The Age of Spectacle, No. 27
Chapter 6. “Doing a Ripley”: Spectacle Defined and Illustrated, part 3
No preliminary, introductory remarks in today’s post save to thank the editor of Cosmopolitan Globalist, Claire Berlinski, for cross-posting today my essay from the October 2 Raspberry Patch, “How Many Hellroads Must a Man Walk Down?” That essay, as some readers will recall, cameos the “negative follower effect” phenomenon. That phenomenon, just to put two and two together for those who need the hint, is not the least irrelevant to what may happen on and after November 5. Woke social justice warriors have been dishing out red meat to bullheaded MAGA supporters for years, enough to supply propaganda fodder perhaps sufficient to produce disaster just thirteen days from now. We shall see.
That said, time now to be, or to get, serious:
Chapter 6. “Doing a Ripley”: Spectacle Defined and Illustrated, cont’d.
. . . Indeed, Trump’s most outlandish statements, from his “birther” days through the 2016 Republican primary season, during his presidency and since, have likely been mostly lies, not delusions, errors, or ordinary falsehoods. They are lies of a particular kind, however: 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 tends to normalize 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 register get normalized by the sixth, seventh, and eighth time they pass the sensory membrane. So new and stronger astounding complexes therefore need to be designed to keep the target mesmerized and hence subject to influence. The shock bar needs always to rise.
That is why to those not dissociated from reality Trump seems to get crazier with every passing month. But he may not be getting crazier; he may merely be running out the string of his rising shock-bar repertoire. Put a bit differently, Trump’s lies have not been a disconnected series of one-offs; to suppose that is to underestimate the man’s sociopathic cunning. They have rather aimed to produce a particular image of a man who is resolute, strong, shrewd, and deeply caring about the “little guy.” But this is all fictive scripting, all appearances and no substance. Trump is not resolute but insecure. He is not strong but weak enough to always be punching down. He is not shrewd but cunning, not the same things. And he does not care about the little guy or any guy; he is utterly empathy shorn and cares only about himself. Trump’s niece, Mary, doubts that he has ever actually loved any of his wives or children, and she may be correct.
It takes a lot of measured and persistent lying to project an image utterly at odds with reality, especially when one’s ambition is fully national in scale. That kind of effort can only hope to work in a cultural milieu that is already littered with people who don’t read, don’t think, and don’t know how to escape the unbounded flowing moment they’re in, assuming they want to escape it. And that is the American cultural milieu right now, brought to all of us by the corporate wizards of digitized screen-borne higher-Disneyfied surrealism. “The truth is, it’s getting harder to describe the extent to which a meaningful percentage of Americans have dissociated from reality” is how Charlie Warzel began his October 11, 2025 Atlantic essay, and he is so right that I wonder how he managed to read my mind.[1]
But for Trump’s lies even to land he must first get the targeted audience’s attention. This he knows well how to do. When we hear an outlandish statement from Trump we instinctively do a double take. Such statements are intended to evoke a “you don’t hear that every day“ kind of reaction. Like the two-headed carnival cow, they are designed to leave us stranded between “is he lying?” or “does he really believe it?”--A or not-A? And our manifestly awkward confusion simply delights Trump’s cultic base, who are deep into counter-humiliation theater and so love to be entertained as they watch their leader diddle the elites. They don’t care if what he says is or isn’t a lie as long as it works on the political street, as it were.
This is why Stephen Miller has often called his boss a political genius: Trump really gets “the attention economy”; he knows how to gather and keep attention, especially exponentially magnifying media attention.[2] He does it by deploying a measured cascade of astounding complexes, by literally making a spectacle of himself. Part of his method, beyond the hyperbole and exaggeration he has admitted to, involves bluntness. His modest, Archie Bunkeresque vocabulary and his attention-arresting bluntness has led many an admirer at home and abroad to the same locution of praise: “He tells it like it is.”[3] Trump has become over the years the undisputed king of five-and-dime-store spectacle, but the massively outsized results he has achieved with his cracker-jacks quality antics speak as much to the level of the audience as to the skill of the circus barker.
