The term “gaslighting” has a specific meaning which has largely been lost, as words and phrases sometimes do. For example, the expression “begs the question” is technically supposed to mean “circular reasoning.” These days it has evolved in most usages to underline a specific kind of hypocrisy. “You say you’re a vegan, which begs the question, why are you eating fish?”
“Gaslighting” started life meaning an attempt by one person to manipulate another into believing they are insane. Today it has come to mean fake news, or simply lying. When certain commentators on Fox “News” insist that the 2020 election was stolen, they are said to be gaslighting us, they are participating in the “Big Lie.”
These evolutions don’t bother me. I realise they bother certain language purists. We are going to have to agree to disagree. I find the new meanings of both terms more useful and versatile than the old ones.
For me, one of the most flagrant examples of gaslighting, in the new and evolved sense of the word, is how the legacy media still frequently insists that President Joe Biden was going senile while giving Trump a pass. They aren’t trying to make us believe we are insane, but sometimes that is the net effect.
Jake Tapper wrote a whole book on President Biden’s alleged increasing cognitive impairment, when a couple of sentences would have sufficed. The book was a colossal failure, I’m pleased to report. It proved to be full of lies, misattributions and invented scenes.
The truth of the matter was Biden was getting old, and he was losing a few steps. He also had a stammer from childhood which he had mostly learned to control. End of book. There you go, Jake, I fixed it for you.
Month on month Trump’s public utterances and rants on “Truth” Social are becoming more bizarre, incoherent and stupid. For example, Trump recently boasted that his uncle, professor John Trump, had Ted Kaczinsky (aka “The Unabomber”) as one of his students.
The problem with this claim is that Trump’s uncle taught at MIT. Kaczinsky went to Harvard and the University of Michigan. You don’t have to go any further than Wikipedia to find this out.
There was a time when Trump tried to make his lies, however transparent, at least plausible. Those times are becoming scarcer.
For example, during the run up to the 2016 election, when the Billy Bush-Access Hollywood scandal came to light, Trump and his crew of miscreants tried to put a “locker room talk” face on it, a couple of men boasting about their, ahem, prowess. (Although only Trump was boasting.) The explanation was good enough to get him the necessary electoral college votes to squeak his way into the presidency. He still got stomped in the popular vote.
Today one can only imagine what he’d say. That the tape was “fake news”? Or that the Deep State, Obama and Hillary used a voice impersonator?
For the past six months Trump’s odd behavior at events, in interviews, in his extemporaneous remarks and at press conferences are increasingly unhinged. Not only does he drift off topic, the topic is frequently nowhere to be found.
For most of his 70s Trump said things occasionally that didn’t make sense. These days, when he isn’t falling asleep, they almost never do. Trump completes fewer and fewer sentences. He’ll start to say something that sounds marginally rational, then veer off into territories that are complete non sequiturs.
There are only two reliable exceptions to this. When Trump is reading from a teleprompter the words written by others, or in some of his posts on “Truth” Social.
How is it that Trump can still occasionally write and post coherent sentences? Sarah Matthews, former deputy press secretary to Kayleigh McEnany, explains that those posts weren’t written by Trump. They were written by his staff. Matthews says they’re easy to tell apart.
For instance, on August 1st, a Trump post begins, “I was just informed that our Country’s ‘Jobs Numbers’ are being produced by a Biden Appointee, Dr. Erika McEntarfer, the Commissioner of Labor Statistics, who faked the Jobs Numbers before the Election to try and boost Kamala’s chances of Victory.”
That’s a complete sentence that is coherent and sounds fairly erudite, however false. Trump might have written a sentence like that when he was 50. At 79 it wouldn’t be possible. No doubt the insertions of odd 18th century-style random capital letters were Trump’s. The rest was pure staff work.
This is why Trump’s middle-of-the-night rants are patently his own. No staffer is around to rescue him. Matthews confirms this. The real Trump comes out at night.
As with the Unabomber quote, Trump blurts out in public whatever sounds good at the time to his increasingly twisted brain. He doesn’t appear to worry (or possibly even know) that it directly contradicts an early blurt.
For example, Trump’s new claim that he and Jeffrey Epstein came to a parting of ways over Epstein’s “stealing” of one of his employees, the late Virginia Giuffre. The timeline doesn’t fit, and contradicts an earlier statement that Trump didn’t know the unfortunate woman. It was also an incredibly stupid and dangerous thing to volunteer.
I’m not a medical professional, so I’m not about to try to diagnose Trump. But I do know that his odd behaviour, his inability to think clearly, his temper tantrums, his constant whining, his instability and increasing difficulty to understand reality and how it works are the most dangerous possible combination of traits in a president of the United States. That he has surrounded himself with people who do understand these things and choose to do nothing but praise him is, to my mind, a recipe for disaster.
The 25th Amendment of the Constitution exists for these times. If it isn’t used and used soon, not only will future history harshly judge the people surrounding Trump for failure to use it, the world needs to judge, condemn and shame them right now. They are participating in the worst possible case of gaslighting, and they are doing it with the full knowledge of the inevitable consequences.
