The Age of Spectacle, No. 26
Chapter 6. “Doing a Ripley”: Spectacle Defined and Illustrated, part 2
The Raspberry Patch is posting this week and next on Wednesday instead of Friday. We’ll be back to Fridays, as per usual, on November 1—just four days before E-Day. No extended project outline for The Age of Spectacle is appended to the end of this post; for reference if needed as to where we are in the project as a whole, please look back to last week’s post.
Chapter 6. “Doing a Ripley”: Spectacle Defined and Illustrated
. . . More important than the mendacity itself is the basic structure that enables “Doing a Ripley” to succeed. The structure is best described as recursive, coming in two types: pre-emptive recursivity and post hoc recursivity.[1]
As to the former, if you conspire to attack a certain target, you first fabricate a conspiracy to accuse the target of doing the same to you. You project to protect, in other words. So if Donald Trump, with or without Roger Stone by his side, wants to steal a presidential election should it become necessary to retain power, he proceeds by hatching a story about the Democrats plotting to steal that same election before it happens—and then elaborating the projection after the fact as needed. The more false details he can invent and repeat the more plausible to the target audience of true-believing naifs and low-information, mostly non-deep-reading others. It is important for the sake of effectiveness that the terms of the scheme not be altered but simply inverted and then projected. Too many differences in basic vocabulary confuse the targets of the fabrication, so the valance needs to be changed but as little else as possible.
As to post hoc recursivity, the same structure obtains but the lie is reactive rather than anticipatory or aspirational. It is made up after the fact to becloud some inconvenient development; otherwise the structure remains the same. We call a recursive post hoc Ripley a contrafiction.
The two-valued, flip-the-valance contrafictive mental method of the MAGA world shows in many ways, and among true believers it pops out, to coin a phrase, where you most expect it. It even elicits double-takes with regard to the copy-cat malefactions of its stars rolled out in the shadow of Trump himself.
So is Marjorie Taylor Greene a MAGA entrepreneur gulling the rubes, or is she as dumb a rubette as she often appears? (Lately she has insisted that the U.S. Government can create and direct tropical storms into “red state” voting areas….) It’s still not clear. She graduated from the University of Georgia with a business administration major, not exactly the diadem in the tiara of the social sciences or the humanities, but that at least suggests she knows how to read. Either way, very clear in the malarkey behind her madness is pure flip-the-partisan-valance projection. One observer, also not entirely sure about the reading on the sincerity meter, hit the proverbial nail on the noggin after Greene trotted out her late February 2023 proposal for a red state/blue state divorce:
. . . the most fascinating thing in this isn’t MTG’s call for a national divorce, but her vision for what blue states would look like: forced pledging of allegiance to identity groups, government-sponsored antifa training, etc. It’s like each idea is a funhouse bizarro twist on something conservatives want. Their worldview is so narrow they believe that everyone wants to use the same means as them, just put to opposite ends. If this is genuinely what conservatives believe the Left wants, then no wonder we've lost our ability to communicate across political divides.[2]
Another vivid example of literally hundreds of flip-the-partisan-valance projection comes to us courtesy of the mid-June 2023 Republican House’s censure of Adam Schiff for his assertions that the Trump campaign during 2016 had colluded with Russian agents. The censure motion, which passed 213-209 mainly along party lines, alleged that Schiff “spread false accusations that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia,” adding that Schiff behaved “dishonestly and dishonorably on many other occasions.” The resolution’s sponsor, Anna Paulina Luna (R-Fla.) added on the House floor that Schiff had “ripped apart American families across the country . . . sowing lasting division across our land.” One could hardly ask for a purer example of willful projection; as for Schiff, who was probably merely merely mistaken about collusion rather than a liar, he would be wise to recall something that Richard Pipes once said in a different context: “To be hated can be an honor if you are hated by the right sort of person.”[3]
Trump’s projectionist mendacity instinct has never flagged. In January 2024 the January 6 insurrectionists became “hostages” and the insurrectionist-in-chief became President Biden, for purportedly leaving the border wide open. It is all as predictable as it is preposterous. But the MAGAt core believes it all in the parallel surrealist world in which it abides. Orwell would have understood; recall this, from 1984:
. . . .she had without exception the most stupid, vulgar, empty mind that he had ever encountered. She had not a thought in her head that was not a slogan, and there was no imbecility, absolutely none that she was not capable of swallowing if the Party handed it out to her. “The human sound-track” he nicknamed her in his own mind.
