The magic trick completed by the best criminals—before Trump—was to take extraordinary behavior and make it seem banal. Somehow media never figured out that what Trump's disinformation machine does is take banal crimes or misconduct and make it seem extraordinary to discredit it.
Example: Do you know how many Americans believe that—if it exists—the Ritz Moscow tape depicts Trump having sex with prostitutes and being urinated on by them? How could that be, when the allegation regarding the tape involves *none* of those things? See what Trumpists did there?
The allegation regarding the tape—the *only* allegation *ever* regarding the tape—was that Trump watched a woman urinate on a bed Obama slept in as a way of symbolically disrespecting Obama. No sex. No Trump being peed on. *Trumpists* worked *hard* to make the tape sound *worse*.
The work Trump's digital machine did to make the tape sound *insane*—not, as the allegation went, banal—was *critical*. Why? Because when Trump's bodyguard *admitted*—as he did—that Trump's Russian entourage offered to send him prostitutes to party with, it had to sound *crazy*.
When Trump's bodyguard admitted—as he did—that he had no idea if the offered prostitutes ever went up, and when the BBC then reported eyewitnesses seeing women trying to get up to Trump's room without signing in, it was Trump's machine that made those *banal* facts sound *crazy*.
I say this to underscore how digital propaganda works in 2020 under the auspices of Trump, Putin, Erdogan, and other autocrats: the goal is to make their *banal*—wholly sad, pathetic, and commonplace—white-collar crimes sound *so spectacular* they couldn't possibly have happened.
That's why you don't hear Trumpists discuss the *content* of my books, they just say how *spectacular* the "theories" in them are. Why? Well, because they haven't read them. But *also* because the books *have* no theories—just facts that are banal and not idiosyncratically weird.
But it's not just Trumpists. Mainstream media outlets and pundits are terrified—*above all*; I mean literally above *anything*—of being considered non-mainstream.
So they avoid *any* account that has been tarred (accurately or through a disinformation machine) as bizarre or odd.
So they avoid *any* account that has been tarred (accurately or through a disinformation machine) as bizarre or odd.
The journalist @AaronGell, who is now an editor on the media-outlet side of @Medium but has also written for @NewYorker and others, once described my Trump books—by way of *complimenting* them—as containing so many banal facts that they read like homework. gen.medium.com/learning-to-lo…
What Gell understands—and what I understand from having been a criminal investigator and criminal defense attorney—is that crime is a *banal* rather than spectacular phenomenon. What Trump understands is that America—due to TV—thinks otherwise, and he can use that to his benefit.
To explain that paradox: Trump knows that America has no understanding of what a routine criminal investigation entails, but a pretty good sense of what a made-for-TV crime sounds like, so his team tries to make his crimes sound like the latter—so they won't be believed as real.
When you read the 450 pages of Proof of Collusion or the 600 pages of Proof of Conspiracy, you're struck by the *amount* of illicit activity but not by any *particular act* being idiosyncratic or weird. It's all very banal, predictable political corruption and white-collar crime.
I'm watching THE GOOD FIGHT. It tackles how we see reality under Trump. We see a character starting to perceive fantastical events as normal. There are elements of that in how Trump acts as POTUS, but the dangerous stuff is the reverse—the banal Trumpists recast as extraordinary.
This recasting of the banal as extraordinary is useful to Trumpists because it makes Trump and the accusations against him thrillingly larger than life and because it caters to the cowardice of mainstream analysts, whose fear—as it kills their marketability—is being called crazy.
What I've done in the past—and will keep doing—is curate thousands of banal major-media investigative reports that calmly, responsibly, professionally, and with incredible sourcing establish a high volume of banal political and white-collar crimes being committed by Donald Trump.
As I do that, trollbots and far-right feeds will keep doing what we began seeing a marked increase in them doing approximately two months ago, when fears on the right that I'd be publishing another book started to peak: falsely position my work as extraordinary rather than banal.
Long excerpts from both my Trump books are available for free on Amazon. I encourage you to read them and see how normal the books are. They're not screeds; they don't contain theories; they don't claim to have underground sources. They're just curations of major-media reporting.
They are also, without question, the most damaging books ever written about Donald Trump. That's because every sentence is a curated major-media report. There is no filler. For hundreds and hundreds of pages. Anyone who has read these books would agree with this characterization.
As we enter general election season, Trumpists will work harder than ever before to try to police the sources progressives and independents can use to try to understand the crimes of Donald Trump. Don't fall for what is self-evidently a disinformation campaign. Trust banal facts.
And my message to the normopaths in mainstream news analysis is this: your cowardice is killing America. You're deciding what to amplify or not amplify *not* based on what you think is true or responsible, but based on obsessive assessments of the blowback you fear you will face.
Eighteen months ago, Gell had the courage to come out and say that—rather than being afraid of what some think about me, or what some would think of *him* for reading my work—he'd simply do what a journalist does: he'd read it. And he saw that I'd responsibly compiled the truth.
I'll keep responsibly compiling the truth—and in doing so writing work that's uncommonly dangerous to President Trump and those with whom he colludes and conspires. My work—while mundane—will continue to be methodically factual, assiduously fact-checked, and historically damning.
