Thread by @AlexandraErin

I mean, I also brought up these points, but it does matter and yeah, he did expect he could bring the map out and no one would say anything.

Or rather, he knew the world would divide up neatly into two groups: those who swallowed it without blinking, and those who balked.

https://twitter.com/jfritze/status/1169334857312428032

When pressed to the point in focus groups, many of Trump's most stalwart supporters admit they know he lies and don't care.

Those who don't, by sheer dint of believing contradictory things he spits out, are literally believing whatever he says.

Donald Trump does not want his power to rest on conditional approval of anyone. It's why he went after Comey so viciously, why he goes after media outlets that have been good for him like CNN: power he does not *own* is a weapon that can be used against him.

Donald Trump is constantly testing the people around him, requiring them to agree with things that are obviously false because he said them, challenging them to contradict or correct him.

He doesn't want followers who are with him because he tends to be right about things... he wants followers who believe he's right because they're with him.

In Trumpland, a thing is true because he says it.

When he makes the lie insulting and obvious as a scribbled marker line on a weather map, he's priming his followers for another test. The aides who went along with that and let it happen passed the test. The allies who will say nothing or, if asked, defend him are passing, too.

And on a psychological level, it's not just that Trump is reassured that his people are on his side... in reassuring him, they become more on his side. They become that much more invested in him, in their own obedience, in his rightness.

And everybody who questions, who points it out? To his followers, we are "triggered by a line on a map". We have so much "Trump Derangement Syndrome" that we take issue with a weather map.

Master has owned the libs.

"The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command. " 1984, George Orwell.

Trump recognizes this should be your *first* command. You don't work your way up to it. It's your opening gambit.

Donald Trump, on the very first day of his so-called presidency, for the very first test of his press secretary, sent Sean Spicer out to argue that a very small crowd we could all see was much bigger.

On day one, he talked about how God stopped the rain from falling on him, when we could all see that this hadn't happened.

These things were not *just* about protecting his own ego. They were about those things, but nothing Trump does is just, in any sense of the word.

People on Trump's side who weren't all in for him... went along with this obvious, insulting lies, because what did it matter to humor him? Why burn political capital and goodwill they might need later for more consequential fights? They believed they could *manage* him.

But each time they made an excuse to not contradict him, each time they nodded along or found a way to reframe the harmless nonsense he demanded they support... they made it harder to fight him, harder to manage him. They built a relationship with him where that didn't work.

Every day, Trump sharpens his razor and draws it across the skin of this country, dividing us into the people who will go along and the people who won't.

And it matters.

It matters if Trump presents a doodle like it's a satellite map, just like it matters when he stages a show with prop binders or stacks of paper, just like it matters when he insists he has a secret plan...

It all matters. The truth matters. Reality matters.

Also, what kind of galaxy brain take is it to suggest that no one thought the scribbled circle would fool anyone? I mean. Isn't it amazing that we have a supreme executive who would do that and we're just supposed to shrug?

It's only worth commenting on if it had a chance of tricking us? It's not remarkable that it happened in the first place?

Honestly... I'm having a hard time imagining how, in any other administration, people wouldn't have *quit* over this. They can't literally stop him from doing it but who would want to be associated with it?

"Over a line scribbled on a map, isn't that a bit extreme?"

A president, on national TV, showing a hand-drawn amendment to a week-old weather map in order to back up an errant tweet? Yes. It's the perfect mixture of dishonest and humiliating.

Your boss, the most important and powerful person in the world, wants you to stand next to him in a video for literally all the world to see, while he shows a map on which he drew a circle to try to retroactively make a now moot point true.

And you go along with it?

I know why they went along with it. See the entire rest of this thread. I'm just trying to highlight how absolutely incredible this is, how remarkable it is... it is remarkable, so we're remarking upon it. That's what remarkable means.

Final thought here - in the story of the Emperor's New Clothes, no one was fooled into thinking they saw the clothes. They might or might not individually have believed the clothes existed, but they all knew they were themselves looking at the emperor's naked body.