The best example, so far, of a projectile MAGAt lie is actually a skein of lies written into a fundraising solicitation supposedly from Trump himself, dated “Friday morning.” I got mine via the USPS—which Trump otherwise attacks for not cracking down on massive voting-by-mail fraud (which doesn’t actually exist)—on September 20. It is difficult to excerpt the letter because the entire thing is projectile mendacity, such that read symptomatically it is an inerrant guide to the genuine thinking of the MAGAt inner circle. All one need do is flip the proper nouns and then redact in the non-mendacious tense. So a mere sampling of the language must suffice.
The letter refers throughout to the Harris-Biden Administration, not the Biden-Harris Administration, in order to blame Harris for doing things MAGAts don’t like but that she as Vice-President had no decisional authority over. The Harris-Walz ticket is described as “Radical Marxist” and “Big Government Socialist” in the same sentence, even though the former Soviet Union and say, Denmark, are not exactly similar manifestations of socialism. Harris is identified as having been the most radical member of the Senate, and so on exaggeration and falsehood falling over one another to get the reader’s attention. The projectile lies revealing the inner reality of the MAGAt mind are layered amid this gale-scale bloviation. Trump’s spectacular display of projectile dysfunction brings to mind something Jody Powell once said back in 1977 in an inside-Georgia quip: “Being called a liar by Lester Maddox is like being called ugly by a frog.”
So Trump tells us that the Harris-Walz ticket “is spending BILLIONS of dollars in an all-out effort to buy the election and seize total control of our government.” Regrettably, it is only barely a single billion, and fundraising for campaigns is not the same as buying an election or else Trump would not be asking me for money….for him to buy the election. But that is what the kneejerk flip-the-valance process often does: create obvious tells of intent somehow without the target noticing. As for taking total control of the government, that is what Trump wishes to do; he is the one who said he wanted to be a dictator “on day one,” not Harris. So: “Their continuous attacks—aided by the Liberal Fake News media—are ruthless and misleading.” Attack media that is continuously ruthless and misleading perfectly describes Fox News, doesn’t it? Rachel Maddow may be many annoying things, but ruthless is certainly not one of them.
Then Trump urges me to give him money so that we can “refute Kamala Harris, Tim Walz, and the Radical Democrats’ lies and propaganda” and foil these villains who are taking their “lies and brainwashing about me and the Republican Party to the extreme of undermining the core unity of the American people,” who are intent on “destroying the America we know and love,” and who want “to dismantle our great government and change our way of life”—this from the most deliberately divisive, fear-mongering and harvesting demagogue who has ever run for President, the man who called for the suspension of the Constitution so he could resume power at the tail-end of a mob, the man whose literal threats against his opponents continued to intensify as the 2024 campaign lengthened, the man who would destroy the professional Civil Service and replace it with legions of political hacks, and the man whose Project 2025 would indeed change our way of life.
There is more. Then Trump tells me that we must have the resources “to dispute their lies and distortions and get the truth out to every citizen.” Up goes the handful of dust, intended for the eyes of the credulous who are somehow still not sure who is actually lying and who is not. The letter goes on and on, and so do the precise and revealing projectile lies.
Just as this letter went out, two other events lapped at its heels. One was Trump’s then-latest petty grift: his wristwatch scam. That just reinforced the point that Trump’s version of the will to power, however malign in its consequences past and potential, is polluted with the most petty kind of grifting imaginable. What would Nietzsche say? Perhaps he would be speechless.
But the other is more telling, and that came in the form of J.D. Vance’s claim that overheated Democratic rhetoric about the Trump-Vance ticket being a clear and present threat to democracy, the Constitution, and the rule of law is what caused the two assassination attempts aimed at Trump. In other words, Vance was not only asserting and protecting the MAGAt campaign’s right to lie at will, but challenging and trying to deter the Harris-Walz campaign’s right to tell the truth. The idea seems to have been to cow liberals—famously defined as those unable even to take their own side in an argument—into feeling guilty about their rhetoric, however truthful, and so stifle it.