Trump knows how to deploy the attention he reaps with his dime-store spectacle mastery: While he is astounding his adversaries with shameless lies he is gathering his base ever closer to him with another display of shrewd manipulation, a base that already once has acted as a private insurrectionist militia. He does not just blurt out loud in public whatever comes into his mind; he knows what he is doing at least in this nether-province of political acumen.[4] And what he is doing is packaging and delivering his untruths according to the well-honed formula of fictive screen-borne drama fare. It is reality-TV cum template, both with and sometimes without the television, for the purpose of devising an alternate political universe for the gulled. It is Trump’s default presentational mode, and has been for decades.
That explains why Trump responded as he did to the cascade of indictments that came bountifully and justifiably his way during 2023, up to and including Jack Smith’s January 6th-related indictment. Some observers marveled at his spectacular counterproductive behavior: baiting the judges; calling the prosecutors names that would once have disqualified anyone from exoneration and then threatening them (“IF YOU COME AFTER ME, I’M COMING AFTER YOU”; caps in Trump’s original message on Social Truth); claiming that the whole thing was a coordinated political vendetta mounted by the deep state; and a string of other absurdities. As with Trump’s appearance at the National Association of Black Journalists event described above, this, nearly everyone asserted, was crazy, counterproductive behavior. Trump was allegedly self-destructing before our eyes.
Not so; his behavior made perfect sense. As on July 31 and so many, many times before, with the help of our irresponsibly craven broadcast media, Trump’s reactions kept him on top-of-the-news-cycle almost constantly. He knew that a courtroom is inherently a stage, with roles and rules specified for everyone in the room—perfect for Trump’s skill set. He knew, too, that America’s TV heads, a few hundred million of them, were used to courtroom dramas from “Perry Mason” through “Judge Judy” and a thousand other fictional vignettes through their years of brain-numbing in front of a screen. The language and “plots” of Trump’s untruths are always outsized but at the same time simple, slogan-length, and easy to understand because they are always shaped as zero-sum propositions. He is ever the victim, standing guard for the liberties of Everyman others.
It is, in other words, The Jerry Springer Show redux, over and over and over again—and still many, a great many evidently, fail to plumb its fakery. Reading the comments on the July 31 NABJ event one is astonished to see how many African-Americans rose to Trump’s side. “Everything he said was true,” claimed one; “he certainly held his own against those mean women,” said another. Why? Well, perhaps some people are so used to being victims of liars and cheats that they inflict a kind of Stockholm Syndrome on themselves, remaining devoted to those who treat them poorly because they treat them poorly. Carlos Ruiz Zafón once described this as “the eternal human stupidity of pursuing those who hurt us the most.”[5] But how can it be that so many observers do not see this? It is because, as Nicholas Chamfort said near the end of the 18th century, “Intelligent people make many mistakes because they cannot believe the world is really as foolish as it is.” Foolish, yes; and connivingly mendacious, as well.
What Trump does and has been doing for years is grifting amid the attention/spectacle economy, ceaselessly and at scale. It raises gobs of money and deprives all competitors within the GOP of oxygen.[6] The reason he succeeds is almost as embarrassing as it is simple: Modestly educated populists are easily swayed by political advertising carefully attuned to their vocabulary, biases, and fears. Poorly educated people are not necessarily stupid people but “rubes” is not too far off a vernacular term to describe their vulnerability to slick-talking snake oil salesmen, of whom there have been a great many in American history. One of the best examples of type and style in verse comes courtesy of a song lyric that conjures up a grifter in yesteryear’s American West:
Man, you should have seen me way back then
I could tell a tale, I could make it spin
I could tell you black was white
I could tell you day was night
Not only that, I could tell you why
Back then I could really tell a lie.
Well, I’d hire a kid to say that he was lame
Then I’d touch him and make him walk again
Then I’d pull some magic trick
I’d pretend to heal the sick
I was taking everything they had to give
It wasn’t all that bad a way to live.[7]
After decades of doing the same thing over and over again Trump probably doesn’t know how to do anything else. He has known that only by regaining the White House could he acquire a “get out of jail free” card in perpetuity. He has thus showed during the 2024 campaign every sign of doubling down on belligerent and mendacious spectacle with precisely that goal in mind.
