He doesn’t seem to care about substance and reality, but cares about size and numbers.
This is what makes Trump so very very dangerous.
Because he is right.
Oh, I don’t mean he has the truth on his side. And I would say that turning the inauguration into a ratings game was one of the most embarrassing thing I’ve seen a Leader of the Free World do.
But perception is reality for all practical purposes.
I mean the media has known that for years, that is why they are always accused of bias: they manipulate reality by manipulating the truth to tell and sell stories.
And politicians have always done the same with political spin, which, in effect, is just telling one side of the story. Not necessarily a total lie…but a manipulation of the truth.
And you can go further back. In Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe 1944 - 1956 by Anne Appelbaum, she documents at great length at how the Soviet governments and parties of many Eastern European countries, from East Germany to Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary and Yugoslavia, indulged in a systematic pattern of lies, alternative facts and obfuscations until the populace was literally unable to tell truth from non-truth. This was, at times, no less silly than Trump’s stupid ratings-gamificaton of the inauguration. I recall reading, for example, that at one point a radio programmer in East Berlin, while preparing a weather report that forecast “a cold front moving in from Moscow” that such language was prohibited as ‘only warm and good things come from Moscow.’ That is exactly the kind of thin-skinned mindset that characterizes Trump.
Trump is smarter than most liberals give him credit for. He knows exactly what he is doing. They still continue to underestimate him. It boggles the mind. They will be posting nonsense about him saying ‘bigly’ and not completing his sentences until they get thrown in the camps. His. Verbal. Foibles. Don’t. Matter.
Now, he may be a bit incompetent at the execution of state matters but when it comes to communication, propaganda and truth-spinning he is a giant among modern politicians, in my opinion. Showmanship counts.
Look, Trump depends on lies. He needs lies because what he wants to do is radically unprecedented in American history and he is risking impeachment at every step of the way and he knows it. So he needs the lies because he understands that, in the hyperpartisan atmosphere of the United States, the truth does not matter so much as the other side going down. These lies are then repeated and rebroadcast at incredible speed on social media, which in turns guarantees that, say, about 40 000 000 voters will parrot those lies.
And they do. Believe you me, the people are believing and spreading that nonsense about the Inauguration Day attendance by the tens of millions despite all photographic evidence otherwise.
This is why the institutions set up to prevent a horrible thing happening in the US are not going to work. Perhaps we can hold out hope for the courts, but I don’t think there is any hope in Congress.
IN this climate, Republican lawmakers are going to support Trump because a large(say 40%) of their base supports it, and they need that 40% support to keep from losing the election to the Democrats in 2018. AS long as he has 40 000 000 Republicans on his side, the rest of the Republicans and all of the Democrats can jump off a cliff — Congress is way too spineless to stand up to him.
This is why I scoff at the idea that Pence is more dangerous than Trump. Pence? That charisma-free corpse? No way. Trump is going to — already has — absolutely torn the national cohesion of the United States, forged by the fires of WWII and the Cold War, to bloody shreds.
Because the need for lies is going to grow until the point where new ‘alternative news’ organizations rise to spread it; and they will rival established, trusted news organizations in audience and popularity and, ultimately, respect.
How long can a nation living in two different bubble-realities go on before the tinder box blows?
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