Trump’s Fake News
Indeed, confusion is such a predictable result that we might describe it as Trump’s purpose.
But why would the President-elect deliberately confuse us?
Perhaps what we see in Trump is the full flowering of an attitude of cynical nihilism, which some say is part of the zeitgeist of our time in the decadent West. Within this worldview, there is no such thing as truth or facts; there are only personalities, subjectivities, endless spin. Megan Garber’s fine essay, “The Image in the Age of Pseudo-Reality,” illustrates this point of view with her comparison of Donald Trump with P.T. Barnum.
.. “An African-American laborer realizes that he has much more in common with a ‘white male’ laborer than with a privileged liberal smugly reasoning about the need for political correctness. A single mother fighting for survival understands how alien are the interests and the views of a feminist who distributes multimillion gender related grants among her friends and clients.”