How to be with Trump

Dear readers!

When last year we launched the mailing of the founders of The Bell, we promised that we would share with you, including personal experiences about what is happening around. It was clear in advance that this would not be easy - from the beginning of this year there are more than enough experiences, but the speed of development does not allow time to sit down and gather thoughts. It seems not only to us - how to react to the frenzy of Donald Trump, no one understands now.

On Friday evening, I was ready to put a point in this letter when we all witnessed a crazy show in the White House, shocking even the Kremlin court internationalists. The consequences of breaking the negotiations between Trump and Vladimir Zelensky can be very different, but so far, it seems, the main consequence is the “thin world” in Ukraine at least postponed. All that happened yesterday on the air we described in our telegram channel , and already at night-summed up in the final mailing . And, of course, we will continue to do this further. But all the last months, not at all an idle question for us - how to write about Trump's presidency and about his speeches.

We are faced with such a newcomer for the first time. For example, Vladimir Putin knows how to directly lie, and manipulate, and turn reality back and forth, as he is beneficial. Frankly, he is still a liar. But still, most often Putin tries to at least rely on reality. Here, for example, Putin’s introductory demonstration with a meeting about rare earth metals (signal and PAS Trump) and a mocking offer to the Americans to disarm (of course, no one will be disarmed, but then we can say “but we suggested”). But despite all the absurdity of the events, for example, the figures of military expenses on purchasing power parity at the meeting were quoted quite mainstream - from the recent report of the British IISS.

With Trump in this sense, everything is even worse. Where do the numbers that he repeat dozens of times come from, no one knows. What is the 4% rating of Zelensky? Where did $ 500 billion come from, which the USA ore now? How could one say seriously that Ukraine should not start a war with Russia? Unlike Putin, who manipulates turns reality for himself, Trump just invents it - and catching him on lies is useless: he will simply answer : “Who said this, you?”, And instead of an answer, he will essentially say that he is the best president in history. Honestly, this part of the letter was written before Trump’s answer to the question of whether he considers Zelensky a dictator: “Did I say that? I can't believe. " You can guess as much as you like, whether he forgot his recent tweet or is it just jokes (this time, it seems, the second) - in practice it has exactly any meaning.

In this Swiss handling of reality, Trump is created by information chaos, who would be proud of the Kremlin PR managers, who had long made it their main trick: “Everything is not so clear, you can look at everything, but you can like it, but there’s no truth in the world - you can only choose which invention you like more.” Trump's appointments are quickly studying this - it is enough to watch a short video on which the nominee for the post of Deputy Minister of Defense of the United States is trying to answer the question "Russia attacked Ukraine." This reminded me of the famous attempts by Sergei Evgenievich Naryshkin to guess the idea of ​​the authorities exactly three years ago.

So far, probably, our most useful advice is regarding the understanding of Trump and his news, the US president’s statements should not be read, but listened. Trump has a unique gift of “making headlines”, but very often his phrases, from which agencies and social networks make sensational news, is just a piece of stream of consciousness: only last week, telegram channels massively confused Trump and Zelensky’s statements and twice attributed to him non-existent statements about the new round of Russian-American negotiations on February 25. Another advice is no worse - to continue to read us: we created our publication in order to make news without garbage and clickbeit, and for us this is a personal challenge.

But, to be honest, it is not clear that we can professionally make this phenomenon. It is useless to catch people like Trump. American media have been doing this for 10 years and still continue. The Washington Post after the first term Trump considered how many times he lied in four years of the presidency (30,573) - so what? Nothing. Trump is again the president, and the owner of the publication Jeff Bezos, together with the other Bigtechtech-billiarders, swore allegiance to him, openly dictates WAPO editors, what topics they should write about, and about which ones do not write in the band of opinions (even if they say that they do not force them to write in bottles ). Anyway, when did these methods work? Putin with his manipulations all our free journalism, for which we hold so, was also unable to stop.

Of course, these thoughts are a side effect of long and unpleasant thoughts that we all do since February 2022: what we did not do that we allowed this disgusting, cynical and condo dictatorship in our country, which over the past three years have killed at least 150 thousand only own citizens. They did a lot like that, of course.

But the deeper the world politics is immersed in madness, the less persons I personally have that our work is still needed. In the world in which there is no one to believe, our task is to help to taxure ourselves and readers in the streams of the false and cynical consciousness of those whom we did not choose, in the hope that the best is still ahead. In the end, as the Nobel laureate Daron Ademoglu told us in a recent interview , democracies simply have ups and falls.