The Fleeting Horror
It arrived in Yours Truly’s brain, stayed for perhaps one ten-thousandth of a second, and vanished before I had time time to write it down.
He actually believes that shit…
History is full of liars. Liars are manageable. They know where reality is buried because they’re the ones who dug the hole. Given enough pressure, enough evidence, enough embarrassment, they’ll eventually point to the shovel.
The true menace is the evil fuckwad who keeps moving the hole.
That’s the unsettling realization that keeps surfacing whenever Donald Trump opens his mouth. It’s tempting to imagine some grand conspiracy room, complete with cigar smoke, velvet curtains and a PowerPoint presentation titled Today’s Fabrications. That explanation is oddly comforting because it assumes somebody’s still driving the bus.
A far stranger possibility is that there isn’t a driver at all. That reality has become automatic customer service. That facts don’t arrive from the outside anymore. They’re manufactured internally, quality-tested by ego, and released to the public only after they’ve been certified emotionally satisfying. The world exists merely to catch up with yesterday’s announcement.
When reality stubbornly refuses to cooperate, reality gets fired.
Judges become corrupt. Scientists become frauds. Reporters become enemies. Elections become rigged. Generals become traitors. Economists become fools. Historians become conspirators. Entire professions are dismissed with the casual wave of a hand because they failed the one test that matters: they contradicted the starring role.
The remarkable thing isn’t merely that millions accept this arrangement. Human beings have always preferred comforting myths over uncomfortable truths. The remarkable thing is how eagerly powerful institutions volunteer to help repaint the scenery.
Political parties once existed, in part at least, to restrain unstable personalities. That was supposedly an important function. Ambitious men would inevitably appear, and institutions would absorb their excesses before they became national disasters. Instead, the Republican Party discovered a more profitable business model. Why restrain the volcano when you can bottle the lava and sell commemorative mugs?
Around Trump, the transformation spread with almost comic efficiency. Legislators stopped asking whether statements were true and began asking whether correcting them might offend the base. Lawyers discovered constitutional theories with the shelf life of unrefrigerated milk. Television personalities evolved into professional applause signs. Every new contradiction became not a problem to solve but another loyalty test to survive.
The whole performance resembles an emperor wandering through a palace of mirrors. Every reflection insists he’s taller than before. Every echo assures him he’s never been mistaken. Every attendant applauds harder than the last because someone else is already reaching for the promotion.
Eventually, something extraordinary happens. The mirrors begin believing one another.
By then, objective reality has become merely another political faction. Gravity acquires opponents. Arithmetic develops critics. Memory becomes negotiable. Yesterday is rewritten before breakfast, revised again by lunch, and denounced by dinner as fake news.
A civilization can survive corruption. It can survive incompetence. It can even survive spectacular foolishness from time to time. What it can’t survive indefinitely is replacing reality with applause.
The terrifying part isn’t that one perverse, rapidly decaying sex-pest of a politician may sincerely believe whatever flatters him most at any given moment. The terrifying part is discovering how many otherwise functional adults decided this is a perfectly adequate operating system for the world’s oldest constitutional republic.
That tiny flash of insight—the smallest thought imaginable—turns out to be the largest warning.
“Oh... he actually believes it.”
Once that possibility enters your head, every performance looks less like strategy than gravity. Everything begins falling into place.
Jeeze, we are so fucked…
