Let’s be clear-eyed and honest lest we should insult each other’s intelligence, or our own: Everything that comes out of Donald Trump’s mouth is some kind of bullsh-t. Everything. There are no exceptions.
If you don’t accept that simple premise, you’re the type who might stare directly at the sun during a solar eclipse, which is to say Trump — who in 2017 famously broke the only rule of eclipses — surely believes a lot of his own bullsh-t by now.
George Costanza, one of history’s greatest liars, once counseled a friend: “Just remember, it’s not a lie if you believe it.” By the Costanza test, Trump doesn’t lie nearly as often as he does if we define a lie simply as a statement that’s incongruous with reality. And to be sure, we do have to take intent into account when we assess whether someone’s a liar.
For example, Trump doubtlessly believes there was something uniquely “great” about the US economy during his first term. So, is he lying to insist, over and over again, that America had “the greatest economy in the history of the world” from 2017 through February of 2020?
I’d argue yes. Yes, he’s still lying. That boast of Trump’s, which played prominently in his grandiose address to the Republican National Convention in Milwaukee on Thursday evening, is demonstrably false. There’s no evidence — none, not a shred of it — to back up the idea that the US economy was anomalously strong when he was president. Sure, the economy performed well and inflation was low. And that’s great. But show me the data to support Trump’s claim — which was greeted with audible laughs in Davos — that he created “a boom the likes of which the world has never seen before.” Show me that data. (Don’t waste your time. That data doesn’t exist.)
It’s remarkable that so many people who readily concede that Trump traffics almost exclusively in balderdash were inclined to a naively sympathetic assessment of his attempt to exploit what happened in Butler, Pennsylvania last weekend to bolster his messiah credentials.
Trump began the dramatized re-telling of the attempt on his life by saying, ludicrously, that he’s only going to tell the story once — because it’s too painful for him to recount. To state the obvious, Trump loves that story. He’s surely told it so many times by now that his family and friends are tired of hearing it. And he’ll tell it over and over again forever.
“I’m not supposed to be here tonight,” he said, alluding to his close call. “Yes you are!” the crowd chanted. “Yes you are!” Trump referenced divine intervention and, by extension, his own manifest destiny, so many times I lost count.
Here’s a screenshot from Trump’s retelling at the convention on Thursday evening:
Does that look, to you, like someone suffering from PTSD? Do rape survivors go to stadium rallies and regale a packed house framed by images from the scene blown up to the size of billboards?
What do you see in that image? Trump. You see Trump. Trump on a jumbotron. Trump on a vertically aligned jumbotron to the right of the main jumbotron. Trump on a horizontally aligned jumbotron on the left of the main jumbotron. Another jumbotron zoomed in on Trump’s prayer hands. Trump on a couple of box-sized jumbotrons placed on the floor. Trump everywhere.
Way over there on the periphery is the empty fire suit of the man who was killed at that rally. The GOP wheeled it out as a prop. Once Trump was done with his story, he walked over and kissed the suit. He also told the crowd how much money he raised for the family, waving around a paper check for $1 million. In short: Trump propagandized a dead volunteer firefighter and called it a remembrance. It was, in a word, despicable, but only if you understand Trump. If you don’t, you thought it was touching.
Tears flowed freely in the crowd. In fact, people were crying all night. Trump’s address to that convention wasn’t a political event, it was a megachurch rally for a cult. The video homage to Trump which played ahead of his speech described a beloved New Yorker “sought after” by celebrities and politicians. Trump, the audience was told, pursued the presidency not for his own glory, but to answer the the noble calling of public service and to save the nation he loves. If you believe that narrative, you’re a credulous dupe. There’s no use mincing any words.
Trump was preceded on stage by an excruciating scream-a-thon from a 53-year-old Kid Rock, a schmaltzy rendition from Lee Greenwood and an introduction from Dana White, who never went below a shout while ensuring the crowd that in all his years of dealing with badasses, never has he seen a badass as badass as the badass who is Donald Trump, badass.