A more philosophically precise way to describe pre-emptive contrafictive recursivity is as a layering, in this case the layering of falsehood, on the more basic reality of the lebenswelt, the life-world referred to and defined in Part I. As noted, the layer has to fit tightly on its model or the intended target audience will more easily become confused, or even see through the lie-cum-ruse. That, again, is why the basic vocabulary used to set up any false inversion has to remain essentially the same as the vocabulary used to describe reality. The layer is the inversion, the “not-A” in cases of post hoc recursivity invented to fuzz or obscure the clarity of the “A”, and the “not-A” in cases of pre-emptive recursivity meant to fuzz or obscure an expected perception of reality that is not in one’s interest.
Both preemptive and post hoc recursivity are therefore more abstract than the model from which they are formed. Each is therefore in some sense metaphorical, for metaphors are by definition abstractions from concrete reality used to shift, or better in this case to project, a logical shape onto less concrete so more readily receptive realms. That does not necessarily make the invention of a recursive structured lie an example of a metaverse, but it does have in common with a metaverse that it is modeled up from a more basic material reality—and this turns out to be not be an incidental observation.
Those who have spent a lot of screen time marinating in fantasy entertainments, gaming, or playing “Second Life,” an early form of metaversic entertainment, may be so much further distanced from actual reality that it is easier for them to shift their attention seamlessly to layers, or laminations, of fabrications than those whose lives and deep-reading minds are more firmly rooted in the lebenswelt. They are, in other words, easier for political entrepreneurs to persuade because they are more adept at fooling—suspending disbelief, some have termed it—themselves for fun.
How so? Because the dynamics of navigating fictive or otherwise dissimulated layered worlds—each “real whilst attended to” in William James’s famous early 20th-century formulation—have much looser, para-magical causal logics than that of the lebenswelt. In these more abstract, metaphorical worlds the laws of both metamorphosis and consanguinity more freely obtain. A laminated cognitive world, whilst it is attended to, is a more fluid and emotional world in which typically rigorous rules of evidence concerning the A/not-A cognitive challenge are attenuated or suspended altogether.[4] It is a world-cum-target for those intent on “doing Ripleys” that promise much success and reward. More Americans live in that world today than ever before. Not a few, lately anyway, incline to vote MAGA Republican precisely because they have been successfully targeted.
Old Ripleys, New Ripleys
There is nothing essentially new about hatching political “Ripleys.” If the Czarist police conspired to foment pogroms against the Jews, they first hatched evidence of Jewish conspiracy against the Russian Empire and its people—that is the origin of the infamous fakery the “Protocols of the Elders of Zion.” If the Nazi leadership conspired to murder the Jews of Europe, they first invented a Jewish “stab in the back” conspiracy to explain why Germany lost the World War. Anti-Semitic conspiracies have a long “doing-a-Ripley” pedigree that include the Black Death-era “poisoning the wells” lie, the blood-libel lie, and many others.
The history of anti-Semitic conspiracies is also not entirely incidental here, since the MAGA world and the Republican Party with it has become rife with anti-Semitic motifs. Some of these leak out spectacularly in the rantings of Kanye West and, less telegenically, the ravings of an improbable Alex Jones fan, NBA star Kyrie Irving. The echo effect of the Israel-Hamas war starting after October 7, 2023 brought out these motifs at scale on both the Right and the Left. Some like Anshel Pfeffer of Ha’aretz had persuaded themselves that genuine anti-Semitism in the diaspora, separate from kneejerk garden-variety criticism of Israeli policies that often hid underlying anti-Semitism (but sometimes did not), had all but disappeared. Despite current exaggerations concerning anti-Semitism, which confuse and conflate internet ravings with actual acts of violence against Jews and Jewish institutions, they were quite wrong.
The typical recursive approach to conspiracy hatching is not always sub rosa, at least not anymore. We knew the master plan of MAGAt leaders to flip democracy itself into a formula for minoritarian government because no great effort was made to hide it.[5] After the November 2020 election we saw an more or less impromptu test run of the plan, in which persuading key state officials to void the popular vote in determining electors to the Electoral College took pride of place, based on a group of fraudulent claims couched in the classic “only A or not-A” form, about voter fraud.[6] This is why Tim Michels, the Republican candidate for Governor in Wisconsin, could state with a straight face on the eve of the November 2022 midterm elections that if he were elected, Republicans would never again lose an election in Wisconsin.
