Ink Tea Stone Leaf

It perpetually amazes me, that we have built a nearly universal social apparatus specifically to explain to children how the world works, and yet so many people don’t really understand anything that their paychecks do not absolutely depend upon their grasping. I could possibly live with this state of affairs if these people did not smugly insist that their ignorance was a secret back-door hack to being cannier than people who paid attention in school. Unfortunately, they insist. I am left with no choice but to hurl invective at them until they learn how to be ashamed of themselves.

Consider the present circumstances: in 2024, through apathy and delusionally wishful thinking, the United States of America allowed one of the worst possible people to be elected as its president. Donald Trump’s approval rating has declined since then, as he has done many terrible things that it was always obvious that he was going to do, and people have remembered that they don’t like those things. He is arguably the least popular president since the advent of reliable polling.

Last weekend, somebody tried to shoot him at the White House Correspondent’s Dinner. This is not very unusual. Every U.S. president since at least 1865 has been the target of at least one assassination attempt. This happens even to relatively popular presidents, and Donald Trump is not popular. That somebody would try to kill him on any particular day and in any particular setting is about as surprising as the fact that he immediately began lying about it.

Oh yes, he lied about it. He lies about everything, and we’ll get back to that in a minute. But first, we need to get one thing clear.

A lot of people who fancy themselves clever, watchful observers of American politics through their phone screens latched very quickly onto the idea that this was a “false flag” operation, that the entire thing was staged by Trump and his administration. They questioned how a shooter could possibly have gotten as close as a different floor of a public hotel before being confronted; they scrutinized the behavior of people caught on camera and used their expertise in body language to determine they were acting ungenuinely; they noted how the timing of the event coincided just a little neatly with any of a half-dozen scandals and boondoggles that he would prefer to leverage or distract us from. Most of all, they leaned hard on a simple heuristic: that Trump’s version of reality is the polar opposite of truth. His every act, in other words, is an attempt to fool you into thinking up is down, and consequently if Trump says up is up, then up must in fact be down. If Trump says that a person tried to kill him for political reasons, it becomes necessary to assert that the very idea that a person who opposes Trump politically would resort to violence is preposterous.

It is not preposterous. However, acting like it is preposterous, especially when so many “smart” people are giving you cover to do so, is a good way to signal to the social media ecosystem that you’re the kind of “critical thinker” who won’t get fooled again. Critical thinking, after all, means parroting the hot take that best conforms to your preconceived notions.

No it doesn’t, you know that. You’re smarter than that, you say. It’s only that Trump’s vomit of propaganda is so voluminous and shameless that he has become the boy who cried wolf, and so it is not your fault if your first impulse is to disbelieve him. It’s better to be reflexively skeptical, so you do not fall into the humiliating trap of believing Trumpian propaganda.

Trump is a propagandist, and he lies all the time. But as often as a propagandist will lie by inventing nonsense, it is always their preference to lie about the truth. There is no reason to orchestrate every significant moment like a stage show and fabricate inflammatory incidents when you can misrepresent an incident in a light that flatters your priorities.

Not long after the incident at the WHCD, Trump was claiming that the alleged shooter was motivated by anti-Christian bias. That was not just a lie, but a classic Trumpian howler. There is no evidence that the alleged shooter bore animosity toward Christianity or toward Christians as a group. It’s just the kind of slander that Trump knows will be accepted without question by his Evangelical supporters (who regard the existence of any non-Evangelical viewpoint as an attack on Christianity) while muddying the waters for everybody else. I want to be very clear that there is no reason to believe any particular detail about this incident solely on the word of any member of the administration, because they will only be truthful if the truth serves their propaganda purposes better than any lie they could invent.

That being said, leaping directly to “this was all staged” is not reasonable, and it’s not a particularly savvy ploy either. No matter how much Trump lies about this incident, when the alleged shooter has his day in court it will be apparent that Trump’s version of what happened (that is, that it actually happened) will be more accurate than the version promulgated by the conspiracy theorists. Making Trump appear honest and sane by comparison is not the most effective way to oppose him.

To be frank, nobody who opposes Trump or Trumpism can afford to voluntarily place themselves on the wrong side of the credibility gap. Making yourself appear untrustworthy and unmoored from reality serves the purposes of his propaganda. Please do not do his work for him.