Two things were clear from Trump’s RNC speech. First, Joe Biden can’t beat this man in November. Kamala Harris probably can’t either. Trump’s a juggernaut, his cult’s whipped into a religious frenzy and now his followers have an ostensible “miracle” to cite while claiming God wants him to be president.
Second, half of America doesn’t know a con when they see it. A handful of Trump’s highest-profile donors — a few hedge fund managers and VCs — know he’s a fraud. They support him for their own reasons, self-interest mostly. Everyone else, though, seems to buy it. They buy the bullsh-t.
Trump often talks of “scams” and “frauds” perpetrated on the American people. He’d know. His movement is the single biggest con ever foisted upon this country. And it’s not close.
You didn’t enjoy Kid Rock’s performance? Hulk Hogan is what won my vote…lol
The whole thing’s truly, truly sad. What he’s managed to do to people — a lot of them good people or at least people who don’t deserve to be exploited — is astounding in terms of scope and the depth of the manipulation. These people are lost. Forever. He took them some place and they’re never coming back.
He took them or they took themselves? IDK. My theory of mind is that obvious con/movements like Trump can only work if you’re pre-sold on it.
Maybe that reservoir of… IDK, stupidity, gullibility mixed with hate mixed with victim mentality, is always there? Maybe it’s only activated if Fox News spends 16 years wiping it into a frenzy? Maybe macro changes are part of the story?
But I certainly wouldn’t grant any of the true MAGA believer the benefit of the doubt. Peter Thiel or JD Vance, yes. Whatever else they may be, they know what they are doing. But the nuts? I don’t think Trump is entirely to blame for their mental defects.
Foreign influence is more important than Fox: https://heisenbergreport.com/2024/07/17/dances-with-wolves/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-022-35576-9
Increasing R vote by 3 to 8% in 2006… While the Nature article is old, by social media standards, I simply do not think that foreign influence really could account for a 5% swing in voters’ preference.
I’ve been back and forth with you on this before, and if you haven’t read the Monthly Letter, I encourage you to read it. I could scarcely be any plainer about this by now unless I wanted to get into details which I’m not (ever) going to get into: I’ve seen foreign propaganda crafted first-hand. As in, I’ve watched it being produced in person. I’ve been in the room with it. Westerners have no idea what they’re up against. Scholars of Russian propaganda overwhelmingly agree with that assessment. You’re consuming foreign propaganda every day without realizing it. We all are. Including the people at Fox and its progeny.
This was my favorite part:
“But when Corey Comperatore’s gear was brought on stage, there was a glaring error: His name, embroidered on a fireman’s coat was misspelled as “Compertore.””
Didn’t watch but if you’re correct, one would think they’d get that right.
Just proves you don’t have to be that smart in Trump’s orbit. Or maybe, you can’t be that smart if you’re in his orbit. Yeah, the latter.
I was just thinking it’s so weird how he gets away with labeling anyone in the “party” that disagrees with him a RINO, when he is the definition of a RINO, as a populist.
People buying snake oil, hand-over-fist.
I’ve been reading ‘The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich’ recently. I wanted to understand how an entire nation could support someone as vile as Hitler and to abide the horrors of their government. I read this book through the lens of watching my own countrymen go through a similar fall.
By this account the great depression played a large role in Germany’s turn to fascism. Americans are by and large prosperous. My takeaway is that America is too spoiled to know what struggle really looks like anymore and have decided against all evidence that they are suffering.
Either way, I have come to the conclusion that there were no good Germans who supported Hitler and the same holds true for any American that still supports Trump.
Germans hadn’t been subjected to an almost 50 year political strategy the primary goal of which, even above advancing a specific ideological agenda, was to first and foremost intentionally breed conflict and divisiveness. This is Newt Gingrich’s monster.
