Twenty years ago, in what now seems an Edenic time, I wrote a book called Breaking the News. The Atlantic ran a cover-story excerpt called “Why Americans Hate the Media.” The book’s main argument was that when reporters presented an overly conflict-centered, tactics-minded, “horse race”-dominant picture of public life, they hurt the news business, and they hurt the function of democracy as well. If the press served up public life as just another version of reality TV, but with less-interestingly scripted plot lines and less-sexy-looking participants, then the public would naturally turn away from this less enticing entertainment and go for the real thing. Back then, it was quaintly possible to think of “news” and “entertainment” as separable realms.

We’re now a million miles down the news-as-entertainment road. Instinctively by Trump, perhaps strategically by Bannon and others, the Trump moment has promoted the idea that there are no facts, no reality, no authorities, no actual truth. There’s only us and them. Donald Trump's caudillo skill as a performer is being the “I” who can be the voice of the “us.” He’s simply better at that than the other side is. I expect if any reporters with experience in 1930s Italy were still around, they’d be writing about parallels with Il Duce. It is no coincidence that reporters who have dealt with state-news systems in autocratic Russia (like David Remnick or Masha Gessen) or China (where I have lived) are more much concerned by Trump than amused.

I won’t draw the comparison to reporters who were in Germany in the 1930s; that is heavy-handed, and a stretch. But I’ll close with part of an interview with Hannah Arendt, who was one of the great interpreters of that era. This is from an interview published in 1978 in the New York Review of Books, freshly relevant now:

The moment we no longer have a free press, anything can happen. What makes it possible for a totalitarian or any other dictatorship to rule is that people are not informed; how can you have an opinion if you are not informed? If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. This is because lies, by their very nature, have to be changed, and a lying government has constantly to rewrite its own history. On the receiving end you get not only one lie—a lie which you could go on for the rest of your days—but you get a great number of lies, depending on how the political wind blows.

And a people that no longer can believe anything cannot make up its mind. It is deprived not only of its capacity to act but also of its capacity to think and to judge. And with such a people you can then do what you please.