11.4

You can’t have it both ways. Or, maybe you can. Who the hell knows anymore?

It is difficult to say what makes Donald Trump so peculiarly irksome to his political opponents, but you could start with pointing at his shamelessness in the face of his own hypocrisy. I refer you to a series of tweets, written one day apart, only a few days ago. First, this one, on the morning of Halloween:

And then, not quite a day later, this tweet on the morning of November 1st:

Enjoy! The scene is so familiar it feels tired to sketch it out again. That Trump will credit himself with the good and blame the bad on his enemies, to an absurd degree, is a well established trope these days.

And it is perhaps important to say that, although these tweets were written only a day apart, they are separated by something like forty tweets and retweets, so it is likely that the President didn’t even notice the contradiction between these ideas. That they are but passing chirps in a torrent of tweeting is an important feature of Donald Trump’s communicative style: a pace of information output so exhausting that attention to one controversy provides cover for ten others.

And so, here is where we start our work at Hot Cakes: in the media environment that Donald Trump built. A world where it is often difficult to distinguish between objective reality and partisan reality. And as we start to think ahead toward the 2020 election, I wonder: how will this all feel in a year? Will we find that, in the end, the facts have won out? Will objective reality prevail? Or will we find that the political game is now fundamentally changed, and that reality has been ultimately discredited?

I look forward, with trepidation.

Harold

November 4th, 2019