From America This Week, February 14, 2025:
Walter Kirn:
“There’s not just a science to planting ideas in people’s heads and hypnotizing them, there’s also a science to disruption.
“It’s been studied, a lot of these big billionaires now or billionaires because they disrupted a settled industry.
“And Trump is a political disruptor in the politics industry, and he knows that sometimes it’s better just to liberate trapped energy through disruption than it is to play the game, especially if it’s not your game…
“The difference between the first and the second terms, to me, is that he did it linguistically and stylistically and tonally the first time.
“But he was trapped politically and in terms of actual practical effectiveness as a leader by the various ops they ran and other things, Russiagate and so on.
“This time, he’s not just playing this disruptive game linguistically. He’s doing it in terms of the government-
Matt Taibbi:
“Policy-wise. Yeah. Exactly.”
Walter Kirn:
“In terms of governance and policy and behavior and that is something they really weren’t prepared for.
“Because now, he’s not just saying weird stuff.
“He’s doing weird stuff…”
Walter Kirn:
“Trump, I think, identified the central issue years ago which was fakeness.
“And it is the American genius as a literary historian to discover fakenesses in all.
“That’s why American literature really got going with Mark Twain who just called bullshit on things.
“He spent a whole lifetime to his dying day in 1910 calling bullshit on Congressmen, on this, on that, on European manners, on fancy writers like Henry James.
“Maybe sometimes he did it unjustly, but calling bullshit on stuff is what Americans do.”