Small or large, political spectacle creates astounding complexes so compelling that questions of truth and falsehood are relegated to the periphery so long as the thrall endures, as the breathtakingly staged “wow” smothers all in its ambit. Brass balls insincerity is all it really takes to succeed. Thornton Wilder understood why: “The great persuaders are those without principles; sincerity stammers.”[8] David Mitchell later elaborated what Wilder meant by stammers: “Sometimes the fluffy bunny of incredulity zooms around the bend so rapidly that the greyhound of language is left, agog, in the starting cage.”[9]
A textbook historical example of mendacious spectacle is the series of Nuremberg rallies starting in 1935 in Nazi Germany. The Nazi leadership understood the social power of spectacle, and so did its hired help like Leni Riefenstahl. Thanks to the cybermedia we now constantly bathe ourselves in, we produce a distributed-system mass-cognitive equivalent of a Nuremberg virtually every week, if not every day during skeins of accelerated experience. We are thus witness to a 24/7 political theater of the obtuse if not the absurd. It is fascinating in a forensic sense; but have no doubt that we are watching the deathworks of democracy at play in a rare, if not unprecedented, example of mass self-brainwashing.
The same dynamic is discernible at a broader level apart from Donald Trump himself. Republicans increasingly insist that Democrats are socialists, communists, and Marxists, and that all of them, not to exclude Joe Biden, are “woke.” Most do not distinguish among these four labels, the more MAGA-addled they are the more likely they are to conflate the terms. This is not remotely the case, of course. No more than 8 percent of the country and perhaps 12 percent of Democratic Party members fit the woke description, which is why self-described progressive Democrats have done so poorly in Democratic primaries in recent times. The electorate that tends to vote Democratic is far more centrist in its attitudes and policy views than Republicans and their sycophantic media chorus claim.
But many sub-deep literate folk believe this broader lie anyway, and the reason is clear enough to be worth repeating: If there is a law of intellectual life it is that ignorance conflates and knowledge distinguishes. Systematic mendacity works much better on those bereft of a reading habit, and hence most often with simple two-valued mentalities, impoverished theories of mind, and at best adolescent quality facility with abstract reasoning. It is easy to persuade such people that all Democrats think the same and that said thinking is the polar opposite of their own simplistic understandings. That yields a bizarre sense of political topography, one with high mountains and floodplains but nothing in between. But, to again cite Charles Frankel, “simplemindedness is not a handicap in the competition of social ideas.” Except that we are now way beyond mere simplemindedness.
Conspiracy Soup
Yet how can the eclipse of truth by systematic mendacity have happened in seemingly so short a time, even within a single generation? One explanation is that simultaneously extreme and widespread polarization has persuaded many that the other side is an existential threat to “America as we know it”—an utterly zero-sum game—so that any means justifies a desperate but putatively noble end. But more is going on than that and, as already suggested, it has to do with the burgeoning spectacle mentality abetting conspiratorial thinking.
Distended political thinking motivates leaders, but fabrications so obvious that a more or less reality-based twelve-year-old can see through them only work on the MAGA masses because a massive, interconnected clot of lies has scrambled their capacity to see what is in front of their noses. Once a person is sufficiently marinated in conspiracy mentality sauce, any contrary evidence can be serially dismissed as just one more example of the conspiracy, so that the discrepant evidence rarely amounts to anything coherent enough to spark serious doubts. Soon the dynamics of cognitive dissonance blind a person to the series of cognitive choices he or she has already made; it works, in this regard at least, the same way that a religious cult hijacks new members from reality.
The Trump cult now consists of somewhere between 28 and 35 percent of Republican voters, sometimes defined in polls as people who would vote for Trump even were he to run at the head of a third-party ticket, and more recently even if he is a convicted felon doing jail time. That sums to between 45.2 and 56.5 million people out of a total of 161.42 million registered voters—not a trivial number. Not all of them are conspiracy-addled, adolescent-brained naïfs, but many do appear to fit the description.
This dawning realization, evidently, is what led Mitt Romney to remark, just after the January 2024 Iowa Republican primary: “I think a lot of people in this country are out of touch with reality and will accept anything Donald Trump tells them. . . . You had a jury that said Donald Trump raped a woman, and that doesn’t seem to be moving the needle. . . . There’re a lot of things about today’s electorate that I have a hard time understanding.”[10] Well good morning, Mitt, you master grabber of zeitgeist tailwinds.
