Alternative Reality

I love the alternative reality or virtual worlds that allow us to temporarily escape from the dreary business of being alive, and staying alive, in this world. Books, films and games provide just that; a chance to lose ourselves in characters and worlds that are just real enough so we can identify with them, but unreal enough for us to escape in them. There's a big problem however, when ideological divides cause some people to live their alternate reality in our real world.

Trump is the most polarizing president the United States of America has ever seen. That's not all his fault though; the times were right, and unfortunately still are right, for such a polarizing figure to rise to prominence. Whatever else I've said about this man, and that's a lot, he was also the most authentic American president during my lifetime, closely followed by George W. Bush. You see, however rational we think ourselves to be, study after study shows that when we choose public leadership figures, we go by appearance far more than by actual policies or proposals. Presidents therefore are usually the most well prepared when it comes to painting their public image, presenting a heavily curated version of themselves to potential voters. That's not Trump, I think. I think he really is the total and complete asshole we see in front of the camera. He doesn't think before he speaks, and his orange tan and plastic hairdo are part of who he really is.

When he points to the cameras of the mainstream media during rallies or press conferences and calls them out as "fake news", I think he's being genuine, and we all know that the mainstream media lies to us on a regular basis. So he's not wrong. The only problem with him calling out the media is not that he's just as fake, he's not as I've just explained, no, it's that he only calls them out when they don't agree with him. If there was ever a time when mainstream media was more often right than the actual president, it was during Trump's time in the Oval Office. It's not just that he lies; his lies are grand and unrelenting. Alternate realities are built upon alternate facts, and Trump started building his alternate reality on day one of his presidency. Remember how his counselor Kellyanne Conway used the phrase "alternative facts" in January 2017? That was about the attendance numbers at Trump's inauguration, which according to Trump was of course the biggest crowd ever seen on earth. Let me just quote the Wikipedia article about this Orwellian affair:

"Alternative facts" was a phrase used by U.S. Counselor to the President, Kellyanne Conway, during a Meet the Press interview on January 22, 2017, in which she defended White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer's false statement about the attendance numbers of Donald Trump's inauguration as President of the United States. When pressed during the interview with Chuck Todd to explain why Spicer would "utter a provable falsehood", Conway stated that Spicer was giving "alternative facts". Todd responded, "Look, alternative facts are not facts. They're falsehoods."

Conway's use of the phrase "alternative facts" for demonstrable falsehoods was widely mocked on social media and sharply criticized by journalists and media organizations, including Dan Rather, Jill Abramson, and the Public Relations Society of America. The phrase was extensively described as Orwellian, particularly in reference to the term doublethink. Within four days of the interview, sales of George Orwell's novel Nineteen Eighty-Four had increased 95-fold, which The New York Times and others attributed to Conway's use of the phrase, making it the number-one bestseller on Amazon.com.
_{source: Wikipedia}

Before that, Trump gained prominence first as the host of a popular Television show, "The Apprentice". There he was also able to act as the obnoxious capitalist he is in real life. But his political career started when he became a prominent proponent of the "birther" lie, a conspiracy surrounding Barack Obama's citizenship. Trump clung to this debunked lie for years and still hasn't apologized for this racist move. Everyone knows that Trump has lost the 2020 elections. Everyone but Trump and his most loyal followers. It's a Big Lie. This term, "Big Lie", is the label applied to a propaganda technique used by the Nazis:

The German expression was coined by Adolf Hitler, when he dictated his book Mein Kampf (1925), to describe the use of a lie so colossal that no one would believe that someone "could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously." Hitler claimed that the technique had been used by Jews to blame Germany's loss in World War I on German general Erich Ludendorff, who was a prominent nationalist political leader in the Weimar Republic.
_{source: Wikipedia}

The Nazis then adopted that technique for themselves, as we all know, and the label was used again to describe Trump's false claims about the 2020 elections. The lies this man has told are too big and too numerous to fit in this one small post; if you want a list, you can visit the PolitiFact site with FALSE FACT-CHECKS ON DONALD TRUMP, although this list isn't complete according to the Washington Post's statement that Trump's false or misleading claims total 30573 over 4 years.

There's no two ways about it; Trump has gathered a following that lives in an alternate reality. Therefore it shouldn't surprise anyone that among them we find a cross-section of believers in all kinds of wacky conspiracy theories, racists, white supremacists and so on; people who believe just about anything as long as it conforms with their personal bias and beliefs. Stories set in an alternative reality are fun; they're often set in a world where historical events have a different outcome than in the real world. The problem with Trump's MAGA movement is that it's trying to write such an alternate history as we speak. And it's not a pretty picture.

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