U.S. President Donald Trump’s multifront assault on convention, economic stability and political custom is a challenge to historians, political scientists and psychologists, many of whom are struggling to coach their patients through a period of immense disruption and profound disturbance. Demonstrators protest against Mr. Trump in Washington, on March 14.Leah Millis/Reuters
The 24-hour news cycle began with the debut of Ted Turner’s CNN 45 years ago. The 100-kilometre-an-hour news cycle began with the inauguration of Donald Trump 54 days ago.
Welcome to the era of news velocity.
Actually, for most North Americans, news velocity – let’s define it as the speed in which news occurs, one event after another, with the ancillary disorientation – isn’t much welcomed this winter. It has thrust Canada into tariff turmoil, the United States into government upheaval, Ukraine into military uncertainty and Europe into economic disruption.
There have been so many iterations of the Donald Trump tariff threat against Canada that it is difficult to keep pace. The most recent trade policies that actually have stuck include global steel and aluminum tariffs. (Possible tariffs of 200 per cent against wines and spirits from Europe may be the next gambit.)
And just when the American public had digested the extent of the personnel cuts in the Washington bureaucracy, a federal judge in San Francisco ruled Thursday that fired employees in the Treasury, Veterans Affairs, Agriculture, Defence, Energy and Interior departments should be reinstated. The dismissal of probationary personnel was, he said, “a sham.”
This period has aspects of the theatre of the absurd (which speaks of the futility of living life normally at a time of disorientation and discord) and existentialism (which questions established ways of living and thinking). But mostly, Mr. Trump’s multifront assault on convention, economic stability and political custom – prosecuted with elements of theatrical performance – is a challenge to historians, political scientists and psychologists, many of whom are struggling to coach their patients through a period of immense disruption and profound disturbance.
This uptick in the velocity of news has severe consequences for young people especially.
“Children and adolescents don’t come with life experience to take things with a grain of salt or put them in the context of broader experience,” said Monika Roots, a psychiatrist in Madison, Wisc., who is co-founder of Bend Health, a national mental health agency. “The amount of stress they feel around things like social unrest or the current political climate is creating a big burden that is leading to stress, anxiety and a feeling of isolation.”
The depth of change is remarkable – but perhaps even more unsettling is the deliberate rate of change.
Speed is the force multiplier of change. It makes difficult, often wrenching change easier to impose and makes opposition more difficult to mobilize. Indeed, the barrage of executive orders, tariff threats and implementations, mass firings and attacks on established governmental agencies in the first weeks of the second Trump administration has created its own momentum and power.
“This speed is part of is the ‘flooding the zone’ idea the Trump people planned,” said Daniel Ziblatt, the Harvard political scientist who is the author, with Steven Levitsky, of the 2018 How Democracies Die. “It makes it difficult for political leaders to respond. There are so many different domains to respond in. This leaves opposition on its heels.”
He compared the barrage of developments with a tactic used by Viktor Orban. During his second term, the Hungarian Prime Minister set out hundreds of pages of legislative changes on a Friday and called for a vote on the following Monday. “It was a way to take advantage of the moment, and to act when people aren’t quite sure of the details and the impact.”
Seldom – perhaps not in more than 80 years, when the term “blitzkrieg” was applied to the lightning-swift movement of the military forces of Nazi Germany across Europe in the early days of the Second World War – has so much happened so quickly, and with such consequence.
In 1941, fighting continued at Tobruk in Northern Africa, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States, and China joined the Allies. Over just four days that December, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, bombed Singapore, occupied Shanghai, invaded Thailand and the Gilbert Islands, and sunk the British ships Prince of Wales and Repulse – symbols of the vulnerability of naval vessels that were the emblem of British power.
Amid all that turbulence, the United States entering the war prompted British Prime Minister Winston Churchill – confident that the Americans would add the force needed to defeat the Axis powers – to say that he “went to bed and slept the sleep of the saved and the thankful.”
Very few are sleeping the sleep of the saved and the thankful this month. That is especially true when it comes to the U.S.-Canada tariff struggle; according to a Quinnipiac University poll released Thursday, 58 per cent Americans disagree with the Trump policy.
“A lot of people are trying to consume less news because it is too much,” said Theda Skocpol, a Harvard sociologist and political scientist. “All of us now are growing accustomed to information coming quickly and in snippets. But this is a time when the Trump people have a strategy that deliberately tries to make it impossible to think through what is going on.”