That is why it came as no big surprise, really, when Donald Trump himself on July 27, 2024 urged the Turning Point Action’s “Believers Summit” audience in West Palm Beach, Florida to vote, adding that, “You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians.” If surprise inheres in this remark, it does so differently. As much as Trump lies, and it is questionable whether even a supercomputer can count that high, he utters a self-damning truth as though absent-mindedly tossing a banana peel on the sidewalk. And then more surprising still: There lies the banana peel of mischievous truth right in front of them, and tens of millions of voters slip and fall on it anyway.
Both Michaels and Trump sounded as though they were channeling Josef Stalin, and other authoritarian rulers even as benign as the late King Hussein of Jordan, who have repeatedly claimed that they do not fear elections because they know how any election held under their auspices will turn out. As Stalin once put it: “It is enough that the people know there was an election. The people who cast the votes decide nothing. The people who count the votes decide everything.” If Trump admires Vladimir Putin, as he obviously does, he would have been head over heels for Josef Stalin.
Much worse than such boasts as threats to democracy, which they obviously are, if the Supreme Court ever rules that state houses can determine presidential Electors in cases where the popular vote is flawed or unclear—or simply befogged deliberately to seem that way—then voilà, the longed for Republican flip will work, ratified by the highest Court in the land. A few years back most observers ranked the chances of that happening as very low, and indeed, not so long ago the the Court did explicitly reject the doctrine of state sovereignty. But after the SCOTUS July 1, 2024 ruling on presidential immunity, that assessment need be revisited. A Court majority that claims to have originalism as its lodestar that invokes the ideal of “an energetic Executive” in a major decision is not being wholly honest with itself, to put it gently. So much, then, for the confidence most of us grew to expect about the judiciary’s role in the separation of powers acting as a sturdy means of protection against the decay of constitutional order.
Despite all this, in poll and poll the “Big Lie” still garners massive support among self-identifying Republicans. Some know it isn’t true but say it anyway because they find it useful; Ted Cruz has been perhaps the most obvious example, but Josh Hawley has probably been the most fawning and self-promoting. Sean Hannity became the most outspoken example from the Fourth Estate, openly admitting that he never believed “for a second” the lies about a stolen election, probably because he was aware of Trump’s directive to his inner sanctum of advisors on election eve 2020: “Just say we won.” But that did not stop Hannity from repeatedly parroting the Big Lie line on the air to many millions who reposed trust in him. How has he squared this? By saying that he was merely following orders, presumably from his benefactor exchequer Rupert Murdock. Has Hannity manifested any indication of shame over what he did? None that is visible. That Cruz, Hawley, Hannity, and so many others do this sort of thing reflects clearly the wholly zero-sum transactional mentality pasted onto a political order based originally on exactly the opposite premise.
To wit and to review, because at this point we must display the contrast that yawns widely before us: The Enlightenment foundation of classic liberalism at its core turned on a discovery that institutions within a political economy—as the subject properly used to be called—can be designed in such a way that win-win outcomes can result, and that fair and sufficiently transparent processes can define down disagreements into less-than-existential struggles against the promise of future procedural access to the political process. Liberal institutions ultimately depend on attitudes that support them, and these too reflect a view of human social nature that is not zero-sum but rather recognizes the potential for cooperation as well as the inevitability of competition and conflict among citizens and factions.Those attitudes support open debate, toleration of principled dissent, humility toward open-ended questions of value, patience in plumbing them, basic respect for the dignity of other persons, and with it all the assumption that oppositions can be loyal within an agreed constitutional legal order.
