Don the Con's Favorite Parlor Trick
Over the course of his career, Trump has mastered the art of changing the scale of things to his own advantage.
Nobody like fruit flies (except perhaps frogs, for whom fruit flies probably make a tasty brunch). If you’ve encountered fruit flies, you probably want to get rid of them as soon as possible. But it’s unlikely that they fill you with terror. They’re mostly merely a nuisance and potentially a health hazard.
But let’s say you’ve never seen a fruit fly and also that you’re extremely naive or gullible. If someone shows you the following picture and tells you that this creature is definitely real and definitely inside your kitchen right now, you’d be terrified. You’d certainly avoid the kitchen.
The reason it appears scary is because it’s magnified through the use of an electron microscope. The unfamiliar scale of the image changes our perception of reality. It makes reality seem like something that it isn’t.
Television is a useful tool for distorting the scale of things. I first awakened to this phenomenon during the Vietnam War. For the first time, the horrors of war were made visible to the general public in real time or near real time. Footage of combat casualties, of villagers fleeing from their homes, of indiscriminate jungle fires fueled by napalm were all put in full view of the American people.
Aside from the realities of war that this footage revealed, there was an unintended problem created by television — the reduction of scale of these atrocities. On small television screens, helicopter raids became the same size as a Tide commercial. Bombings of villages appeared in the same dimensions as the Sunday NFL game.
The ability for the viewing public to fully understand the scope of what was happening was limited, in part, by the size of the television screen they were viewing.
The consequence of that change in perception is that the war that Walter Cronkite called “unwinnable” in February of 1968 didn’t end until April of 1975. The daily images that the public saw, while eye-opening, were so reduced in scale that the ongoing horrors of that war became a topic of conversation and even background noise for dinner in front of the TV. But it took years for the unfathomable and multi-faceted tragedies of the Vietnam War to impel our government to end U.S. involvement.
Fast forward to the 2016 U.S. presidential race. Early in his campaign, Candidate Trump — the man who avoided serving his country in that same war — used his instinctive but well practiced ability to distort reality to gain political advantage. He knew that if he held outdoor rallies, he could create the illusion of an unstoppable force, particularly if he engaged his buddies at Fox News to give those rallies end-to-end coverage.
The snowball effect of the coverage of those rallies, coupled with his unrestrained behavior, attracted more and more attendees. He went to places that other politicians — Republicans and Democrats — had long ignored.
Remember, this was the guy who had sold himself to the nation as a wildly successful business man on “The Apprentice,” despite his numerous bankruptcies and a long history of failed business ventures, so he had considerable experience using mass media to manipulate the truth.
He knew that by creating political buzz, he could capture the attention of cable news outlets. In response, news outlets allowed themselves to be led by the nose, providing wall-to-wall coverage of every rally.
Trump turned his campaign into something that millions wanted to be a part of, despite the fact that the promises he made on the campaign trail had about as much value as Confederate money. Over the course of several weeks, there was a snowball effect — or perhaps a FOMO effect — that increased the sizes of those crowds.
Hillary Clinton consistently led in the polls, but he regularly badgered her for her crowd size being smaller than his. He declared those polls to be “fake news” (a term he had appropriated from those who had criticized reporting by Fox News and other outlets — genuine lies — as fake news). Trump and his team launched a coordinated smear campaign that put concentrated focus on Secretary Clinton’s perceived misdeeds and somehow morphed them into the greatest crime ever perpetrated against the United States of America in all of history, magnifying the scale of those perceived misdeeds and, once again, manipulating the media into following every shiny object that he dangled in front of them.
To this day, Donald Trump continues to use his ability to manipulate people’s perception of scale to maintain political dominance:
Trump has magnified a few high profile crimes in the New York subway system and has characterized New York itself as an urban hellscape that everyone should avoid. In truth, crime rates in New York City have been on the decline for more than 30 years, making it one of the safest cities in the nation. Crime rates continue downward, with a 3% reduction just within the last year. Similar reductions in crime have occurred in most U.S. cities. But Trump has changed the scale for those who have no other information.
Crime rates among undocumented immigrants are, in reality, far lower than crime rates overall. But Trump has continued to characterize all undocumented immigrants as murderers, rapists, and gang members. He has changed the scale by leveraging the latent (and sometimes overt) racism of his low information supporters.
Trump loves to boast about his “landslide” in the 2024 election. He squeaked out a win with a scant 1.47% advantage in the popular vote. But he uses the count of electoral votes (58% to 42%) to pretend that he has a “mandate” to do whatever he wishes. He has often cited the county map as evidence, presenting the perception of an overwhelming victory. He conveniently never mentions the narrow margin of the popular vote. In the minds of many, he has changed the scale.
In perhaps the most cynical change of scale he’s ever engaged in, Trump and his hateful cronies have fomented transphobia in ways we have never previously witnessed. He has presented trans folks as a looming ever-present threat, even though the percentage of the population that is trans is in the single digits. He knows that, as a result, most people have probably never even met or had a conversation with a single trans person, so he can characterize them as scary and use them as a political wedge issue. (It’s no coincidence that crimes against trans folks — murders, rates, and assaults — have been increasing at frightening rates during the Trump era.) Again, Trump has used his ability to change the scale to stir up fear and instigate violence.
As recently as this past week, Trump has outdone himself. He militarized the response to anti-ICE protests in Los Angeles, increasing the tension instead of helping to defuse the situation, resulting in violent backlash from a tiny minority of the protesters. State TV (a/k/a Fox News) ran footage of a couple of car fires — the likes of which we regularly see after Super Bowl victories — on an endless loop. Trump then turned around and pronounced that “Los Angeles would be burning, just like it did a number of months ago with all the houses” if he hadn’t sent in the National Guard and the Marines. He created the crisis and then manipulated the media into changing the scale of the backlash.
Even the deportation effort that triggered the protests is premised on an exaggeration of scale. He has consistently characterized all black- and brown-skinned immigrants as criminals, despite the fact that most of the people being deported are simply hard working folks trying to make a life for themselves and their families. You know — the American dream.
In the wake of the massive unprecedented nationwide protests against him this past weekend, he’s attempting to manipulate the scale yet again. He instructed his press secretary, ever the dutiful purveyor of his lies, to tell the nation how small those protests were.
I suppose these examples also fall under the general heading of “lies” — his stock in trade. But they’re more than just lies. These are coordinated attempts to distort reality, in ways large and small, and always to his personal, political, or financial advantage.
There are two things at the heart of his scale manipulation — control and fear. He strives to control the narrative, control the population to bend to his will, control his own fragile ego. He wants to instill fear in the population to be able to control them more easily. But he also has fears of his own — fear of being exposed for his incompetence, fear of having his public image shattered, and — most of all — the fear of having to face consequences for his numerous crimes and misdemeanors.
After all, that last fear — facing responsibility for his crimes — was his primary reason for running for a second term.
Nevada: a state with such a tiny rural population, with about 12 hospitals max(between Reno and Vegas) that when we took patients into the State Psych hospital in Las Vegas, we never asked for hospital names when their tiny ERs or County Sheriffs contacted Admissions. We took the patient info, the name of the town, and pushed them up to the top of the waiting list immediately, since it took hours anyway for them to arrive in the big city. I do know the number of tumbleweeds outnumbered the population by far.