Editor’s Note
This lockdown experience has taught me a few new things about myself. A friend tells me that, since lockdown, she’s discovered a compulsion to clean her kitchen with a toothpick. I’ve identified in myself an entirely different preoccupation. If I look closely, though, there are faintly discernable overlaps. She’s obsessed with picking at entrenched muck with a hopelessly ineffectual tool. I can’t stop being appalled by Donald Trump. Call it a morbid fascination, call it a weird guilty pleasure, but watching Trump bumble his way through this crisis is a remarkably absorbing pastime.
It would be entertainingly funny if it weren’t so damn serious. He’s making it up as he goes along, attacking or blaming others for his incompetence or, when he gets caught out in lies, threatening reporters, opponents and his own people alike should any of them step out of line. Dr Anthony Fauci has to seriously watch his step or Potus will “#FireFauci” as he threatened this week in a tweet. Where would the US be then? Trump also ordered a halt in World Health Organisation funding this week, accusing the WHO of having “failed in its basic duty” of stopping the coronavirus’s spread from China. But the most alarming thing about watching the “Trump Show” is its indictment of the people who voted him in. How gullible are they?
Or perhaps it’s we who are the morons, the hapless fools who believe what we read in the liberal press? But then, people will believe almost anything if it aligns with what they believe already. The traction gained by conspiracy theories, the subject of our feature story this week, proves this. In discussion about the story, my colleague Patrick Bulger said: “I always think it’s overlooked that apart from anything else about them, conspiracy theories buttress prejudices and serve a particular ideology, and it’s the conspiracy theorists’s ability to tap into a prejudice and exploit it that enables him to subliminally reinforce bigotry by way of a fanciful story.” Or as writer Jasper Fforde put it: “Feedback loops, echo chambers, circular reinforcement. All could play a part in escalating the utterly imaginary to the level of reality, sometimes with fatal consequences.”
So have your way with us, Illuminati — just make it quick before Trump does.