Trump’s Cloud of Gossip Has Poisoned America
https://newrepublic.com/article/159021/ ... conspiracy
On one hand, some reporters are trying to shame Trump into acknowledging some denied fact or repudiating some blithely proffered bit of flotsam that he’d plucked from the sludge canals of conservative media. On the other, a president is standing defiant in his murky and misinformed ignorance, insisting both upon what he heard and that no one knows for sure. When Trump gave a similarly vague response to a similarly couched question about the metastatizing online political cult QAnon, which holds that Trump is locked in a secret war with a cabal of elite satan-worshipping pedophiles, it was both similarly empty—Trump rephrased a reporter’s allusion to its spiking popularity by rephrasing it as something he also definitely knew about himself, then added “I don’t know much about the movement other than I understand they like me very much, which I appreciate”—and similarly loaded.
It’s not just that this cycle of offhand umbrage and gilded bluster never goes anywhere; it’s that there’s fundamentally no real place for anything this useless to go. If a question arrives in a way that suggests he should do otherwise, Trump will absolutely give succor to the cultists, who have already committed murders and kidnappings in the name of their janky shared delusion, or humor some cheesy racist canard. It’s all just something interesting he’s passing on–about him, in case you hadn’t heard. He is an expert in it, actually.
It’s not just that the truth doesn’t matter to Trump, although of course it very much does not. All presidents lie, and if few have done it quite as relentlessly or thirstily or with as much unaccountable personal dampness as Trump, he certainly didn’t invent the right to howling, self-serving falsehoods as the ultimate executive privilege. What’s still jarring even this far into his presidency, though, is how unbelievably cheap and checked-out his communication remains. In his role as president of the United States, Trump reliably holds forth with the same po-faced casualness of a lonesome boomer hoisting some confounding eagle-strewn Facebook meme onto his page to an audience of sighing nieces and cringing grandkids.
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Neither abject ignorance nor personal judgment can prevent Trump from weighing in; his inability to sit any topic out is total and helpless. “Thought this was interesting,” Trump idly tells the country he governs a dozen or so times per day before forwarding along a preposterous chain email or sharing a link to some gaudily fraudulent tidbit. It is worrying enough that the president communicates with the urgency and discretion of an elderly relative who signs their text messages. It is more worrying that he is not alone.
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The collapse of shared reality across the online sector over the last decade unfolds every day in just this kind of fudgy, vagued-out language. It occurs through the steady accretion of the terrible, disturbing, utterly unfalsifiable things that some people claim or that you just heard all those things that may or may not be so but that are Worth Hearing and So Interesting—all of which occlude and then obscure the real and demonstrable violence that power visits on us every day. “I thought her voice was an important voice,” Trump said last month when criticized for boosting the spurious medical claims of an erratic Houston doctor and self-trained demonologist, “but I know nothing about her.” It’s a remarkable thing to say, and yet somehow it isn’t.
Then as now, Trump didn’t know anything about any of it—he never does, he never will, he doesn’t care—but he wanted to make sure that everyone else heard about it all the same. When other lonely, wrongheaded or web-damaged people extend the same dubious service to those in their lives, they sometimes attach perfunctory well wishes. The president doesn’t bother with that. As far as he knows, he’s just doing his job.