+1
The idea that, with material prosperity, came the need to invent reasons for fake suffering is a powerful and super depressing one…
I find it ironic that we have a republic, ostensibly to prevent the tyranny of the majority issue that pure democracy could engender; however, instead of protecting the country, it’s allowing a very questionable leader to rise in spite of the popular vote attempting to prevent it.
“Two things were clear from Trump’s RNC speech. First, Joe Biden can’t beat this man in November. Kamala Harris probably can’t either. Trump’s a juggernaut, his cult’s whipped into a religious frenzy and now his followers have an ostensible “miracle” to cite while claiming God wants him to be president.”
Fully disagree with this statement. I address it because autocracy counts on fatalistic perspectives like this to crush hope.
Trump has a base. His base loves him more for the god complex stuff. The few swing voters out there are fully turned off by it. They usually tend to focus on purely economic self interest issues, but this time a large portion of this swing voter group is also focused on reproductive health rights.
There is usually a surge coming out of a convention. My read is that the Republican ticket is peaking and they have no means to maintain any momentum to gain votes. Trump has already burned through the currency of sympathy from nearly being assassinated. It took less than a week. Then he owned goaled himself (as he oft does) by handing the Dems white suburban women with the Vance VP pick.
4 months until the election, there will be many twists. Momentum will likely shift. A Dem pivot to Harris in 1st position on the ticket would galvanize the Dems into the convention. And unlike the Repubs, Dems are in a position to capitalize on the convention surge. The major shift in the polls I’ve seen since the debate is the undecided portion is shrinking and Biden (despite all of his headwinds and poor performances) is gaining a much larger share of these newly decided voters.
Also, if you haven’t heard it yet, the Cruz Senate seat is at significant “risk” of flipping. Allred is surging in the polls and “everyone hates Ted”. The data is looking good for Allred coming out of the summer into the stretch when Independent voters (the determining factor in Texas statewide elections) will make their choice.
I think you’re discounting the possibility that he’s going to declare himself the winner regardless of the outcome. The Supreme Court would surely hand him the presidency if it’s close. Democrats, despite having witnessed January 6, still don’t have a plan for that. I don’t think the Pentagon does either. I think we’re still telling ourselves “It can’t happen here” even as it’s happening right before our eyes. In the simplest possible terms, I think Trump could come out on November 6 and say “I’m president, and that’s the end of it” and I don’t think anyone would know what to do.
I was going to try and say something witty and sarcastic about how Democrats saw the Biden age issue coming four years ago and got ahead of it, so surely they have a plan for dealing with Trump declaring himself the winner. I just don’t have the heart for it. I think you’re correct.
Trump had the advantage of occupying the White House the last time he tried the “I’m president, and that’s the end of it” stunt. Unfortunately for him, Saint Joe the Immune will be at the Resolute desk with nothing to lose this time around. Assuming tRump loses and starts free-styling again, if Saint Joe doesn’t drop the hammer on tRump, his SCOTUS allies and congressional goons, well then the democrats have been bought and don’t deserve to govern ever again.
The rhetoric used by Trump is comparable to that of Hitler and the NAZI party during their rise in Germany. The comparable bombast, rallies, blaming others for our state of misfortune, vile language etc have all been remarked on before. The Nazis enforced their propaganda through control of the news, print and radio, through violence or threat of violence, similar to how they controlled wrong thinking people.
This is why I was particularly jolted with the comments made by the Heritage Foundation and their 2025 project about revolution and no need for violence if the”left” rolls over. During Trump’s administration apparently there were people who were able to control his worst instincts. Does not seem to be the case in the next one.
The violence to date has been demonstrated by January 6 and to the truth. I was terrified by what might have been if Trump had been assassinated, even if by a Republican. I am even more terrified by my premonition that violence will become another tool of this gang of Nazi wannabes.
Anytime I take a step back to try to understand and explain what would cause so many people to support Trump, I realize how nonsensical it is and just fall back to massive flaws in how our brains evolved. The evolution of our brains kept us alive when tribal instincts were needed, but we aren’t optimized for a global society that is confined to one planet.
