Trouble upstairs with Trump
Before Trump we had the Goons.
That surrealist 1950s radio team headed by Spike Milligan knew a thing or two about alternative facts. In one lost-in-the-desert skit, the dimwitted Eccles charges to a shimmering mansion, heedless of warning cries it’s only a mirage. Then thump. He was upstairs, see, when it faded. Here’s the problem with Trump. He’s oftentimes delusional, but vested with such extraordinary powers that he really can reposition great chunks of the real world into a landscape of his own perception.
Temporarily, anyway, until the mirage fades and something from the real world come crashing down. Which brings us to unspecified but terrible events in Sweden after they left all those migrants in. ’’Sweden!’’ Trump marvelled at a re-election rally. ‘‘Who would believe this?’’ His comments had everyone scrambling and the Swedes themselves reassessing their own wellbeing of late and reassuring the world that nothing untoward had happened there at all. Certainly no major terrorist incident, such as others he referenced in his address.
Though he’s no stranger to mendacity, Trump didn’t simply make it up. He was basing his lamentation on a claim one filmmaker had made on one Fox News interview, blaming refugees for a purported crimewave that the film-maker believed Swedish authorities were trying to cover up. This comment was, simultaneously, two things to Trump. It was something that aligned with how he saw things. So it was therefore, immediately, something to seize upon and brandish without even a minimum of fact-checking, expert scrutiny (pah!) or contextual carefulness.
He feels instantly entitled to have confidence in such fleeting personal encounters with fact, opinion, whatever, because they support what he’s been saying and he has supreme confidence in himself. So on that basis alone he presented one more untested contention as a fact. Trump’s presidency has become so divorced from the real, let alone the rational, world that it invites comparisons to the Goons and their successors, Monty Python, who became masters of taking ridiculously made-up scenarios to their logical conclusion by still applying real-world rules to them.
Of course, the comedians were all fairly self-aware. And none of them had his finger on any scary buttons. That’s when the very concept ‘‘logical conclusion’’ becomes a scary one indeed.
- Fairfax NZ