I’m sick and tired of hearing things,
From uptight, short sighted, narrow minded hypocrites,
All I want is the truth,
Just gimme some truth,
I’ve had enough of reading things,
By neurotic, psychotic, pig headed politicians,
All I want is the truth,
Just give us the truth,-John Lennon — “Gimme Some Truth”
Donald J. Trump is a lying-ass liar who lies. In fact, of the many casualties of the now thankfully outgoing Trump administration, the truth may be the one with the largest metaphorical and literal body count.
As a man of many grievances, and many enemies — Trump positions himself as an unhappy warrior beset on all sides by threats both real and imagined. Of them though, no greater foe consumed Trump than that of The Truth. Trump staged bloody trench warfare against observable reality at a level that would embarrass most tin-pot dictators or politburo loyalists. So much so that Glen Kessler of the Washington Post was assigned one of modern journalism’s most daunting tasks: chronicling all the lies Trump has publicly told since taking office. At last count at the beginning of September, the tally had reached 22,510, and that’s before we were even in the last run-up to the election. By the end of October, Trump was belching out over 50 lies a day, which, even by his own miserable standards, was pretty jarring.
In the late 1970s and early 80s, the residents of the Soviet Union were aware on at least some abstract level that they were being lied to regularly as a matter of state policy. The cognitive dissonance between the scarcity that surrounded them and pretense being made by the government that they were flourishing as a society led to a state that Russian anthropologist Alexi Yurchak called hypernormalisation. It’s a shared illusion among a people so continuously lied to that they lose the ability to imagine virtually anything different — an endless exercise in perception management in the place where actual problem solving should be. One that eventually breaks the public’s will to be able to tell objective fact from fiction, even in the presence of irrefutable empirical evidence. Essentially, it’s the pot of gold at the end of the gaslighter’s rainbow. For a nation of entitled brats like America who were already predisposed to reality shopping, Trump’s version of reality had a built in aggrieved audience that was…
