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“The White House press corps would be in wolf pack mode if Biden were in the middle of a speech and suddenly veered into gibberish about boats and sharks. There would be front-page stories questioning whether the president, at 81, was suffering from dementia; and the op-ed pages would be filled with thumb-suckers about whether Vice President Harris and the Cabinet should invoke the 25th Amendment."
~ Eugene Robinson
#Trump #dementia #Biden #media #MediaFail
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/06/10/trump-sharks-electrocuted-boat-story/
@wdlindsy trumps speeches are best understood to be a MAGA version of Garrison Keillor’s “news from Lake Wobegon”. Amusing slice-of-life vignettes of fighting back against govt mandates on electric batteries and stoves and toilets and stuff.
@wdlindsy@toad.social@branewave An interesting comparison, given that Keillor's rifts go to sane places and make some sense despite their non-linear organization, while Trump's are totally insane.
@wdlindsy That's the MAGAfication part. And actually a lot of it tracks logically just fine when viewed from inside the MAGA cinematic universe. You have to have prior understanding of the "my uncle from MIT" character and so forth. There's still people mad about the Shark Week discourse from a couple years back about how sharks are just misunderstood, not malicious. Basically it's all remixed genre tropes, we just have to identify the tropes.
@wdlindsy It's also kinda like "The Red Green Show". Absurdist humor played straight about a down-home man's man confronting a changing world. Quite a bit of Trump's audience understands that it's all a vaudeville show for their entertainment, though some of them tip too far into suspending disbelief. The politics of it makes the show more participatory.
@branewave I wonder if speaking of a MAGA cinematic universe and its inner logic is really giving too much credit altogether to what makes absolutely no sense at all.
@wdlindsy I suppose it depends on one's goals. I think this line of criticism fails to penetrate, because it is so easily dismissed as "you don't understand what we're talking about". We diagnose "dementia", and they diagnose "you guys fail to comprehend the genre tropes". It's like going to a modern art gallery and saying "my kid could fingerpaint that" -- the criticism betrays an ignorance of the ongoing cultural conversation.
@branewave Yes, I know this is how a lot of folks want to frame discussion of these matters. My own take is that Trump's speaking nonsense (as in non-sense) from the outset, no matter what he says, because he does not intend to carry on meaningful discussions. For that reason, I tune him out, since I don't intend to give non-sense mind room — and at the same time, I pay attention to what he's saying simply to chronicle the dangerous absurdities. Always recognizing that they're malicious nonsense