For recent evidence of just how deranged a large chunk of the electorate is, note the mid-August 2023 CBS poll that showed Trump voters trusted Trump more than anyone to tell the truth, more than their ministers, friends, and family, and more even than Fox News propagandists. Unfortunately, the poll did not accurately convey the essence here, and Charlie Sykes, who reported it in The Bulwark on August 21 under the subhead “A cult by the numbers,” seems for once to have missed the main deliverable here. Most Trump voters do not understand by “truth” or “the truth” what normal people understand by it. When they hear that word many hear “hidden” or “secret” or “forbidden” truth, truth no one dare name except the charismatic leader of the cult. What’s the point of being in a cult if everyone knows the hidden plot of history rolling out?
There’s nothing historically odd about this by American standards: Before the Civil War huge percentages of American voters believed in Masonic and Papist conspiracies on the basis of thin air. Such impressionable people, then and now, have typically already put plenty of distance between their extant state of mind and an evidence- or fact-based world. Any semblance of cognitive adulthood must already have vanished, and their mind’s eye has to have already been framed or primed by the kinds of simple storylines one encounters in mass-marketed entertainment fare. It doesn’t take a proverbial rocket scientist to plot out the way from fictitious “Three Days of the Condor”-type “deep state” plotlines, hammered into the public psyche by our entertainment screen culture since 1975—richly illustrated in mass-entertainment fantasy dystopia hits like Black Mirror, Westworld, and Handmaiden’s Tale—to the same model applied to current political reality.
Indeed, the same cultural meme shows up in the recent trajectory of tastes for fiction reading. Most categories of fiction have been selling poorly for a while now, with one stand-out exception: young adult (YA) fiction, of the sort epitomized by the “Harry Potter,” “Hunger Games,” “A Series of Unfortunate Events,” and “Artemis Fowl” series. Tanner Greer observes three characteristics of the genre that have made it so popular.
The first is that in a time of generally declining literacy, books with an 8th-9th grade vocabulary now appeal not just to young adults but to older-than-young adults. More than half of those reading YA offerings are older than 22 years of age.
The second is that the settings, though fictionally otherworldly, tend nonetheless to resemble slightly antique, mostly late-19th or early 20th century, urban America and other familiar places rather than a medieval past or a distant teched-up future. Why? Because, argues Greer, many young adults believe that the problems they encounter, largely from unresponsive and self-dealing authorities of one sort or another, were caused by their parents’ and grandparents’ generation.
And third, the payoff to the point being exercised here, virtually all of them involve some sort of conspiracy hatched by one in-authority cabal or another—focused on the inevitable key sinister decision made just out of earshot—to be uncovered and overcome.[11] This is the literary parallel to the “anonymous they” that has sunk deep roots in common language: whatever the problem, large or small, specific or hazily amorphous, “they”—never defined or named because “they” do not exist as a actual group—are behind it.
Greer doesn’t mention it, but another telltale cultural trait being displayed here is spectacalization. All of these narrative plotlines limn spectacle as well as conspiracy. They seek the wow, the astounding complex, however small and evanescent. A perfect example is “the monstrous mind” of Emil Ferris. Ferris, a graphic novelist who likes to walk around in a witch’s pointy black hat, has the huge advantage of “writing” in a form that is more image than words. But listen now to Sophia Nguyen’s description of one of Ferris’s most popular offerings, My Favorite Thing is Monsters: “Readers fell in love with this chimera of a story, which shapeshifted from mystery to Holocaust novel to queer-coming of age tale . . . like someone threw together Otto Dix and back issues of Mad magazine and set the blender on high.”[12] Well, with ingredients like that, how could it possibly have failed these days?
Young fiction fare corresponds well to the trend in American novel writing generally toward increasing weirdness.[13] It sells, just as otherworldly fantasy sold during the West’s “arts and crafts” epoch a century and a quarter ago, and the reason is the same: Destabilizing times of rapid change sire romanticism and escapism. They also sire retreat into childhood. They seek the way back to the Garden, to banish both pesky sexuality and terrifying mortality, and for this they characteristically rely on the premodern, mythic cognitive state of mind. It’s quite simple really. Might this escapist mentality make its way into actual politics? You think?
