“The whole point is to wield this kind of absurdity as an instrument of power”
by digby
Also known as:
Greg Sargent has a scorching piece today about Trump and his media apparatus that informs this moment. It’s not good news:
An excerpt:
Trump and certain of his media partisans have long been engaged in something altogether different — something that can only be described as concerted and deliberate disinformation.
Two new televised attacks on House Speaker Nancy Pelosi — Trump’s interview with Laura Ingraham, and Sean Hannity’s follow-up broadcast, both of which aired on Thursday night — provide an occasion to underscore the point.
In his interview with Ingraham, Trump ripped into Pelosi for privately saying she wants to see Trump “in prison.” He blasted Pelosi as a “nasty, vindictive, horrible person” and claimed special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s report was a “disaster” that produced “nothing” (an incalculable absurdity, given its incredibly damning revelations).
Trump also insisted that Mueller produced a letter to “straighten out” his recent public remarks, which were “wrong” (as Steve Benen shows, Mueller in no way backed off his devastating core assertions). And Trump called the investigation a “phony witch hunt,” absurdly suggesting the Russian attack on our political system, which Mueller extensively documented, was a big nothing never worth investigating.
“I think they’re in big trouble,” Trump said of Pelosi and Democrats, “when you look at the kind of crimes that were committed.”
This echoed Trump’s long-running argument that the only corruption that occurred was the Russia investigation itself, perpetrated by law enforcement and Democrats, an absurd rewriting of basic history that has generated one buffoonish pratfall after another.
Naturally, Hannity picked up this baton, tearing into Pelosi for wanting “a political opponent locked up in prison,” which “happens in banana republics”:
Sean Hannity on Fox tonight, without any hint of irony: “Based on no actual crimes, [Pelosi] wants a political opponent locked up in prison. Umm, that happens in banana republics. Beyond despicable behavior.” pic.twitter.com/bZceCo4sIn— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) June 7, 2019
Hannity also claimed it’s an “irrefutable fact that there was no collusion.” This is a severe distortion: Mueller said “collusion” isn’t a legally meaningful term and documented extensive efforts by Trump World to encourage, profit off, and, yes, conspire with the Russian attack. Hannity suggested Democrats “don’t state” what they believe Trump has done wrong — a ridiculous lie, since this is amply laid out in Democratic documents.
It’s the disinformation, stupid
It should be impossible to watch these diatribes in full without quickly realizing that this isn’t ordinary political dishonesty — some level of artifice is an inevitable feature of politics — but rather is something much more insidious. What’s notable is the sheer comprehensiveness of the effort to create an alternate set of realities whose departure from the known facts seemingly aims to be absolute and unbridgeable.
As many have noted, it’s richly absurd that Hannity is claiming Pelosi is engaging in “banana republic” stuff, given that Trump has called for investigations into his political opponents for years. Indeed, in the Ingraham interview, Trump blasted Pelosi over this, then immediately segued into suggesting that Democrats will soon be held accountable for imagined crimes.
But this absurd duality should be understood as a feature of this kind of Trumpian disinformation. It won’t do to note its self-contradictory nature. The whole point is to wield this kind of absurdity as an instrument of power. It’s to use an alternate reality to supplant and extinguish good faith efforts to discern actual reality — to blot out the possibility of shared agreement on facts that are in front of all our noses through the sheer insistence that the alternate reality is supreme. The alt-reality doesn’t have to be proved as the true one; just established as the dominant one.
This is correct. The battle is no longer between Democrats and Republicans. It’s between reality and fiction. And fiction could win.
And it means the man who wrote this could actually be re-elected unless Democrats are very serious and very smart.