The Constitution, just by the way, stipulates a remarkable demonstration of that assumption. Article II, Section 1 obligates the sitting Vice-President, acting as president pro tempore of the Senate, to preside over the ritualist counting of Electoral College votes at the opening of Congress following a presidential election. Four times in U.S. history an incumbent Vice-President has presided over his own election victory to become President, and if Kamala Harris wins on November 5 she will preside for her own victory on January 6, 2025. But the sitting Vice-President acting as president pro tempore of the Senate is also obligated to preside if he has been defeated, as Al Gore had to do in January 2001 before George W. Bush. It is one thing for the loser of a country-club tennis match to rush to shake the hand of the victor over the net; it is quite another to do what Al Gore and others have had to do at the behest of Article II, Section 1. That is what ego-suppression in the face of principle means to credit a loyal opposition in a liberal democratic constitutional framework, and that is exactly what Donald Trump rejects, as he demonstrated by being the first President in 150 years to refuse to attend the inauguration of his successor, on January 20, 2021.
Remarkably, it will be recalled, Enlightenment-borne attitudes institutionalized in American political culture developed out of a singular confluence of trends: discoveries in early modern science showing that primal forces did not behave like spiteful and self-absorbed gods scheming and dueling in the dome of heaven, but rather like separate entities in dynamic balance, matched with new definitions of piety and virtue espoused by Anglo-Protestantism. It was wonderful while it lasted, and it endures still in American institutions and in many millions of discerning hearts and minds. But it is today under relentless attack and, ironically enough, one source of its apparent eclipse reflects S.I. Hayakawa’s famous description of the “two-valued orientation” at the heart of American dualism, itself an inheritance from the nation’s founding Calvinist/Puritan religious culture that endures in both fading still-religious and burgeoning denatured secular forms.[7]
That persisting two-valued dualism suggests that most Republicans who believe the Big Lie actually do really believe it. This is why MAGA planners have lately created biased and bogus polls allegedly showing Trump way in front of Harris in various states and localities; these are the seeds of future lies concerning voter fraud, to wit: “Look how far ahead Trump was here, here, and here; so fraud is the only way to explain the purported vote tallies.” These planners are justifiably confident that the same millions who have believed the Big Lie since November 2020 will believe this lie, too.
This means that their thoughts and occasional behaviors are not anti-democratic as they see them; to the very contrary. That is why many of them become so angry at being accused of anti-patriotic acts. Explaining opportunism without a conscience among politicians, most of whom are lawyers, is very easy compared to explaining mass delusion—explaining, in other words, the apparent power of claims that demonstrable facts are “fake news.” Here, in the political arena at any rate, spectacle plays a special role, but one predicated on pre-political phenomena, as it were.
On Fake News
Not all disinformation and “fake news”—or false claims (Ripley inversions) about something factually true being “fake news”—occur in the political arena. Similar things happen when people spread false medical information and advice, inadvertently or not, and when they make inaccurate claims about the causes (or non-existence) of global warming. Spectacle does not play as great a role in the psychological dynamics of medical and scientific debates as it does in politics, and one of the reasons is that the former is not so prominently biographied. Scientists and medical doctors are rarely household names the way prominent politicians are, and the grandiosity of lies seems to have something to do with ego jousting in competitive, game-like social environments. That may be why those who have made it their business to inoculate young people against fake news, Sander van der Linden, Seema Yasmin, and Renée DiResta among them, mention spectacle rarely if at all in their essays and books.[8]
Note that the fake news which often delivers the greatest punch relies on images more than text. So when Omar Suleiman, an adjunct professor of Islamic studies at Southern Methodist University, posted on X/Twitter a photo of Bashar al-Assad’s destruction of the Palestinian community in Yarmouk, Syria more than nine years ago and claimed it showed destruction stemming from Israel’s bombing of Gaza a few days before, he was simply lying. He did not need fancy technology to do it, but it worked anyway on both those who wanted to believe it and on many who simply did not know any better what to believe.[9] The same was true of fake images of victims from Hurricanes Helene and Milton in October 2024 that were taken earlier and elsewhere and then used to defame FEMA and embarrass the Biden-Harris Administration—and which lead to genuine hardship as relief efforts were hampered on that account. It is much, much easier to devise image-heavy lies about political issues than it is about medical or environmental matters.
