Why fact checking Trump’s fire hose of lies during CNN’s absurd “Town Hall” was worse than useless

Good observation from Paul Waldman:

1. One thing last night made clear is that not only doesn’t “fact-checking in real time” work on Trump, it’s actually JUST WHAT HE WANTS. Allow me to explain… 

2. When he says “The election was rigged” or “I did complete the wall,” gets corrected and then says the lie again, steamrolling over the journalist, it isn’t about which of these competing versions of reality will be judged factually accurate. 

3. The conflict, and his bullying of the journalist, is the essence of the performance. It says “We will create our own reality. You have no power over us. And the more frustrated you get, the more we win.” 

4. The journalist with their petty “facts” is essential to the spectacle. Getting fact-checked then bullying the journalist is WAY better than just repeating his lie on Truth Social for the zillionth time. 

5. It shows him defeating his enemy, mocking them, pouring his contempt on them while his fans applaud and cheer. Without that foil there’s no drama. When it’s over he has proven his mastery over the people he and his fans loathe. 

6. That doesn’t mean anyone outside of his base is at all persuaded. But for that base, it creates a visceral thrill no other Republican can touch. 

As always, Sartre on the anti-Semite and Arendt on the totalitarian mindset are all too germane to our present situation:

Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.

In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true. … Mass propaganda discovered that its audience was ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow. The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.