Facticity Termites
We used to assume that the number of adults who routinely blur the distinction between fiction and fact could not possibly be large enough to matter, not enough, surely, to make a significant difference in our political life as a nation. Anyone who still thinks that hasn’t been paying attention. The same stuff keeps happening for an obvious reason: There is a political market for it because it works, and it works to the extent it does because our techno-spectacalized environment enables it to work. The techniques of obfuscation afforded by that environment help, when used knowingly, to break down key ways that normal people confirm reality against fiction. How does this work?
Philosophers have distinguished five and only five types of knowledge sources that generate together all knowledge of discrete facts: empirical—from the senses (you see the book in front of you); rational—from reason (you know from intuition that two plus four equals six); introspective—from self-knowledge (you have unique access to how you feel, for example if nose itches); from memories (you think you know what so-and-so said or did last week); and testimonial—from what others tell you, orally or in writing. Everything you know about the Glorious Revolution is from testimonial sources, since you did not see them with your own eyes in 1688-89, were not born with rational knowledge of them, they are not parts of you, and what you remember about them is only from testimonies read in the past.
We acquire knowledge from testimonies in basically two ways: We evaluate reliabilities of single testimonies or we trace the origins of multiple testimonies. We learn to trust what some people tell us and to distrust others; over time, too, we also learn to distinguish what we want people to tell us from their reliability.
What has been happening in recent years constitutes a diffuse but identifiable attempt to derange our evaluation of testimonial reliabilities. Historically, we trusted the Washington Post and distrusted, say, the National Enquirer. MAGA entrepreneurs, acting as willful facticity termites, set out to reverse that order by repeatedly presenting reliable media as “fake” and genuinely fake stuff as reliable, and by doing so frequently and consistently enough that unreliable sources could present themselves as indistinguishable from reliable ones—especially in social media, and in the same graphic electronic format—and get away with it. They have been substituting fantasy for facts and conspiracy theories for history by manufacturing Ripleys and reverse-Ripleys pretty much without surcease.
With sufficient confusion tossed up between the reliable and unreliable, reliable sources can no longer readily suppress wishful thinking. So people start cataloguing as reality whatever other people say that reflects their emotions and prejudices. Nobody more reliable can counter the wishful thinking because they are not trusted, and those who try just persuade a wishful thinker to trust them even less—around and around and down we go.
Even more insidious is the use of technologically augmented rumor mills to confuse independent with dependent testimony. Independent testimonies can generate reliable knowledge even when they are unreliable or when the testimonial sources’ reliability cannot be evaluated. But they are usually more reliable than obviously dependent biased sources. The current technological environment enables a political trickster to blur the distinction between what is and is not an independent source of information. They enables the deliberate spreading of rumors, and spreading rumors, in turn, is designed to bombard people with the same disinformation from many directions so as to appear independent and therefore believable in the above sense. This is why it makes sense for foreign governments to use fake bots to influence U.S. elections: They supply confirmatory bias from directions other than the principal ones.
Before social media, this sort of thing could only be done by implanting gossips in select groups orally and in person so as to make it difficult for anybody to trace the rumors back to any single source. In our time, social media has technically augmented the old technique of rumor mongering, much like radio and television once augmented the mob effect of participation in rallies where most people cannot be present.
Social media’s rumor-mongering capacities are significantly augmented by technologically facilitated pervasive anonymity. Gossips, shills, bots, and assorted crazy people are all protected from the consequences of deliberate disinformation by the simple “fact” that it is impossible for practical purposes to hold anyone responsible for what they say if they wish to stay anonymous. Lots of people are angry and frustrated and that is nothing new. Such people have always wanted to lash out in cathartic ranting. Now it’s easy and free: outrage, obscenity, baseless accusations, and more—all without any likelihood of reprovement or remorse. As if American culture wasn’t already coarse enough before social media.
It is also, therefore, no coincidence that the reliability of experts, intelligence analysts, serious journalists, and rational elites have come under attack, since others pretending to be what they are often spout nonsense and the typical listener cannot readily distinguish among claimants. The old sources of reliable testimonial knowledge are still there, but thanks in part to social media anonymity the ratio now tilts against them.[14] The shredding of reliable context in this sense is the direct analogue to the manipulation of context in magic arts, “hide-the-puck” sports strategies, tall-tale jokes, optical illusions, and con artistry.