In a text that is extraordinarily cryptic even for an octogenarian intellectual, Philip Rieff occasionally ripped a sentence that stops a reader in his tracks. As intimated in passing above, commanding truths are not grandiose; “Rather, the lies are grandiose,” wrote Rieff in 2005, “for they can never be lived modestly, as the truths can be lived. It takes no skill to lie in . . . a systematically mendacious world,” so for a lie to be effective it must be grandiose.[10] It must arrest attention at first blush, which is why grand lying is often euphemized as boldfaced. Once trotted out, it must then be often repeated and shaped so as to get others to repeat it, magnifying its efficacy on behalf of its inventors.
Rieff does not dig deeper here before skipping off to another observation, but for our purposes his reference to a systematically mendacious world deserves particular elaboration. Thanks in large part to the colonization of American language and culture by science-based advertising technique, Americans who immerse themselves willingly in the material fetishisms of hyper-abundance are being lied to almost constantly. Advertising, aside from being usually rude and insinuative, is about impression management, which means it is about selective truth telling at best, manipulation and falsehood more often. People know this at some level but most have long since left off caring for the whole business having become normalized over decades. Most have become inured to it or anyway see no means of practical escape from it. GenZ types even think they are immune to advertising, so hyper-jaded was the environment in which they came of age. So they are fine with truth being instrumentalized if it is set in an entertainment mode context, the same way that a television set instrumentalizes three-dimensional reality when it shoves it into a two-dimensional ersatz machine.
Shadow effects are capacious. When nearly everything in our man-made environment is a simulacrum of what is real, why should it come as a surprise that a circus-quality liar like Donald Trump gets an easy pass? All the more so when his lies are so spectacularly entertaining? Why are politicians generally surprised when they adopt advertising methodologies only to find that so many sentient people just assume that they are liars? Flipping McLuhan a bit, the message is assumed to be the medium and the medium is a mendacity machine.
To wit: Why have tech giant owners and spokespersons told us that social media brings people together and is good for creativity and democracy when the truth is that they are strip-mining human sanity at scale for coins?[11] And it is any wonder lawyers are so important in American politics, today more than ever by both numbers and power? Lawyers instrumentalize truth as part of their jobs, and always have; if you don’t want to take Ben Franklin’s word on this, how about Aristotle’s? And what at base are lies? Distortions of reality. Train to do it, do it often enough, indeed nearly all the time, skillfully and in so many ways, and what must happen to any culture that allows this without effective restraining balance in due course?
From this observation it is but a short step to realize the power that resides in lying even to oneself, to the point that lies that can matter politically in the lebenswelt get swallowed in the ubiquity of marketed and self-induced fantasies ever at our perceptual ready, and so are ontologically lost cum lies. Here is how Becca Rothfeld put it, riffing off the famous 1993 New Yorker cartoon where Peter Steiner has one dog tell another, “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog.” Rothfeld notes that she was only two years old in 1993 but by age 13 she was mimicking Steiner’s dog “in silly chatrooms all the time. I said I was 25, or French, or a famous novelist, and I carried a little bit of the glamour of my fictions back into my banal life.” Now for the key to all this which should raise at least one of your eyebrows: “Later, I realized that the magic these lies conjured was minor, but it was magic all the same. And what was the difference really between being treated as a cosmopolitan and becoming one? Maybe the dog impersonating his owner in Steiner’s cartoon eventually forgot he had ever been anything else.”[12]
Magic, remember? Again we see the law of metamorphosis at work; Becca could change into anything she wanted and then change back again. What fun: No-fault unlimited fantasy at one’s keyboard fingertips! But thus Kurt Vonnegut sagely in Mother Night: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.” And thus Rothfeld in conclusion: “. . . even absurdities can be dangerous.”[13] Right. Very right.
Trump as Master of Contrafiction
Trump illustrates as no one at the national level ever has where political theater meets systematic mendacity: via spectacle. Some spectacle is relatively small in scope, as with loners like Adam Lanza, Dylan Root, Robert Bowers, Edgar Maddison Welch, and David Wayne DePape, for they all intended what they did to be spectacular so as to get widely noticed. Same with 20-year old Thomas Crooks, who took at shot at Trump on July 13, 2024. Or it can be massive, on a Goebbels-like scale, as with the Trumpian Big Lie and its attendant supportive smaller lies as they accumulate on the road to authoritarian pretense.
