Hernandez, former President of Honduras, who was convicted and sentenced in the U.S. to 45 years in prison for conspiring to import 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S. over the course of 18 years. As President, he also received $50 million from the U.S. to police drug cartels. Trump claims that Hernandez was not really a bad guy and was treated ‘unfairly’ by American law enforcement and courts. Mr. Hernandez received a presidential pardon and is now free.
Pete Hegseth, Defense Secretary, is busy authorizing blowing up what appear to be fishing boats off the coast of Venezuela. Violations of international sea law are no problem for magical thinkers. So far, 191 people have been killed. These fishing boats, he claims, are stuffed to the gills with drugs. And, when two survivors exited from blowing up a boat, he had drones go in for the final kill, killing both of them. To this day, there is zero evidence of drugs being transported, and there are no witnesses to testify to the contrary. Why capture potential informants when you can kill them and save time and complexity, especially if they might say something that you don’t want the public to hear.
Kristi Noem, U.S. The Secretary of Homeland Security made a recent trip to El Salvador to visit the prison where immigrants who were in the U.S. illegally – all referred to by Trump as violent terrorists – 100 percent violent bad people – were captured by ICE on American streets. They were flown to El Salvador out of Texas without due process or real knowledge of their identity or social conditions. Often, they were separated from loved ones.
There she was at the prison entrance in El Salvador dressed in a white, tight top, sporty outfit, wearing her shiny $50,000 Rolex for a photo op. The only problem is that she mis-identified and confused prisoners from Venezuela with local prisoners from Honduras and further made wrong assumptions about men wearing tattoos as belonging to supposed gangs, which turned out not to be true. She never went inside the prison to review inmate conditions to determine the truth of the situation. She ended up warning people ‘don’t come to the U.S. illegally, or this is what will happen to you’. Prisoners are, according to Human Rights Watch, abused, and housed in inhumane conditions.
CBS 60 Minutes crew had gone along to film ‘Kristi’, the real deal. However, there was so much fiction – some say lying – that the only way not to expose the government’s magical thinking was to cancel the show. A pirated edition ended up on social media anyway. CBS is now owned by Trump supporter Larry Ellison. You can expect more shows based on magical thinking.
Not to be outdone in the realm of fantasy, RFK Jr., Head of Health and Human Services, claims that vaccines are dangerous and cause autism. He’s convinced that this is the case in spite of years of verifiable research to the contrary. Real science is bothersome to magical thinkers. He does, however, suggest that drinking whole milk will prolong your life, and that a wellness orientation is a cure for diseases that ails Americans. Unfortunately, the main government sources of data collection that reported diseases have been eliminated. The ‘herd’ response to disease adaptation is thought to prevail; and according to RFK’s reasoning, COVID would have been less of a problem if it had been allowed to run its course.
Because cancer is of no real concern to the Trump administration, they cut $2.7 billion from the budget for the National Institutes of Health, including a 31% decrease for cancer research. This is in spite of overwhelming popular support for increased cancer funding.
Last, but assuredly not least, is the Republican magical thinking that climate change is a hoax. All the science to the contrary and increasing temperatures for the last 50 years is nothing but garbage, the result of ‘leftist’ opinions. So, the Trump administration has closed the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado. No more data, upsetting trends or leftist negativity about fossil fuels and atmospheric warming. The best action for America, according to Trump, is to ‘drill baby drill’—oil and lots of it.
And, because Trump is no economist he can’t figure out that the oil the Republicans are stealing from Venezuela isn’t needed because there is an oversupply in the world; and it’s expensive to refine because it requires extra processing, known as ‘heavy-crude’.
While you’re at it, propose taking Greenland, Mexico, Colombia, and Cuba, and anything else that excites your fantasy. Nevermind reality, what fun. No matter that you killed 32 Cubans when you bombed Venezuela; and then presented the raid on Madero as ‘surgical’.
Magical Dystrophy
Republicans create magical reality that hurts the majority of Americans. They are, for the most part, paid schizophrenics whose magical thinking is applied to real politics and power. The way to alter this state of illusions is to wake them up, provide a dose of reality, urge them to quit politics and apply for unemployment insurance.
Whatever you care about, or whomever you care about, fight to address reality. Call, write, protest, yell, disrupt, and fund alternatives to fictional reality that is giving us waking nightmares. Write to the White House to practice your writing skills. Call Chuck Schumer, Democrat, in New York and tell him straight away to do something ethical for once: stand up and fight Trump’s right-wing coup; or leave office.