But it’s more than that. Destroying the reliability and credibility of formerly trustworthy sources of information functions, as suggested already, as a softening up process for the presentation and success of much bigger lies. Trump’s “fake news” mantra set the stage for the “stop the steal” Big Lie. Subsidiary but still necessary examples of “doing a Ripley” since and beyond the November 2020 “Big Lie” are plentiful, as well. Trump doesn’t stop; the pattern always repeats. He seems not to know any other way to act. But even if he does he has so thoroughly trapped himself in his web of lies that no escape remains possible without collapsing the entire sham. “Oh, what a tangled web we weave….,” right?
We saw a classic post-January 6 Ripley at work, for example, in the August 2022 FBI raid on Mar-o-Lago. Trump got caught with his hand in the cookie jar, or in this case the classified documents briefcase. No reality-based adult can possibly miss the massive evidence for his violation of the law, not just or even mainly in the fact that he had the documents where they should not have been, but that he lied about having them, tried to evade returning them, and made claims about his innocence—that he declassified them by merely so uttering even after his term in office ended—that amounted to obstruction of justice. Why did Trump take the documents in the first place?
Three reasons seem most likely: to sell what might be sold down the line; to hand them over to Vladimir Putin as a ticket to a luxurious Russian exile, if necessary, to escape prison; and to use the documents as extortion bait in defense against a Federal indictment. In other words, “indict me and I’ll reveal all these national security secrets to the world. I’ll out-Snowden Snowden.” That is why nothing significant about the Trump security-breach case ever resembled those of Joe Biden and Mike Pence.
Whatever Trump’s reasons, the MAGA circus masters were quick to “Do a Ripley” after the raid. The raid, they claimed, was really all about politics, nothing to do with actual law enforcement. It was a deep state witchhunt, and not coincidentally an exact projection of what a Trumpian second-term state would try to do to its opponents. Trump declassified all the documents with a magical utterance of the lips so there was no crime, and so on, went the Ripleyfied text. The Trump faithful were again instantly stranded in wowland between A and not-A: Did he violate the law, or was he framed? Framed, of course; it’s a conspiracy! Even the merest suggestion was enough manufactured ambiguity for the purpose to hand.
A reverse Ripley followed in January 2023 when it turned out that Joe Biden was also in possession of classified material that he should not have had, especially outside a safe. The reverse Ripley consisted in lying that the Trump and Biden cases were identical when they were not, in hopes of using Biden’s gaffe to force an exoneration of Trump. It did not help the optic that the Attorney General, Merrick Garland, appointed a Special Prosecutor for the Biden case so soon, but no doubt he did so to avoid charges of politicizing the Justice Department—the last thing he wants to do—and to bring some authority to the inevitable conclusion that, no, the two cases were not comparable before the law.
[1] See Warzel, “I’m Running Out of Ways to Explain How Bad This Is,” The Atlantic, October 11, 2024, and Claire Berlinski’s kind reference to Warzel and me in “Cluster B,” Cosmopolitan Globalist, October 17, 2024.
[2] Full disclosure: Miller’s wife, Katie Rose Waldman, is a maternal cousin of mine, and her parents and other family members attended the wedding with then-President Trump as an invited guest. I was gratefully uninvited; Katie Rose and I are….not close.
[3] I heard this very sentence in 2019 in Singapore from the former Singaporean Ambassador to Russia, Chris Cheng. I answered: “No, Chris, he tells it like it isn’t. He lies as easily and often as he breathes.” I did not change his view. Trump was popular in East Asia generally because of his uncharacteristic bluntness, and also because of his wealth-flaunting and general “magnifico” demeanor. It fit the contemporary culture well: “Crazy rich Donald,” in other words; so what’s not to like?