That being said, I don’t know what to do with that information. Some form of civilization will survive barring a gamma ray burst pointed in our direction, but in the meantime, we’ll just keep torturing and killing each other with some ok periods in between.
I’ve wondered that myself. I’ve wondered if humanity isn’t going to be the first species to go extinct from its ecological niche coming to a dead end created not by natural forces outside its control but by its own intellectual decisions.
I have also travelled that road of trying to understand the attraction of some many people to the cult of Trump, an interesting bit of reading is from the thinker Zizek, one of the ways of mentally addressing the postmodern lack of meaning, a world without grand narratives to make sense of things, is to artificially resuscitate a tradition or narrative from the past.
Man…it would be so great …if I REALLY COULD CONVINCE myself…that these traditions were real. LIke of think of the superpower I would have…if I could do some kind of mental gymnastics that would allow me to THINK my way into a belief into something that gives you totalizing answers to all of life’s difficult questions…This is what Trump offers a comfort blanket of ‘certainty’ mixed with filling a need for to belong to something that feeds the ego…..
I like reading of the history of thinking, there is nothing new here, unfortunately, historically, these type of narratives have often been an augur of huge upheaval.
No big trick here. P. T. Barnum put it pretty bluntly when he opined that there’s a sucker born every minute. H. L. Mencken framed a similar sentiment when he observed observing that nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the (North) American public. The great Thomas Jefferson famously said we elect the government we deserve (again, it seems).
With all due respect, H, this is the first time I’ve ever read a post of yours and had no reaction to it other than, “Well, duh.”
I honestly don’t understand what so many people have fallen for here. I do get one thing: he’s especially media savvy. He’s a modern PT Barnum. He’s going to get more attention than he deserves because a certain number of people are always going to support him for that reason alone, confusing showmanship with some sort of leadership skill. There are people to whom a reality tv star performatively kissing a prop fireman’s helmet, disingenously holding up a Bible as if he was hawking it, or hugging an American flag is attractive, rather than repulsive. I get that. People who are sick of feeling not pandered to are thrilled to have somebody finally pandering to them. And a celebrity millionaire, at that!
But I especially don’t understand how so many people don’t know or simply don’t care about his history of open and occasionally explicit support for racism. In fact I wonder sometimes if that isn’t secretly the appeal. Most importantly, I don’t understand why that history is now going unmentioned by anybody, including the people who fully understand the need to stop him from regaining power. Why is nobody talking about him dining openly with prominent career antisemites? Why is nobody talking about him using the visibility of the highest office in the land to post “white power” video on Twitter? Why is nobody asking his supporters why they’re OK with this? Why isn’t it an instant disqualifier?
Believe it or not, I’m not preaching exclusively to the choir in these pages. All you see are the public comments from longtime readers. What you don’t see is the angry email and the first-time comments from Trump’s many fans on Wall Street, most of which don’t make it into the comments section because they’re profane.
I can assure you that those folks — the authors of the angry mail and profane comments — do not read articles like this and think “Well, duh.” They think articles like this are entirely off base, and as such they need to be reminded that they’re being duped by Trump. And I’m more than happy to convey that message. No matter how mad they get about it.
Ok. Fair enough. I hadn’t thought about that.
I respectfully disagree. There are no good people among Trump supporters anymore. Anyone who looked at the President of the United States posting praise and a video on Twitter of a man shouting “White power! White power!“ and thought to themselves, “Yep, that’s still my guy, I don’t see any problem with this“ is not a good person.
Oh, dang it, I wish we had a delete button here. I was trying to post this in reply to H’s reply above about good people being misled, not as a top level reply to the post.
No doubt
H-Man, he has managed to touch a nerve with the American public where he becomes the idol they worship and he knows it. He will keep pushing that button until those followers are decimated from his actions. It truly is the sheep to the slaughter and he has lots of sheep.