Policy is Easy!

Via the AP: Trump claims a win on immigration after a call with Mexico’s president. But she suggests no change.

 President-elect Donald Trump declared a win on stopping illegal immigration through Mexico on Wednesday after talking with that country’s leader. But Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum suggested Mexico was already doing its part and had no interest in closing its borders.

The two spoke just days after Trump threatened to impose sweeping new tariffs on Canada and Mexico as part of his effort to crack down on illegal immigration and drugs.

Trump said Sheinbaum “agreed to stop Migration through Mexico.” Sheinbaum indicated separately on social media that she told Trump that Mexico is already “taking care of” migrant caravans, calling it an “excellent conversation.”

So, of course, anyone who knows a scintilla about policy knows that Sheinbaum both did not, and could not, promise to “stop Migration [sic.] though Mexico.”

On the one hand, maybe all this means that Trump is going to pretend to do stuff and then act like he was successful. This would not surprising, given his general approach to life.

On the other, this is a dangerous approach to governing because it will only further deepen the already exiting disconnect between national perceptions and actual reality. We are already in a precarious space where we, as a country barely have a shared reality. And a shift from lack of shared agreements on what ir real to the active promotion of the unreal is not healthy for us in the least.

Further, this is all too similar to the way Putin governs. It becomes impossible for people to know what is truly real, so they just don’t even try. Along those lines I recommend this 2014 piece from The Atlantic: Russia and the Menace of Unreality.

In today’s Russia, by contrast, the idea of truth is irrelevant. On Russian ‘news’ broadcasts, the borders between fact and fiction have become utterly blurred. 

[…]

The point of this new propaganda is not to persuade anyone, but to keep the viewer hooked and distracted—to disrupt Western narratives rather than provide a counternarrative. It is the perfect genre for conspiracy theories, which are all over Russian TV. 

[…]

But insisting on the lie, the Kremlin intimidates others by showing that it is in control of defining ‘reality.’ This is why it’s so important for Moscow to do away with truth. If nothing is true, then anything is possible. 

We are not to the level of state controlled media using actors to promote fake stories (as noted in the linked piece). Still, the idea that the “news” might be an outlet to “keep the view hooked and distracted” is quite recongizable, as is the blurring of fact and fiction. We have watched mainstream news outlets like Fox News promote the big lie about the 2020 election. We have seen ongoing attempts to downplay, if not excuse, January 6th. Outlets like Newsmax and OAN very much promote a Trump-based “reality.” In regard to the story at the heart of this post, the NY Post (which has been a huge purveyor of pro-Trumpist propaganda) has a headline the uncritically accepts Trump’s version, Trump says Mexico’s president has ‘agreed to stop’ migrants crossing into US through her country: ‘Very productive conversation!’

Part of what helped us get Trump 2.0 (and even Trump 1.0) is the widespread assertions that “all politicians lie” so Trump really isn’t that different than any other politician. This has opened a massive rationalization gateway.

I would note that a significant amount of the “reporting” on this matter (along with a lot of the reporting on Trump’s nominations) have just been slicing and dicing of Trump’s Truth Social posts. The media is lazily just parroting what Trump has posted as if they actually talked to him and did reporting on the subject. If a reader is just skimming, they might not even notice that basically the “news” is recycling Trump press releases. And while this is not unusual in the grand scheme of things, the fact that Trump is not trying to hew to the truth means that the news media is just parroting untruth and unreality, laundering it through their word processors so as to get something posted to the internet as fast as the can.