Indeed, Trump’s most outlandish statements, from his “birther” days through the 2016 Republican primary season, during his presidency and since, have very likely been lies, not errors or ordinary falsehoods, despite the fact that he is an encyclopedically ignorant narcissist. But they are lies of a particular kind: Taken together they form an ensemble of astounding complexes, or spectacles. They are fantasy contrafictions that thanks to ceaseless repetition become normalized if not wholly believed, because the human brain always tends to normalizes what it takes in from the world if it is repeated often enough. Even perceptions that evoke astounding complexes the first, second, or third time they are perceived get normalized by the sixth, seventh, and eighth time they pass the sensory membrane.
So Trump’s lies have not been a disconnected series of one-offs; to suppose that is to underestimate the man’s sociopathic cunning. When we hear an outlandish statement from him we do a double take. It is very much a “you don’t hear that every day“ kind of event. Like the two-headed carnival cow, it often leaves us stranded between “is he lying?” or “does he really believe it?”—A or not-A? And our manifestly awkward confusion simply delights the MAGA base, who are deep into counter-humiliation as they see it, and love to be entertained as they watch their leader diddle the elites. They don’t care if it is or isn’t a lie as long as it works on the political street, as it were.
[1] I started out calling the general methodology of pre-emptive and post hoc recursivity the “I know you are but what am I?” ploy, called after the classic schoolyard come-back in a typical episode of competitive pre-teen taunting. I did this partly because it fits the nine-year old mental age of Donald Trump. The actual reason, however, will be immediately apparent to those familiar with it: That single snarky question stunts via the artifice of inversion any conversation that the taunted cannot win just by blowing the inverted dust of nonsense into the air. It’s a cheap and quick way to “get even” with the taunter so that one can walk away and do something else. The taunter can only continue his dominance by escalating the encounter to fisticuffs, which is relatively rare—or used to be at least in my experience. The “I know you are but what am I?” defensive taunt, however, is narrowly American and it has aged, so many readers may not be familiar with it. Having laid out the nature of designed astounding complexes using the Ripley’s ‘Believe It Or Not’ metaphor, to “Do a Ripley” seems a preferable shorthand.
[2] An anonymous reader quoted in Jonathan V. Last, “ABP: Always. Be. Projecting.” The Bulwark, February 23, 2023.
[3] Quotes are from Amy B. Wang and Mariana Alfaro, “House passes measure to censure Adam Schiff,” Washington Post, June 21, 2023.
[4] Anyone interested in a deeper dive into this kind of phenomenological analysis is well advised to consult Erving Goffman, Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience (Harper & Row, 1974), notably chapters 3 and 4, and then especially chapter 11, “The Manufacture of Negative Experience.”
[5] Note Ezra Klein, “Republicans Have Made It Very Clear What They Want to Do If They Win Congress,” New York Times, November 6, 2022.
[6] Detailed in Cecilia Kang, “5 Unfounded Claims About Voting in the Midterm Elections,” New York Times, November 2, 2022.
[7] The reference is to Hayakawa’s 1949 book Language in Thought and Action. See also the classic cognitive psychology masterwork by Milton Rokeach, The Open and Closed Mind (Basic Books, 1960), which elides on some of the same points.
[8] See van der Linden, Risk and Uncertainty in a Post-Truth Society (2019), and Foolproof (2023); Yasmin, What the Fact?! (2022); and Renée DiResta, Invisible Rulers: The People Who Turn Lies into Reality (PublicAffairs, 2024). Van der Linden and Yasmin have worked with the News Literacy Project (NLP), founded in 2008 by Alan C. Miller, a long-time Los Angeles Times journalist. On van der Linden and his most recent book, Foolproof, see Tim Hartford, “Foolproof—how misinformation works and how to counter it,” Financial Times, February 22, 2023.
[9] Noted in Claire Berlinski, “The Bloodbath of Simchat Torah,” Cosmopolitan Globalist, October 29, 2023.
[10] Philip Rieff, My Life among the Deathworks: Illustrations of the Aesthetics of Authority (University of Virginia Press, 2006), pp. 141-42.
[11] The phrase is a paraphrase from Alderman, Future, p. 142.
[12] Rothfeld, “The dark internet mind-set that seeped into the GOP,” Washington Post Book World, July 14, 2024.
[13] Ibid.