The candidate’s unchecked flow of untruths and bizarre outbursts spell danger but no longer cause sufficient shock

1. 3/13/24, 2:39 PM
Democracy dies in Trumpian boredom
Page 1 of 4
https://www.ft.com/content/35106042-2e96-4dde-8cf6-734c6e89fd9e
Democracy dies in Trumpian
boredom
The candidate’s unchecked flow of untruths and
bizarre outbursts spell danger but no longer cause
sufficient shock
Every time Donald Trump gives a speech, he dispenses a minimum of several full-blown lies. His untruths merit
a shrug; everybody else’s qualify as a scandal © Elijah Nouvelage/AFP via Getty Images
Call it the banality of chaos. Here is a checklist of Donald Trump’s recent
activity. He promised on day one of his presidency to let January 6
convicts out of jail, close the US-Mexico border and “drill baby drill” for
gas and oil. He feted Viktor Orbán in Mar-a-Lago as the best leader in the
world and assured Hungary’s strongman that he would not “give a penny”
to Ukraine. He took out a $91.6mn surety bond to pay defamation
damages to his sexual assault victim, E Jean Carroll.
He purged the Republican National Committee with 60 staff firings — the

2. 3/13/24, 2:39 PM
Democracy dies in Trumpian boredom
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https://www.ft.com/content/35106042-2e96-4dde-8cf6-734c6e89fd9e
opening move by his daughter-in-law, Lara Trump, who he handpicked as
RNC co-chair. He did a U-turn on TikTok, now saying its Chinese parent
company should retain ownership. He mimicked Joe Biden’s stutter,
insisted that America’s true inflation rate was 50 per cent and attacked
Jimmy Kimmel as the worst ever Oscars host. It seems almost trivial to
add that new detail emerged about Trump’s apparent soft spot for Adolf
Hitler.
All this happened since last Friday. Now multiply that by 47, which is the
number of five-day slots between now and the general election. Even the
most diligent Trump observer would feel catatonic after a few such
increments. It is thus little surprise that most of his recent episodes did
not hit the headlines. In another time, with a normal candidate, any single
one would hijack the news cycle. Trump’s candidacy is so far off the
charts it is almost paranormal. That is the essence of his political appeal. It
means he is judged by a different standard to Biden, or any other
politician, Democratic or Republican.
Katie Britt, an Alabama senator, hogged the airwaves for two days last
week after giving the Republican response to Biden’s State of the Union
address. On top of Britt’s otherworldly delivery style, her blunder was to
have misled viewers with an anecdote about a Mexican sex trafficking
victim. Every time Trump gives a speech, he dispenses a minimum of
several full-blown lies. His untruths merit a shrug; everybody else’s qualify
as a scandal.
This dual standard is to a large extent subconscious. In 2018, Trump’s
then chief strategist, Steve Bannon, described his media tactics as
“flooding the zone with shit”
. The more bizarreness Trump generates, the
less people notice. Economists would call this hyperinflation, except that
the item being devalued is our capacity to be shocked. A good example is
the gap between how Biden’s syntax is measured versus Trump’s. Biden
often confuses dates and names and he has never been articulate. Yet the

3. 3/13/24, 2:39 PM
Democracy dies in Trumpian boredom
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https://www.ft.com/content/35106042-2e96-4dde-8cf6-734c6e89fd9e
point he is trying to make is usually plain. His mix-ups merit front-page
treatment.
Trump issues regular flights of gibberish that might trigger a primary
challenge if they came from Biden. This was Trump’s reasoning about real
inflation earlier this week. “And let’s take a look at outside of the stock
market...we’re going through hell,” he told CNBC’s Squawk Box. “People
are going through hell. They have — I believe the number is 50 per cent.
They say 32 and 33 per cent. I believe we have a cumulative inflation of
over 50 per cent. That means people are, you know, they have to make
more than 50 per cent more over a fairly short period of time to stay up...
And they have been treated very very badly with policy.” Good luck trying
to figure out Trump’s inflation policy.
After Trump was elected in 2016, the Washington Post adopted the slogan
“Democracy dies in darkness”
. But that was incomplete. No matter what
approach America’s media takes to Trump, controversy is assured.
Ignoring what he says is negligence. Running his speeches live is an in-
kind subsidy. The same applies to he-said-she-said traditional reporting.
Fact-checking is for losers. The beauty of the media’s quandary from
Trump’s vantage point is that whatever it does will trigger in-house
controversy. Bannon described the mainstream media as the “opposition
party”
. The ideal opponent is one that is always at war with itself. In
gratitude, Trump routinely calls journalists “criminals”
.
The 2024 election’s odd blend is to be equal parts dull and frightening. If
Trump is true to his word, 10 months from now he will be rounding up
millions of illegal immigrants for deportation. Ukraine’s war against
Vladimir Putin’s Russia will be over. The same fate would befall Trump’s
federal criminal trials. His Department of Justice would be investigating
his opponents. And he will have invoked the Insurrection Act to shut down
civilian protests with US troops. Bannon’s zone would have long since
overflowed. America would have arrived there in broad daylight.

4. 3/13/24, 2:39 PM
Democracy dies in Trumpian boredom
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https://www.ft.com/content/35106042-2e96-4dde-8cf6-734c6e89fd9e
edward.luce@ft.com
Democracy by Margaret Atwood | Democracy 2024