Trump Is the Hoax
Everything Trump has called a “hoax” has been anything but that.
How many times do you think Donald Trump has made use of the word hoax?
The investigation into his ties to Russian operatives during the 2016 campaign? A Democrat hoax. The coronavirus? A Democrat hoax. People having trouble affording groceries and housing? Affordability — the very concept of being able to afford the bare necessities in life — a Democrat hoax. The Epstein files? A Democrat hoax. His record two impeachments? Can you guess? Yes, the first, for his “perfect phone call” with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, was a hoax, and the second, for inciting an insurrection, was yet another hoax.
Has anyone written a children’s book, “The President Who Cried Hoax”?
Because we know Trump is forever psychologically projecting and, thus, talking about himself without realizing it, we understand that he is forever admitting his guilt by using the word to undermine the legitimacy of investigations against him.
It’s interesting to me that Trump makes use of such an old-fashioned term like hoax (not to mention witch hunt) on the regular. Dating back to the late eighteenth century, hoax seems to derive from what a conjurer or juggler might say, a truncation of “hocus pocus,” utilized to divert the attention of an audience. According to the etymonline site, as a verb, it originally meant “ridicule; deceive with a fabrication,” which means, with each deception, he is ridiculing his own followers. (Reasonably intelligent people who pay at least some attention to news sources employing actual journalists have never, ever been fooled by “The Donald.”)
Lifelong conman, conjurer of distractions, juggler of multiple grifts at a time, Trump is himself the hoax he so often speaks of. He was a hocus-pocus real-estate developer, using the public dole, that actual New York developers considered not serious or honest; a self-promoting “great businessman,” actually manufactured by a reality show producer and a ghostwriter; owner of a fraudulent university and a bogus foundation, both heavily fined and shut down by courts; a “playboy” who speaks creepily about his own daughter and who has been accused by 28 women of various forms of sexual misconduct, from unwanted kissing and groping to rape; and an utterly unworthy candidate for public office — even after his first term. In every way one can imagine, as a man, husband, father, patriot, leader, Christian, tough guy, smart guy, Trump has proven himself time and again to simply be a hoax.
When Trump works the room to prove his patriotism by kissing and groping an American flag, when he incessantly boasts he’s passed an IQ test that is actually a basic mental competence screening and says others, especially female journalists, could never pass it, when he claims he had nothing to do with his decade-long best friend Jeffrey Epstein, why doesn’t every American think of Shakespeare’s “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.” (Are we that poorly read? Perhaps all we need are civics and a good grounding in Shakespeare.)
The definition of hoax in the dictionary should include Trump’s scowling orange mug, the heavy makeup also being a type of deception, an admission of falsity. The man is literally a circus act: Decepto the Clown.
He boasts endlessly about the “big plans” he has — infrastructure, healthcare, peace treaties — that are always a couple of weeks away but never materialize. He says he has “concepts of plans,” but you know (and he knows) he doesn’t even have that. Even a group of truly mediocre men would find him flighty and lacking in follow-through. As Salon’s Amanda Marcotte recently wrote, even projects he seems to love, like the ballroom he knocked down the East Wing of the White House for, is nowhere near being started on and likely will never be built:
“The whole thing is a too-perfect symbol of Trump’s second administration: They are very good at breaking things, but they don’t know how to create anything of value.”
Which is not to say that Trump’s gaudy vision of a grotesquely oversized ballroom overwhelming the White House is a thing of any value, other than to his purposes in destroying our democracy. He turned the East Wing into rubble for the same reason he bolted his name onto the Kennedy Center: to show us that he could.
Isn’t diversion — or attempts to divert our attention from his utter fecklessness — what Trump does nearly every hour of every day? That is, when he’s not doing some hocus pocus on the folks he’s invited to play golf, the frequency of which reportedly amounted in his first term to about 22% of his time as president and an estimated $140 million in costs to taxpayers.
Again, Trump himself is (and I will mimic his use of capital letters ) the BIG LIE, the EMPTY PROMISE, the convicted FELON and SEXUAL PREDATOR, the (as investigative journalist Wayne Barrett called him decades ago), USER OF USERS.
To wit (to use another equally aged term), the HOAX HIMSELF.
It’s easy to fall for a conman’s pitch, but you don’t have to keep falling for it. (As George W. Bush famously advised: “Fool me once, shame on…shame on…you. Fool me…you can’t get fooled again.”) When Trump boasts that his economy is great while hiding the numbers, when he tells you that other American citizens are your enemies, remember the deep meaning of hoax — “ridicule, deceive with a fabrication.”
And consider joining the rest of us — moderate Republicans, Independents, moderate Democrats, Liberals, Progressives — who may have been a step or two ahead of you on figuring out who Trump is but who will happily welcome you into the fold of reasoning humanity once again.
A version of this essay later appeared on Salon.
