Trump's Dream Logic

The Atlantic

24-03-2025

In Ursula Le Guin's novel The Lathe of Heaven, George Orr wakes to discover that he has the power to control reality through his dreams. Each night while he sleeps, the world changes in profound and unexpected ways. In the morning, Orr alone remembers reality as it was. Soon, Orr (named, one would assume, for George Orwell) finds himself under the care of a psychiatrist, who, realizing that Orr has these powers, tries to use them to turn the world into a utopia. This does not go well for the world.
It doesn't go well because dreams have their own logic. They are nonlinear and to some degree nonsensical, and so directing oneself to dream of world peace may result in an alien invasion. Technically the dream has been fulfilled. Earthlings have stopped fighting with one another, but only because all of Earth is now ruled by an alien species. In this new dream reality, a world ruled by aliens becomes the only world you have ever known.
That is what the American experience is beginning to feel like in 2025: Not as if we are living in President Donald Trump's reality, but as if we are living in his dream. As the showrunner and director of TV shows including Fargo, Legion, and the upcoming Alien: Earth, I think a lot about how audiences navigate the tension between horror and the absurd. Now we're all in this liminal space of the president's devising.
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When the Trump administration pretends that the three branches of government are not and never have been equal, it creates a state of unreality in the minds of everyday Americans, similar to that of a dreamer in a dream. When the president and his proxies ignore both laws passed by Congress and Supreme Court decisions, they seek to replace the vérité of our shared history and experience with a fantasy, turning the stabilizing force of precedent into the quicksand of dream.
Only in a dream could the bicycle you're riding become a pony. But if you tell the pony in the dream that he used to be a bicycle, he will deny it. I've always been a pony, he will say. And because this is a dream, you will accept that. But what if you're awake and your government is doing things and saying things that seem nonsensical? What are you supposed to think when you search for the Gulf of Mexico on Google Maps and discover that it no longer exists? What happens if, as a next step, the history books are revised to erase all records of the name? In this new reality, that body of water has only ever been called the 'Gulf of America.' You can imagine the argument that will happen years from now, where you swear there was once a Gulf of Mexico, but, for the life of you, you just can't prove it.
Over the past two months, the rule of law in this country has been replaced by the rule of whim. The whim is not just that of one man but of a loose cabal of Cabinet members and 'special advisers' who are combining revenge fantasies with small-government dreams, xenophobic visions, and cryptocurrency delusions. And so former national-security officials have had their security clearances revoked, government agencies have been fed into the wood chipper, 'alien enemies' have been deported despite a judge's court order, and a vaccine denier and pseudoscience champion has been confirmed as the secretary of Health and Human Services.
The only thing these dreamers have in common is that they want to control reality itself, to rewrite the past, present, and future simultaneously. Their actions create a maelstrom of daily news and revisionist history that the mind struggles to combine into a coherent reality. As a result, we are moving from a waking state to a dream state, where logic is flexible and anything can happen.
The movie Inception introduced us to a world in which corporate spies infiltrate the dreams of CEOs. Once inside, they steal secrets or, in the central action of the film, seek to implant an idea that the dreamer will, upon waking, turn into a reality. Inception, as they call this process, is considered almost impossible because of how difficult it is to make someone believe that an outside idea is their own. In this framework, however, the logic of the waking world is distinctly different from that of the dream. It assumes a waking world in which things make sense. Where facts have meaning. Not a world whose richest man brandishes a chain saw onstage and hires teenagers nicknamed 'Big Balls' to gut the federal government, while the president of the United States reposts an AI video of the Gaza Strip as a luxury resort destination.
Inception did not envision a world in which only dream logic exists even when the dreamer is awake; a world where the federal government is trying to both shut down the Department of Education and weaponize it in order to remake how and what children in this country are taught. A world in which the president signs an executive order invoking the Alien Enemies Act against immigrants from Venezuela, even though the country is not at war with Venezuela. In the administration's dream logic, the executive order itself creates a preexisting state of war, allowing it to issue the order. The logic is circular. Without being at war, the administration cannot use the act to justify the deportations. Or whatever. The bicycle is a pony. The logic is dream logic.
In the past century, authors in Russia, China, and other countries with totalitarian regimes have written about how absurd life becomes under autocracy. But until you experience it yourself, you can't fully comprehend the illogic of it—or, I should say, the dream logic of it. It is a feeling as much as an idea, a surreal sense of unreality, from which the dreamer wills himself to wake up.
As the Austrian-born psychologist Bruno Bettelheim wrote about life under fascism: 'Thus has tyranny robbed men of their sleep and pursued them even in their dreams.'
In this warped reality, rather than dreading sleep, we begin to dread waking up, because every day there is a new dream, one that, like George Orr's, threatens to fracture our reality yet again. Our job over the next four years is to remember what life was like before the dream so that one day we can make the world a logical place again.