収束ゾーンでのライフ: Life in the Convergence Zone

The media have been sanewashing and coherency-washing Trump for years now, and the deeper he gets into word salad, they more work they’re doing for him. It’s not just nightmarish, it’s deceptive. Given that you have to choose to filter and select words, then put them into an order that makes sense, I assert that it’s not just that – I assert that sanewashing Trump at this point is just lying on his behalf.

I say so because when a reporter does this, they are not reporting his answer to a question. They are reporting their answer, made up of a selected subset of the words which came out of his mouth in no particular order and with no particular meaning. They could about as easily have picked different words and put them in a different order and come up with a different result.

When I was in graduate school, teaching undergrads, I had a student with severe writing issues. I tried to help. After not very long I started begging him to go to the literacy centre on campus, one specifically for people like him, to get help. I suspect he was severely dyslexic, and I have no idea how he got through high school in that state – but he did.

He would write answers to questions that were quite literally just collections of words in often – even generally – no discernable order. They were piles of words from which I could choose to pick out the actual correct answer, but from which I could equally choose to pick out several different very wrong answers. And so, I would give no credit and plead with him yet again to take advantage of any of the many resources available on campus. He refused without fail.

He seemed bright enough, and maybe he knew the work – but maybe he didn’t. It was literally impossible for me to tell.

So if I were to pick out the right answer from his word pile and give him credit for it, it wouldn’t’ve been him writing the correct answer.

It would’ve been me writing the correct answer.

That’s what it is to sanewash Trump, and that is what the political reporting class has been doing.

(It’s also what his audiences do. They don’t hear him. They hear themselves, in his voice.)

One writer this week at the Washington Post decided not to do that sanewashing. He printed exactly what Trump said in response to a simple, straightforward, pre-screened softball question, and ran that answer in its entirety, with some notes.

And WaPo buried it in “opinion.”

It’s an opinion to print what Trump actually said, in its entirety, in his actual words, in response to a question. It is opinion.

I guess it just reveals too goddamn much.

The question was:

Like my fellow Americans, my grocery bill has not gone down. Everything is still so very expensive. What steps will your administration take to help American families suffering from this inflation?

It’s not paywalled. Go ahead and read it yourself. Try to read it as the answer to a simple question about grocery prices without constructing that answer on your own by picking and choosing and reordering from his words.

Good fucking luck. You’ll need it, because nothing’s actually there.

This is where he is, and it is not a healthy place.

18 days remain.

Posted via Solarbird{y|z|yz}, Collected.