The bullshit phenomenon is very common in politics of course - well beyond Trump. What makes Trump’s bullshit so disorienting though is that he makes no effort to make it coherent or internally consistent (I guess philosophically that’s just what bullshit entails)- he zigs and zags between totally contradictory statements, sometimes even in the same speech. The Putinists call this the ‘fire hose of falsehoods’ approach and Bannon calls it ‘flooding the zone with shit’. It’s goal is to exhaust and confuse opponents, to wear them down. By the time you’ve fact checked one lie, 10 more have been spun. Hopefully Trump will be defeated and jailed, but the epistemic violence he’s unleashed in the US and on the world will cast a long shadow. You see how the likes of slicker politicians like J D Vance are mastering and supercharging these rhetorical devises.
i can remember when he first oozed onto the scene in an interview, by the Wash Post or someone, and he was just looking at them blankly, and to almost every question he was just saying "fake news!" "fake news!". and, politics aside, i thought wow that is such a dangerous, lethal game to play. You are playing with the "shared narrative" in a very insideous way. There's one thing fighting facts wtih facts, but just outright dismissing it
all is somethign else entirely. He's basically accusing people of lying, and by doing so: lying. without shame, over and over.
These were pretty inocuous questions put to him - but still, he wanted to set the ball rolling, that it's all a ploy to get poor him. I am sure you can all remember it, the "fake news!" years - where everything was"fake news!" so you have fairly well established legally bound [though of course with bias, with own interests. etc] news organisations, and individual journalists,
totally discredited, without any grey area at all. and listen now to his supporters, their trust in institutions, especially media ones, is completely broken, almost completely absent. Instead you have in their place whirling hell holes of social media grifters, lunatics, and charlatans. the average trump supporter, i dare to guess, could do no worse than sitting down with teh NYT or the Wash Post and reading it, front to cover, every day - and yes apologies if that sounds elitist, perhaps it is slightly. But no, instead, the whole thing, the whole operation, is consigned to teh trash bin, largely because of this orange lunatic.
