But the President said during Wednesday’s news conference that he told Kemp he disagreed “strongly” with the governor’s decision to reopen some businesses in his state.
“I told the governor of Georgia Brian Kemp that I disagree strongly with his decision to open certain facilities which are in violation of the phase one guidelines for the incredible people of Georgia,” Trump said.
He suggested he would intervene if he saw “something totally egregious.”
Head I win, tails you lose.
If people don’t die: “I was right. I said we should open up.”
Also a variant of the abusive, manipulative parent/guarduan/spouse. Oh, did you think you were doing what you thought I wanted? No, you don’t decide, I decide. You do what I say, when I say, you will always be wrong.
There is a section in the 2016 Adam Curtis documentary HyperNormalisation that posits a theory as to why all this confusion is happening. It seems to me that the last few years prove that Curtis was right.
“In Russia, Vladimir Putin and his cabinet of political technologists create mass confusion. Vladislav Surkov uses ideas from art to turn Russian politics into a bewildering piece of theatre. Donald Trump used the same techniques in his presidential campaign by using language from Occupy Wall Street and the extreme racist right-wing. Curtis asserts that Trump “defeated journalism” by rendering its fact-checking abilities irrelevant.”
“Twitter Prophets” use this method basically. Make a shit ton of predictions, delete the ones that don’t come true, and all of a sudden you look like Internet Nostradamus.
Bonus that someone can make their account private, and then at a later date mark it Public with a spontaneous full history of accurate predictions.
But I don’t think it would be his style to take on something as specific as Coronavirus without contextualising it in a bigger historical perspective and conflating it with something unexpected.
His films tend to be big, rambling affairs that somehow manage to make a point at the end. His use of voice-over and found footage give his work a dreamy/nightmarish quality that’s very relaxing.
I probably first saw the term in a Damon Runyon story, though it might have been my father, who grew up on the streets in the South Bronx and liked to tell me about a lot of this stuff when I was a kid.
