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It’s Nice to Spend Some Time Outside Trump’s Reverse-Truman Show

Photo credit: Win McNamee - Getty Images
Photo credit: Win McNamee - Getty Images

From Esquire

An old editor of mine once described the experience of getting back on Twitter after a week's vacation as opening the door of a furnace. Flip open the hatch and position your face for the wave of heat. He was describing the general tone of simmering anger and burning conflict that seems to infuse around 85 percent of the messages on the platform. There are some celebrities, there's @dril, there are sub-communities that are largely self-contained and probably have a decent time, and then there's everyone else screaming at each other constantly—including some of those celebrities.

I tried to stay off Twitter for the last four days or so, across the long weekend and Tuesday. I tried to avoid most of The News. Occasionally, though, my addiction to the stimulus would kick in. It might be an oven, but it's also a firehose. You get used to the explosive flow of information, and anything else feels like a shower with bad water pressure. But when you jump back in, you can feel the generalized anxiety splash on you and start to gather around your ankles. It's immediate exposure to everything that's wrong with the world, and everyone who's mad about it, and everyone who's mad at them because they think the mad people are mad about the wrong thing, or they're blaming the wrong person. Then there are the people who aren't people at all. And then there's everyone who's profiting from the anger.

It doesn't help, of course, that the platform is now dominated by a President of the United States who is obsessed with it, and with generating an outsize share of that anger and conflict. It's useless to get into the perennial discussion of whether he knows what he's doing—that it's strategic—or if he's just acting out of impulse. He does what he does: he gets mad online, usually about something he saw on TV, and spawns a conflict. His followers rally around him as the non-believers attack. We have been replaying the same battles, on loop, for four years, substituting different Anger Generators each week. Wearing masks during a pandemic is now a culture-war issue.

Granted, there are no Both Sides here, and plenty of the anger sloshing around is justified. The president is now screaming that Democrats and The Media want to destroy the country they live in, and regularly accusing a cable-news host of murder, and hollering that mail-in voting—which he himself used to vote in the most recent election—will destroy the integrity of American democracy. Then we all get into formation and do the dance. This is an unfounded conspiracy theory, report serious journalistic types, as the battle moves swiftly to cable news. You're trying to rig the election! say his fans. These are not two sides of a coin. The latter viewpoint is deranged, a self-serving delusion constructed to support yet another assault in a larger campaign of voter suppression. The other view gets at a real threat to democratic integrity, as the president once again seeks to undermine the legitimacy of any unfavorable result before it happens. But we're all participating in this circus. Maybe we have to. He is, after all, the president.

Photo credit: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI - Getty Images
Photo credit: BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI - Getty Images

It really is reaching a high-water-mark of absurdity, however. Twitter has steadfastly refused to take down the president's tweets accusing Joe Scarborough of murdering an intern, but it did introduce a little module on the president's vote-by-mail tweets offering users the chance to "get the facts about mail-in ballots." (Spoiler: the evidence does not support Trump's assertion that "mail boxes will be robbed, ballots will be forged & even illegally printed out & fraudulently signed.") This was greeted with apocalyptic doom by the president, who first suggested Twitter was "interfering in the 2020 Presidential election"—because its prior policy of allowing the unlimited spread of his propaganda did not affect previous elections at all—and then began threatening to shut down social media platforms in the interest of free speech.

Meanwhile, his Secretary of State was announcing, on Twitter, that "the U.S. stands against, and will not tolerate, government-imposed Internet shutdowns and other forms of censorship during or after this pandemic." It's just a game. It's a joke. They don't really care about any of this. Trump doesn't care about "free speech," he cares about his speech. Mike Pompeo doesn't care about the beleaguered residents of Kashmir, who had their Internet access cut off by India's nationalist government. They don't care. It's just another episode. The only time Trump mentions that 100,000 Americans are dead—28 percent of the world's fatalities spread across 4 percent of the world's population—is when he's saying it's better than 2 million deaths. (But one death, he also says virtuously, is too many.) For the current regime, governing means putting on some show in the town square that will ignite another food fight while the grifters and termites of the state go to work behind the scenes.

We are cursed with this vile circus for as long as the current president is in power. He needs it. The media can't resist it, and often can't cover it responsibly—or without becoming Charlie Brown with the football. The Democrats are unwilling or unable to set the terms of the conversation. 38 million people have filed for unemployment in nine weeks, the latest blow to an emerging American underclass who've worked longer hours for worse pay for decades now. Some areas of the country may be reopening without adequate testing regimes in place. We have done nothing to address the climate crisis for three and a half vital years. Conflicts of interest and generalized corruption have infected much of the government. But we're talking about Joe Scarborough, because the president is.

No one knows what the 2020 election will hinge on, or even if it will be free and fair. What Joe Biden is banking on, it seems, is that people will just be sick of this shit every day. He certainly isn't campaigning on much else. Maybe it's a good bet to make. How much longer, really, can this go on? Most people don't use Twitter, but they can't escape the circus. It's there on cable news, and local news, and Facebook, and the paper. How much longer do we want to participate in this reverse-Truman Show? Having spent a few days outside the dome, I can vouch for it.

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