• fizzle@quokk.au
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    5 days ago

    Trump has been doing this fraud-in-plain-sight thing forever.

    I’ve read comments that say it works because the defense is that it’s so obvious it can’t be deceitful. As in: if you wanted to hand $15m to a donor you’d find a secretive way to do it.

    I personally believe it’s just learned ineptitude. He’s just deceitful at every turn and he’s never encountered any consequences so why would he change?

    • A_norny_mousse@piefed.zip
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      5 days ago

      I keep coming back to his 2016 quote about “the swamp” which is featured in Hypernormalisation:

      “If I ask’em, if I need’em - you know most of the people on this stage I have given to, just so you know, a lot of money - I will tell you that our system is broken. I give to many people, before this, before [???] was a businessman, I give to everybody. When they call I give, and you know what? When I need something from them, 2 years later, 3 years later, I call them, they are there for me. And that’s a broken system.

      Needless boasting aside, he’s calling out corruption by admitting that he and his cronies are corrupt. That’s confusing. And when I watched Hypernormalisation during Trump1.0 it was already apparent that he continues acting in the way he himself criticized, so that was more confusing.

      As the narrator says, nothing was fixed, constantly changing, no relation to reality - Trump defeated journalism by making revealing the truth irrelevant.

      By the way, at the beginning he says “this now started happening also in the West”, refering to what Vladislav Surkov did in Russia: “man who attempted to turn a superpower into a stage play.” Worth researching (easily done by watching the whole of Hypernormalisation).

      The video clip above ends thusly:

      “But the stories politicians told their people about the world had stopped making sense. And in the face of that, you could play with reality. Constantly shifting and changing, and in the process further undermine and weaken the old forms of power.”