Chunk 25: The president who cried … everything?
You’re all no doubt familiar with the Aesop fable, “The boy who cried wolf”.
Pretend you are that boy in 2020. Armed with a shiny new Apple iPhone SE, instead of crying, you’d be busy posting. Across every social media channel available - Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, LinkedIn, TikTok and whatever else I’ve forgotten - you’d be “Wolf! Wolf! Wolf!” 24/7.
Now, pretend you are Donald Trump. He’s just like that boy in the Aesop fable, only his objective is far more pernicious. He needs to make people feel frightened. Why? Because when people are afraid, they naturally seek security, which this president then claims only he can provide.
And to ensure that people don’t become complacent over time, threatening them with one type of animal isn’t enough. Everything is coming to get you! Lions and tigers and bears, oh my! Immigrants and fraudulent voters and radical socialists!
Doing this isn’t actually as easy as it sounds. It takes real commitment to fashion enough new fears that your audience doesn’t tune out. You can never allow people to feel at ease or comfortable. To make them true believers - to keep them on edge - you have to make them feel concerned over and over again.
That’s why - in addition to inventing terrors - Trump has taken it one step further than the boy who cried wolf ever dreamed of. (Do you think the boy who cried wolf drifted off to sleep counting sheep that were subsequently eaten by the wolf? But I digress…) Trump has made it his additional mission to discredit those who would dispute his message.
In Aesop’s time - he was born in 564 BC - paper was expensive and printing too arduous, so news was mainly distributed by word of mouth. For Trump, it is the free press that is the “enemy of the people”; it is the “fake news media” that can’t be trusted. The wolf is at your door. “Believe me”, as he is so fond of saying.
And for the better part of three and a half years, this was exactly how things operated.
But, as John Lennon famously once wrote/sang, “life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans”. Because while Trump was busy yelling wolf, other, far more frightening, less predictable and real scourges were being allowed in. Like a global pandemic, and increased frustration on social injustice, and inaction on climate change.
Then, many of Trump’s earliest believers began abandoning him to give exclusive interviews and write books declaring that he really didn’t have a clue what he was constantly crying about. And, inexplicably, Trump allowed himself to be recorded saying likewise.
And so, as is the fate of all liars, each untruth has to get bigger than the last. You have to keep upping the ante. So, instead of the boy who cried wolf , we have the president now crying King Kong, and Smaug, and Godzilla: “Biden calls law enforcement the enemy.” “Biden is controlled by people that you’ve never heard of, people that are in the dark shadows.” “I think there’s probably, possibly drugs involved. That’s what I hear.”
Let’s only hope that his rhetoric finally gets drowned out in ballots on 3 November.
