Garbage In/Garbage Out: Why Trump Thinks Portland Is A “Warzone”

I watched “Dune” again this weekend, so I already have the perfect quote ready to hand for describing this bit of news: “He who controls the spice controls the universe”. Or, to reword that slightly:

“He who controls the television controls the country”.

And in this case, that “He” would be Lachlan Murdoch and that specific television would be whichever one Trump spends all his time watching Fox News on.

This was already pretty obvious, but here we have a particularly egregious example of it and one that can be traced from a specific television show to a set of false public pronouncements followed by blatantly illegal actions.

KGW8, the Portland NBC affiliate, reports that Trump said to NBC White House Correspondent Yamiche Alcindor:

“I spoke to the governor, she was very nice,” Trump said. “But I said, ‘Well wait a minute, am I watching things on television that are different from what’s happening? My people tell me different.’ They are literally attacking and there are fires all over the place…it looks like terrible.”

Because, as the Guardian reports, Fox News has been playing old footage of Portland’s relatively-minimal-given-the-situation George Floyd protests from 2020 behind its reporting on the extremely-minimal-given-the-situation protest against ICE’s illegal bodysnatching there:

“I will say this, I watched today, I didn’t know that was continuing to go on, but Portland is unbelievable, what’s going on,” Trump said. He then claimed, incorrectly, that he had seen video evidence of “the destruction of the city”.

He’s so close to self-awareness in that interview with Alcindor; he almost realizes that the image he’s absorbed from Fox News of what things are like in Portland is a fantasy.

And then he went and illegally ordered 200 Oregon National Guard troops into Portland anyway.

This really is the stupidest timeline.

We all knew that Trump lived in a tiny information bubble, and had absolutely no idea what things were like out here in the real world.

That’s a risk for everyone, of course, but especially for rich or powerful people; a risk that many of them seem to fall prey to.

We can’t do much about this for most people, what with freedom of speech and association and all, but there are things we could do to mitigate this risk for politicians.

We just have to get creative about it.

NOTE: I got this from The Fucking News, which is kinda ironic since the problem it demonstrates is that Trump’s idea of the world is being manipulated directly by the fucking news.