How Trump Convinced Americans to Give up Meat Space and Consent to Live in Augmented Reality

I have been shaking my head every morning for the past several months trying to conceive of a strategy or desire that would encourage Trump to behave in the various erratic and unpredictable ways that he has over the past 205 days he has been in office. It has crossed over from the standard laymen to writing for Rolling Stone and USA Today that provide second-hand diagnoses of “malignant narcissism”  from accredited psychologists at Johns Hopkins University to more speculative hypothetical diagnoses like “CARB Syndrome” and Dementia. The anomalies that keep occurring indicate that Trump could even be in stages of sundown delirium stages of Alzheimer’s disease. The problem is that his behavior appears too consistent to be completely random, and yet too erratic to be entirely deliberate.

One factor that may be helpful is to consider what a person who worked in entertainment for a long period of time would learn hosting an unreal reality show, Celebrity Apprentice.  Trump received extensive praise for the show; He commented in one interview, “I hate to say it, I have the No. 1 show on NBC”.  Frankly, who is to disagree with him or argue otherwise? Nielsen agrees with him one week and differs the next week. The object lesson that Trump may have come to understand is that the truth does not matter if enough people believe. If you provide data to an audience and they don’t do any analysis, research or consciously think about it at all; then it is theoretically possible to convince Americans that your reality is the only one.

“Psychology Today” did a piece in 2014: Anti-Intellectualism and the "Dumbing Down" of America with Susan Jacoby, author of The Age of American Unreason. Her quote was also in “The Washington Post”: 

"Dumbness, to paraphrase the late senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, has been steadily defined downward for several decades, by a combination of heretofore irresistible forces. These include the triumph of video culture over print culture; a disjunction between Americans' rising level of formal education and their shaky grasp of basic geography, science and history; and the fusion of anti-rationalism with anti-intellectualism." 

By that logic, if the average American watching any of these “reality” shows never received any training in critical thinking or learned how to research anything to determine its efficacy, why would anyone (including a political representative or a President) need to do anything more than simply entertain them? If Trump simply is approaching the role of President of the United States in the same light as his role of reality TV host; then the choices he makes that appear flagrantly insane are actually deliberately provocative and provide the audience what it theoretically wants. Audiences respond to multiple stimuli and the standard communication practices of repetition and participatory actions to keep the audience engaged and involved seem to be at play here. If every day an individual wakes up to Trump making emphatic statements, encouraging congressional acts, firing and hiring people willy-nilly in all aspects of federal service with little indication of  any actual goals or intent; all of which contain material that directly affects them. There are direct statements indicating 'Fire and Fury' for multiple aspects of American lives. Americans are electronically and verbally receiving relentless levels of information impacting every aspect of their lives every day from their health, their jobs, their assets, their families, their perceived personal rights (ironically provided by various constitutional amendments that most Americans have never read); to their theological beliefs (and their perception of other’s theological beliefs) and even their physical safety. This has generated an unprecedented level of an engagement and affect in Americans and additional spectators throughout the globe. So from the day Trump began running for office, to the day he began making decisions on behalf of the American people, he made specific choices that engage an incredibly vast audience by bringing each of these things about.

Did Trump appoint people who had no involvement or knowledge in their given cabinet roles because he shares Steve Bannon’s philosophical goals or specifically wants to destroy central government? It’s possible. However, Trump could also have simply realized that the more instability he placed in different aspects of Americans’ lives, the more they would come to rely on him for news and information. If 140 characters you write can consistently drive the entire news media machine to react, reinforce comments, speculate and share that information around the world, then you are strengthening and constantly increasing a captive audience. If Trump is only looking for public attention, then his actions make sense. Some have argued that there is a primal need for approval as well; but Trump’s overall actions indicate that his attention is on the primary need of attention and approval is only a secondary need. So if people notice, then that is all he needs. If there is an obvious negative reaction; (and I DO mean obvious); then the need for approval kicks in and Trump will react and retaliate; but only if in fact, there is a personal slight or deliberate offense that is pretty obvious.

When these motivations and resulting choices impact the populations of the United States and the world, it begins to appear that Trump is in fact trying to destroy the country or is simply insane. It is impossible to completely determine someone’s motivation as most of us do not have the same “public” persona as we generally do in private; but when looking at Trump’s potential or indicated goals, It seems more likely that Trump’s aim is to manipulate an audience to simply follow him (on Twitter or otherwise); and rely on what he says and does to determine their own levels of happiness, anxiety, fear, hatred, anger, sadness, etc. I don’t envy any psychological experts who continuously try to diagnose. 

Whatever the cause, I believe that to solve or at least address the problem, American information consumers need to take Trump’s toy away. We can do this by addressing our media’s and our owncompulsive reliance on Trump to constantly influence how we perceive our present and our future. Until we as an audience and/or an electorate can strategically determine an operative way to regain control of our direct reactions to what has become an irresistible reality show plot-line, it is unlikely to improve. Consequentially, we will likely remain a captive audience of “I M POTUS” (or whatever other name Trump ultimately decides to use) for at least 3 more full seasons. Trump’s groundbreaking reality TV series could even succeed in having the highest demographic reach of any medium in history. Trump will even sit down for a future interview touting his amazing success with quotes like; “I hate to say it, but I have the No. 1 show on any form of media, anywhere of anytime in the history of the world!” which in our new reality, might even be true.