[4] Another observer who saw this clearly early on is the weird and odious Scott Adams. See his Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter (Portfolio, 2017). In my review of the book (“Scott Adams’ ‘Moist Robots’,” Law & Liberty, December 19, 2017) I pointed out that Adams was trying to manipulate the reader even as he was explaining to the reader how Trump manipulates others. That same motive was behind the astounding complex he pulled off in early March 2023 with his infamous remarks about “Black people.” The parallels between Win Bigly and his March stunt are clear. In the book he claimed to be a liberal Democrat who started out in the run-up to the November 2016 election being a Hillary Clinton supporter; in the stunt he claimed he always checked “black” on any form because he thought that was “a way to help Black people.” This never made any sense, anymore than his claimed support for Hillary Clinton did, which was just a lie used to arrest readers’ attention. The March stunt seemed at first to be working: Adams got lots of media attention which, like Trump, he intended to cash in on via his new podcast. The mainstream media, which provided Trump with billions of dollars worth of free exposure in 2015 and 2016, never seems to learn its lesson. They behave like Adams’s “moist robots” headed to the bank. Hence the irony of the Washington Post headline on the day Trump pleaded “not guilty” to 34 felony counts brought by the New York District Attorney: See Dan Balz, “On a sad day of spectacle, a nation is left to wonder how it came to this,” Washington Post, April 5, 2023. “Sad day of spectacle” was the perfect, if accidental, phrase for that occasion. But “a nation is left to wonder how it came to this”? Memo to Mr. Balz and his media associates: Wonder by looking in your own damned mirrors!
[5] Zafón, The Shadow of the Wind (Penguin, 2004 [original Spanish, La Sombra de Viento, 2001]), pp. 42-3.
[6] For data and details see the excellent analysis by Jonathan Swan, Ruth Igielnik, Shane Goldmacher and Maggie Haberman, “How Trump Benefits from the Indictment Effect,” New York Times, August 13, 2023.
[7] Emmylou Harris, “Jerusalem Tomorrow,” from A Cowgirl’s Prayer (September 1993).
[8] Wilder, The Eighth Day (Harper & Row, 1967), p. 166.
[9] Mitchell, Cloud Atlas, p. 168.
[10] Romney quoted in Charlie Sykes’s Morning Shots, January 18, 2024. Full discloser: I once briefly worked with Mitt Romney when he first ran for President in 2007-8. My former State Department colleague Mitchell Reiss, who had been director of the Policy Planning office when I was a speechwriter bivouacked in Room 7311, asked me if I would be willing to help the candidate write his first major foreign policy speech. Reiss knew Romney from his time as Governor of Massachusetts. I reminded Mitchell that I was not a Republican, only a Schedule B “expert” hire. He said Romney did not care. If he didn’t care, then I didn’t care that he was a Republican; so, partly out of curiosity, I flew to Boston and met with Romney. I asked him who his ideal audience was for the speech, to be delivered at the Bush Presidential Library at Texas A&M University. He answered, “I want to speak to the foreign policy expert community, Republican and otherwise. I have established my domestic policy credentials as Governor of Massachusetts, and I have proved that a Republican can be a popular elected governor of a mainly Democratic-voting state. Now I need to establish my foreign policy and national security credentials.” With that reasonable purpose in mind, I prepared an outline that passed muster, and with Mitchell’s help—he knew Romney’s body language and cadences much better than me—prepared a speech draft. Romney liked it, offering but few changes. Then at nearly the last minute he changed his mind about his audience, deciding that he needed instead to speak to the GOP rank-and-file. When he told me this with only about 30 hours left before wheels-up from Boston to College Station, I told him that I’d work late to transform the speech text for the new target audience; I assured him that, having written for Colin Powell, who favored army-prol cadences, this would not be difficult. He thanked me for offering but said, “That’s won’t be necessary, Adam. I was an English major; I can transform it myself.” I smiled; the speech did not land particularly well. I did not vote for him.
[11] Tanner Greer, “Escaping Only So Far,” City Journal, July 16, 2021.
[12] Nguyen, “Inside the monstrous mind of Emil Ferris,” Washington Post Book World, May 26, 2024, p. B5.
[13] See Jess Keiser, “It's not your imagination. Novels are getting weirder.,” Washington Post (Book World), December 17, 2023, p. B4.
[14] This section draws from Aveizer Tucker and Adam Garfinkle, “The Etiology of a Fact,” The American Interest, January 25, 2018.