“Everybody can now feel much safer than the day I took office,” the president of the United States announced today. “There is no longer a Nuclear Threat from North Korea …. President Obama said that North Korea was our biggest and most dangerous problem. No longer – sleep well tonight!”
Perhaps especially at his most incoherent, you can hear little bits of the man’s character crying out. The desperation to believe something so unfounded, he doesn’t even attempt a theory for it. The need for that fiction to be so unquestionable, immediate, automatic as to defy any justification. And always posing his predecessor in the role of dupe because he’s recently experienced an unfortunate attack on one of his core beliefs — that everyone but him is and has always been incompetent, and that the world’s problems fall away naturally in his omnicompetent hands, if he just does whatever comes to mind, his radically gifted mind. One of the lesser appreciated things about the Trump era is the window we’re getting into the mind of a man that is mightily trying (and mostly succeeding, by the looks of it) to transcend cognitive dissonance. A man who believes that if he is just insistent enough, the facts will come to him.
It helps that when you say something, an entire national media ecosystem will spontaneously start to craft the supporting narrative structure to justify it. If you wrestle briefly with doubt, you just have to read your favorite news source or watch your favorite show the next morning to see the pieces fall into place, see the facts and arguments now bolster you where before you were vulnerable, where you cried out the thing that you needed to be true at some stupid hour of the night, unsure.
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Coherence has lost the war in the United States, I’m starting to think, and that makes it a very dangerous country going forward. There is, if not a consensus, at least a winning coalition across both parties that there is no mutually agreeable independent arbiter of the facts anymore. And because the mass media environment has become both increasingly consuming and pointedly unrestrained by any kind of gatekeeper, everyone can and typically does find the reality that suits them. The quality of that reality represents its own quality of life. It is not just how we interpret the world around us. It is very much becoming its own world worth fighting for.
It’s not hard to imagine the next (previously) laughable thing that can come out of that environment, nor how quickly people will habituate to it. Invade Canada, goes the old line, a trope of a trope. But how easily would we accept it with just a little spit shine on it. Canadian steel is now designated a national security threat, an assertion to which the Foreign Affairs Minister can only muster “Seriously?” (increasingly the last imaginable response between any two parties from opposing medias). Of course, Canada also shares the world’s longest unprotected border with the United States, and while an order of magnitude increase in refugees from America’s immigration reforms are flowing North, it’s not hard to imagine (if, indeed, the fact would matter at all) how an immigrant crossing a border in either direction becomes a live threat in a sense, seeing as how if these animals can escape US jurisdiction long enough to avoid capture abroad, they might easily reenter the country unobserved to carry out their mayhem — and suddenly you have pretty reasonable grounds to mandate that Canada actually police its own damn border, or the US will do it for them (just like troops are being sent to do now in Texas), and if lining up troops through the fields of North Dakota doesn’t work, it becomes existentially necessary to send US troops in to police the border cities (as they’re threatening sanctuary cities in California now) — and at every step in this process, if some logical leap beggars the rational mind, just spend five minutes trying to imagine the argument you would give for it if someone was paying you to. These guys aren’t geniuses. They’re just committed, and brave enough.
This morning, the North Korean nuclear threat was neutralized. Praise be. If I had to bet, the only thing keeping that assertion from being accepted fact for half the country is whether the president continues to want to believe it or not. If he repeats it every day until he leaves office, there will be media universes where that truth is reinforced, and the facts will come to him. Trump did not create that environment. An entire country of people creating and choosing their own information universes and disintegrating the idea of gatekeepers or independent arbiters of fact did. And whether that country happens to be trending blue or red at any given moment, that is a dangerous society for the rest of the world to reckon with.