Once upon a time, a charismatic Republican president vowed he would make America great again, and part of his strategy involved being very clear about the nation\u2019s enemies.
It was the 1980s. Ronald Reagan famously labeled the Russian-dominated Soviet Union an \u201c evil empire ,\u201d and Hollywood did its part to help. The 1984 action movie \u201c Red Dawn \u201d told the story of a band of heartland guerrillas, the Wolverines, that confronts a Soviet invading force. A year later, in Rock y IV , Rocky Balboa traveled to the Soviet Union and, wearing his stars-and-stripes boxing trunks, somehow managed to knock out the terrifying Ivan Drago.
Today, it is unclear whom, if anyone, Rocky or the plucky Wolverines would fight: The question of whether Russia should be considered a friend or foe seems more unknowable than ever. And that, indeed, is the case with many formerly stable facts of American life as President Trump has ascended to power.
The scrambling of what\u2019s real and what\u2019s illusion began well before Mr. Trump\u2019s counselor Kellyanne Conway offered the concept of \u201calternative facts\u201d on Sunday when commenting on false statements by Mr. Trump and Sean Spicer, the White House press secretary, and before Mr. Trump\u2019s repeated false claims on Monday that millions of illegal voters cost him a popular vote majority.
Even since before his inauguration, Mr. Trump\u2019s rise has been characterized by an erosion of surety, bizarre and inscrutable subplots worthy of an airport-bookstore spy thriller, by epistemological questions about what is truth and what is fiction like no time in recent American history.
After an election that played out in a blizzard of untruths and questions whether news is real or fake, it can feel like a hall of mirrors inside a hall of mirrors. Now, Americans are trying to make sense of a Republican president reflexively praising Vladimir V. Putin , who, according to American intelligence assessments , had worked to undermine Mr. Trump\u2019s opponent. Mr. Putin, in turn, is saying those who propagated unsubstantiated salacious reports about Mr. Trump\u2019s behavior in Russia were \u201cworse than prostitutes.\u201d
Questions keep multiplying. Was the election influenced by those Russian hackers \u2014 or even by the F. B. I. director? What to make of Mr. Trump\u2019s shifting positions and huge promises? Will Congress really strip health insurance from millions of people, many of them Mr. Trump\u2019s voters? Will Mr. Trump really build a wall along the Mexican border and somehow persuade Mexico to pay for it? How to explain a \u201cpopulist\u201d upheaval that installed a team of multimillionaires and billionaires at the heart of government? And what is the new government even proposing? Will policy be set by the president\u2019s words and Twitter posts or the congressional testimony of many of his appointees who often take the opposite position he does on significant issues?
Some of the old battle lines once drawn between parties and factions now seem hopelessly scrambled, in part because Mr. Trump scrambled them. Imagine how upside down 2017 would seem to a time-traveling Reaganite from 1982: The American left frets that a Republican president-elect might be too soft on Russia. The Republican Party embraces, or at least seriously flirts with, protectionism over global free trade.
At presidential altitude, the gold standard for political rhetoric used to be something like Lincoln\u2019s first inaugural address , with its carefully calibrated prose-poetry. Now the very notion of \u201cpresidential\u201d language and behavior has come in for a makeover. Before the inauguration, Mr. Trump unleashed Twitter barrages against a Hollywood actress, the United States intelligence community, a prominent civil rights leader and some news media outlets. His critics fear that the style, improvised and inflammatory, might create substantive havoc, particularly in the realm of foreign policy, where the smallest gradations of adjective or adverb can affect real lives.
But an upending of the status quo is exactly what many of Mr. Trump\u2019s supporters crave. On Friday, they flocked to Washington for his inauguration, giddy with the hope that Mr. Trump would continue to deploy his outsider style \u2014 what his friend, the author Conrad Black, has described as \u201can Archie Bunker talent at blunt, earthy, and amusing reductionism\u201d \u2014 to purge government of curdled ideas and clotted bureaucracies.
Their movement combines America\u2019s revolutionary and nostalgic impulses, with twin promises of radical disruption and a return to a surer, stronger past to which Mr. Trump\u2019s red baseball caps have alluded.
But first, the change, and a headlong hurtle into the unknown. Mr. Trump \u201cwas elected as a disrupter,\u201d Walter Russell Mead, the centrist academic at Bard College wrote recently on the website of The American Interest, \u201cand disruption is what a Trump administration will bring.\u201d<\/p>\n

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\nSimilarity rank: 11\n<\/div>\n

Sentiment rank: 2.3<\/div>\n

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