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.