The game 45 always wins
Just say what you don’t mean…
“He asked me to do some crazy shit.”
-Trump’s former legal counsel Don McGahn
Trump to former acting Attorney General Jeffrey Rosen: “No, just say the Election was corrupt. I’ll take care of the rest, with the (help of) Republicans in Congress.”
These gentlemen, McGahn and Rosen, well-heeled and able lawyers in Trump’s gaze, balked at learning a new game, the perfidy of “public relations:”
Just say what you don’t mean… just say anything to move along the effect you want to make…your intentions will remain hidden because people don’t really listen.
This cynical attitude is getting legs in America’s pandemic times. People don’t really listen. Ever notice how 45 always finishes his minion’s sentences? How he uncannily completes one’s nihilistic curiosity? Because he assumes his counterpart is not listening. So rather than answer anything, rather than reduce ambiguity, 45 fills the void with nonsense and misinformation. Some call this lying, others, “public manipulation.” The effect is always the same: 45 fills the space with clutter, the silence with noise, the normal with the unprecedented. And so we are whisked away to “Trump Neverland,” recruited into a gang of “lost boys.”
People don’t take vaccines. People confuse what is healthy with what some think is in their self-interest. So to expand the self-denial pool, surrogate listeners are invoked- co-conspirators, liars, sycophants. In Trump’s world, those loyal to him. It’s surrogate listener interview week at Mar-a-Lago and Bedminster. Would the visits only involve ring kissing. No, these visits are job interviews. And the ‘crazy shit’ McGahn is referring to is precisely the interview question: will you…?
Folks who refuse to take the vaccine, generally speaking also refuse to listen. Voices are fervently sought- a celebrity, a priest, a doctor, a lover- those who might influence the strident rejects ‘to do the right thing.’ Voices that go unheard for these deniers live in the effect, not in spoken reality. So ‘the research is still out,’ ‘I will only follow my conscience (self imposed ignorance),’ ‘spoons will stick to my chest,’ ‘I don’t really know (if it works)…do you?’
A political analogy: Rep. Kevin McCarthy who on January 6 yelled at 45 over the phone ‘but this isn’t how it’s supposed to be (in Neverland)… get them to stop it!’ And was told, “Well Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.” This past week’s McCarthy yodel: “I didn’t look at it (January 6 Committee Hearings).” There is no history, no political reality for Kevin McCarthy, just effect.
Like McGahn and Rosen, who operated within 45’s gaze, on January 6 Kevin McCarthy was reminded of the effect. “Neverland” won.
The self-healing among us implore others not to succumb to 45’s daily rantings, but the “rants”leach into the public domain. They are the bitter sap, the reeking bile, the noxious swill. And some folks- friends, family, colleagues- eagerly swear allegiance to “the effect.” Those who demand relief from the rants are ridiculed and dismissed for they are the ‘conspiracy’ deniers, the “false narrators,” the wimps, the snowflakes.
45 is gone.
The game, the effect, the ‘Big Lie’ persists.
‘So unprecedented.’
August 1
