Under this president, we’ve traveled far beyond political spin
 | By Frank Bruni |
At what point are we doing more and worse than stewing in deeply partisan television content, chomping on the social media chum that has been algorithmically hurled at us, wading through digital slop, dodging deepfakes and seeing, through warped glasses, useless shards of the shattered truth?
At what point have we altogether exited reality?
That seems to be where we’re headed. And with each passing day, I come to believe that the E.T.A. is much sooner than we thought.
Look only at the past week. On Tuesday, President Trump spent part of an exchange with journalists at the White House essentially assuring them that he was alive. I know how absurd that sounds — he was there in front of them, blustering and babbling — but this is an era of epic absurdity, and for the three previous days, the internet had been ablaze with assertions that the president was dead and that any images or Truth Social posts to the contrary were counterfeit.
“Trump’s critics have speculated about his health for as long as he has been in national politics,” Katie Rogers acknowledged in The Times. “But there had never been a conspiracy wave as feverish as this one.” It was fed by an evidently expanding population of skeptics and nihilists who don’t trust what’s right before their eyes, a growing number of instances in which they’re sure they’re being tricked, and ever more technologically sophisticated sleights of hand. People increasingly feel that they inhabit a hall of mirrors. They’re right.
Just ask Trump’s vice president. “If the media you consumed told you that Donald Trump was on his death bed because he didn’t do a press conference for three days, imagine what else they’re lying to you about,” JD Vance wrote in a post on X. It’s so hilariously and characteristically disingenuous that Vance sought to pin the rumor-mongering on mainstream journalism, when the bulk of it crowded the digital bazaars where he and his ilk have bought and peddled such junk as immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, making Rottweiler roti. But his larger (and inadvertently confessional?) point is valid: We can barely comprehend how many fictions are being sold to us, and we’re in a constant struggle to determine which merchandise we can safely purchase.
Trump himself reflected on that in other comments to journalists on Tuesday. He was asked about a video of a black bag being thrown out of a White House window; perplexed by it, he said that it was “probably A.I.-generated.” (The White House press office separately confirmed that it was real and had to do with maintenance work.)
Trump went on: “One of the problems we have with A.I., it’s both good and bad. If something happens, really bad, just blame A.I. But also they create things. You know, it works both ways. If something happens, it’s really bad, maybe I’ll have to just blame A.I.” How deeply philosophical. How vertiginously high-minded. And how chilling. Photographic images of war crimes? A.I.! Recordings of shakedowns of foreign dignitaries or corporate leaders? A.I.!
“New Way to Reject Reality” was the headline that CNN’s Brian Stelter used in his newsletter on Wednesday to describe Trump’s musings. My stomach knotted as I took in those words. “New way” — meaning there are already so many existing ways. “Reject reality” — a phrase underscoring how far we’ve traveled from mere political spin, which is to Trump’s loopy fantasias as the horse and buggy is to a Waymo taxi.
“The War Against Reality” was how Derek Thompson recently titled a section of his newsletter devoted to the Trump administration’s “mass cancellation of inconvenient data.” Thompson ticked off Trump’s firing of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, whose job-growth numbers displeased him; the administration’s dismissal of hundreds of experts working on the National Climate Assessment; and Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s reconfiguration of the C.D.C. to his conspiracy-minded liking.
Thompson could also have mentioned the purge of Justice Department lawyers who had the temerity — the gall! — to regard the melee at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, as anything other than a heartwarming outpouring of ardent patriotism. Or the canning of the Defense Intelligence Agency official who dared to contradict Trump’s insistence that the bombing of Iran’s uranium enrichment sites was a completely devastating, history-changing success. “The White House is trying to program reality as if it were reality TV,” Thompson wrote. What Trump is pioneering, he added, is “choose-your-own-reality governance.”
Trump’s erasure or inversion of unflattering facts extends not only to the sacking and smearing of truth tellers, but also to the elevation of proven liars. If your fibs flatter him, they and you are gold. And he has been known to spread A.I.-generated hallucinations himself. In July, on Truth Social, he reposted a video with fake footage of former President Barack Obama being arrested in the Oval Office. I suppose he’s just getting with the program, although maybe he’s leading the way; here in North Carolina, where I live, Republicans recently created a fake photo of Roy Cooper — our former governor, now the likely Democratic nominee for a U.S. Senate seat — wearing a Bernie Sanders T-shirt. It was an attempt, as a social media post from the state party made clear, to rebrand Cooper as “Radical Roy.”
We’re facing the profoundly dangerous convergence of a leader determined to distract and deceive us and a social and political landscape primed for distraction and deception. Have we dealt with anything quite like this before? The existence of the shorthand IRL to designate that an event or relationship is occurring In Real Life, and not just online, suggests both the unreality of cyberspace — the fog and the fakery of it — and the significant amount of time we spend there.
“America has stacked the deck in favor of virtual reality over our material reality,” Representative Jake Auchincloss, Democrat of Massachusetts, wrote last week in a guest essay for Times Opinion that bemoaned “the shrinking terrain of real life.” Shrinking or vanishing? And what in God’s name takes its place?
