You Can’t Fact-Check a Song: Inside Trumpism’s Sonic Reality

Reharmonizing Politics Through the Power of Modulation

American 19th Century, Portrait of Three Men, c. 1860. . Courtesy of the National Gallery of Art.

My last piece on Trumpism — The Fatal Flaw in Fighting Trumpism with Facts¹ — outlined how treating Trumpism as a collection of factual claims rather than understanding it as a form leads to ineffective resistance. Using Wittgenstein’s framework of stipulations, variables, and values, I showed how the power of Trumpism resides in its formal structure, not in the accuracy of any specific expression of that form. This explains why fact-checking and rational appeals consistently fail to diminish its influence: they target the content (values) while leaving the form itself untouched.

In response to dozens of reader comments asking for suggestions on creating an effective counter-movement, I want to expand on the musical metaphor I used previously. Just as a major scale (W-W-H-W-W-W-H) is a form whose specific content is secondary to its structure, I’ll explore how German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk’s conception of phonotopes, outlined in his book Foams: Spheres III², offers us a framework for understanding and responding to Trumpism’s sonic reality.

In this piece, I will show how Trumpism operates as a distinctive sonic environment — a phonotope, or ‘sonic bubble’ — that shapes how its participants hear…