IN a roiling ocean of misinformation and nonsense, the human mind can only navigate by way of small pointers; it manages to keep itself afloat by clinging on to the nearest of the bobbing buoys. Or at least mine does.
Donald Trump churns out so many lies that it’s a physical impossibility to process and discredit them all. And so, like the layer of hard skin an MMA fighter builds up on their knuckles over the course of a career, the American people develop a tolerance for repeated blows to their trust. Though the Trump tactic of flooding the zone has been taken up with great enthusiasm by the right in Ireland and Britain, there’s nowhere near the same level of gaping credulity.
While a massive number of Americans are going along with Trump’s assertion that he’s not really a rapist despite a court ruling that he is, and that he’s not a self-confessed abuser because his sex abuse admission was only banter, such risible assertions gain currency on this side of the pond only among the Tommy Robinson/Reform UK fruitcakes. But for how long?
It’s not the big lies that do the damage – it’s the incessant attrition of the small ones that carve a scarred and rugged landscape dominated by Mount Rushmore-scale untruths capable of defining eras and shaping national psyches. It’s the barely-noticed fibs that build up over time to form a carapace of indifference over a nation’s humanity. While the bodies of the 67 dead of the Washington DC air disaster were still either strapped inside the shattered fuselages of the two aircraft, or bobbing on the icy-cold waters of the Potomac, Trump spewed forth a selection of monster lies, including the bogus claims that Barack Obama undermined the Federal Aviation Authority (FAA) because he thought it was “too white” and the pilot of the military helicopter failed to execute manoeuvres that would have avoided a collision.
He continued to pick at these doozies two as he would at a bucket of cold KFC, but he finally settled on another claim for his main course.
Trump told Americans – and the world – that the crash happened because there are too many disabled people working as air traffic controllers thanks to an Obama-era Diversity, Equality and Inclusion (DEI) directive. It was perhaps the rawest and purest stream of Diet Coke-smelling piss that Trump had ever delivered from his toadstool todger – but it wasn’t vicious enough; it wasn’t anywhere near sufficiently black-hearted.
Reading from a DEI report on FAA jobs for people with disabilities, Trump drew a picture of an average day at work in a control tower. He claimed that planes were being landed and pilots were being guided by:
•People with epilepsy.
•People with ‘missing extremities’.
•People who can’t see.
•People who can’t hear.
•People with dwarfism.
He had to read the words out, of course he did, because the cruelty is a big part of the point. He had to say the words just as he had to crook his arms and shake his body when he did a grotesque impression of New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski, who lives with a congenital joint condition. Trump enacted that vile tableau in 2015, ten years ago, but also a thousand years ago, when he told the world who he was and the world decided to ignore him.
POINTER: Months before he was elected, Donald Trump mocked New York Times reporter Serge Kovaleski 
The simple truth is that no-one gets anywhere near a control tower without undergoing rigorous training and testing. The simple truth is that Trump did nothing about the quoted FAA report when first elected in 2016. The simple truth is that the Trump administration updated the report in 2019.
None of that matters now – the job’s done. Trump told the shocked, open-mouthed faithful that control towers in the United States are staffed by a chimps’ tea party of mental defectives, fit-throwers, amputees and circus freaks, and the MAGA caps lapped it up. The lie was so perfectly outrageous, such an egregious insult to the very concept of truth, that even BBC Verify got involved. And that lot have just spent 15 months trying to create a new language for genocide.
If I go over to New York in the next few days, take out my notebook on a street in Queens and ask passers-by why those 67 people died in the Potomac, a hell of a lot of them are going to tell me they died because people without arms shouldn’t be landing planes. A huge chunk of the New Orleans queue for the Super Bowl are going to tell me epileptics shouldn’t be anywhere near all those airport lights. The tragedy – the terror – is that there’s no more chance of reaching these people now than there is of one of Trump’s imaginary dwarfs reaching an imaginary desk in an imaginary control tower.
Now Trump wants to cleanse Gaza of its ethnic people. I think there’s a name for that, but I just can’t seem to remember it. I’m not alone – RTÉ and the BBC can’t remember either, but they’ve managed to scramble a couple of huggable alternatives. The newly-returned people now living under tarpaulins in the rubble of their former homes are going to relocated; or they’re going to resettle. They’re not going to BE relocated and they’re not going to BE resettled; they’re going to relocate and resettle themselves and their displacement will be their choice, their fault. Again.
The US will own Gaza and it will be the “Riviera of the Middle East,” according to Trump, inhabited by the “world’s people”. Or at least, the world’s people who spend their days on the deck of yachts and their evenings in casinos. “Faites vos jeux,” as the Monte Carlo croupiers say around the roulette table – “Place your bets.” Is your money on the wretched people of Gaza, hounded across the Middle East for 78 years on the word of a 180-year-old man in a 3,000-year-old book? Or is your money on that Trump hotel and casino with stunning views of the Mediterranean where the lights of anchored super yachts twinkle in the night? I’ve been a gambler all my life and the odds of the latter are so short that if Paddy Power had laid a book he’d already be paying out.
Billionaire gamblers and their millionaire lackeys playing roulette in an eight-star marble hotel built on a foundation of the pathetic remains of Gaza homes and the bones of the families who lived there. What a prospect. Will the increasingly erratic, preposterous and dangerous Trump live long enough to see it for himself? Who knows? But even if he doesn’t, it would be a chillingly fitting memorial to his life’s work.
“Rien ne va plus,” the croupier tells the players.
“No more bets.”
The wheel is spinning.
The little ball has been thrown in.
All we can do is watch – since it’s all our leaders will do.
