For Rorty there was a clear political implication to the pragmatic view of language. “Competition for political leadership is in part a competition between differing stories about a nation’s self-identity,” he writes in Achieving Our Country. This is an idea that Barack Obama—one of the few contemporary politicians one could imagine being familiar with Rorty’s work—understood well. Obama told a story about American history in which his election was a culmination of imperfectly realized ideals that had been guiding America since its founding. Donald Trump—in a much more instinctual way—likewise understood this idea, and it is no accident that his political career began with the birther movement. He was telling a competing story about what it meant for a black man named Barack Hussein Obama to be elected president. In the political and cultural world we have inhabited ever since, Truth has most certainly gone on vacation.
It has been said many times that Trump was—in his own bizarre fashion—a postmodernist president. Those who say this generally use the term “postmodern” loosely. They mean that Trump cared nothing for tradition, had no regard for truth, that he lied all the time. But Trump is far better understood as our first pragmatist president. Trump knew—and knows—that Truth has gone on vacation; his acolytes know it, too. They are not nihilists, as they are often labeled, for they clearly do value something. And they are not deconstructionists, for they are prepared to latch onto pragmatic truths that will get them what they want.
Trump’s language is, or seeks to be, performative. He speaks to advance his cause and confound his enemies. To achieve this, he will say virtually anything. His followers—disillusioned people who have been stripped of ideals—are responsive to his reckless pragmatism and employ it themselves; they are always ready to use words to “get a gasp.” If Trump ever used words to render reality, I never heard it. Like a committed pragmatist, he uses words to influence his listeners and accomplish his goals. We Americans, natural pragmatists, understand this in a way that no European electorate ever could. His way of using language is all too often ours, which is one of the reasons so many of us are receptive to it.
To be sure, politicians have always wielded language in dishonest ways to serve their agendas. But there is, in general, some articulable and more or less idealistic end—the dictatorship of the proletariat; the creation of God’s kingdom on earth; the dismantling of an unjust social order; the preservation of a just one; liberté, égalité, fraternité—by which the means are justified, even if only cynically. What distinguishes Trump is that he has never claimed—at least not for very long—to have any enduring values in mind. Many voters who were themselves idealists of one kind or another—including, most notably, pro-life Christians—supported his candidacy in explicitly pragmatic terms. Trump invited them to do so not through his half-hearted claims to share their values but through his repeated insistence that he was a winner who would deliver what they wanted. It was this more than anything that made him our first true pragmatist president. […]
Anything can be caught in the pragmatic game and seen for what it is: not a necessary fact, but a contingent one. And if all ideas and morals and institutions are contingent, then we can do away with them through ridicule, the kind that asks, implicitly or overtly: What good are these things? What good are they to you and me, right here, right now? And if they are no good to us—if they do not give us what we want: the nomination, the election, mass applause and allegiance—then let’s dump them immediately.