Why the Trump phenomenon continues.

In a lunch conversation between Thomas Frank and Seymour Hirsch, an excellent explanation for why Donald Trump continues to attract venom from millions of Americans was expressed.

Thomas Frank explains…

You were asking why Trump keeps going. Because there is massive... I mean, it's too big. There's massive dissatisfaction with American life in all sorts of different ways. I’m talking about the way people experience their everyday lives and are unhappy about all sorts of things great and small. Their towns or regions are in a state of permanent hard times. There’s inflation. There are lots of homeless people. Lots of immigration. People feel disrespected, they get insulted on social media, they hate the news, they feel like the TV insults them all the time.

We could talk about this all day, but the thing is that there's many different streams of dissatisfaction, sometimes deep dissatisfaction that doesn't go away, even when the economy improves, even when the economy is doing well. And all of this stuff gets projected onto Trump, the permanent outsider, the champion of the disgruntled.

The perennial scapegoat.

Donald Trump is just one person. He has one body, one mind and one will. With these personal assets and the material assets that he has earned and acquired, he takes one step forward at a time like everyone else on the planet to pursue his goals.

What Donald Trump has become in the “public sphere” is not entirely his doing.

His oversized persona, reputation, and his mythology is mostly the creation of the media over which he has no control.

The results are predictable.

Like Frankenstein, his creators have cobbled together images and stories that present Trump as an amalgam of competing narratives. The creation has taken on a life of its own.

The resulting creation isn’t pretty but, also like Franstein, “the Donald” is not responsible for the mistakes of his creators.

Trump has attracted media attention.

Was that attention intentional? Was it due to his wealth, the roles he played that were purpose-built for attention, or both? If he was not a billionaire, host of The Apprentice TV series, and visible in New York high society circles, would we even know his name?

Certainly, Trump has courted media attention.

He is not innocent of playing a part in building his own mythology. Narcissists love attention. It’s like a drug that keeps feeding an addiction to attention. Few would quibble about Trump being a narcissist.

Times change

One 125 years ago when news and opinion travelled by local gossip, the teletype and the Pony Express. Most people avoided the limelight. They were too busy trying to survive without the benefits of our modern conveniences.

Average citizens minded their own business with the exception of a few busybodies who could not leave well enough alone and loved to be at the centre of the rumour mill. Narcissistic attention-seeking existed then as it does now.

Today, the Internet and social media makes busybodies of the majority. It also erodes trust generally because its nearly impossible to reconcile that competing stories that circulate with precious little to verify them.

What motivates the public figures we listen to and how can we know who to trust?

This question was asked by A Midwestern Doctor who remains anonymous under his Substack publication by that name. He answered his own question…

Unfortunately, one of the most challenging aspects of human interactions is accurately assessing someone’s character, especially when you can only observe them from a distance, and in turn, one of the most common errors I see people make is to ascribe beliefs or motivations to someone they don’t have a strong basis for (and often are completely wrong).

Ultimately, I believe this arises because humans are complex beings with so many good and bad facets that the way someone is perceived by someone else is primarily a product of which facets of them are being seen rather than who they actually are. In turn, one of the things I’ve always found immensely frustrating about politics is how someone I know is a destructive sociopath is seen as a saint because the media highlights a positive facade of them while another person I know is genuinely interested in making the world a better place is instead seen as a monster because the undesirable aspects of their personality are continually focused on by the media.

Will AI come to the rescue?

Will AI algorithms help us identify saints from sinners? By whose standards will those classifications be defined?

Will the Bible be the arbitor of what’s good and bad human (and non-human?) behaviour, or will an AI “Supreme Judge” play that role as the digitized “wisdom of humanity” becomes the dataset which trains it to adjudicate human conflicts and prescribe “fair” sentencing?

OR, will each person become some future humanoid in which the AI Supreme Judge guides our choices and actions to create an AI version of the Garden of Eden without the snakes?