Donald Trump's presidency has caused a number of divisions in America. One of the most damaging has been the divide between rational people and melayu lucah xxxthe truth.
I'm not even talking about Russian rumor mills peddling bombastic stories to impressionable social media users. I'm talking about a growing problem I've noticed on the left side of the political spectrum: believing the absolute worst about Trump and those around him with no evidence whatsoever.
Many have been so inundated with daily almost-unbelievable acts by Trump that they are now inclined to believe whatever negative thing about his administration they hear. Adding to that, the desire to believe every incendiary thing about our president has evolved into a comforting dopamine rush, even when it's based on nothing.
The most recent example of this pattern happened last night, when the genius Twitter account @pixelatedboat posted a joke excerpt from the much-hyped Michael Wolff book Fire and Fury. It posits that Trump's staffers broadcasted a bunch of gorilla footage into the presidential bedroom as a "makeshift gorilla channel."
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The joke is honestly pretty funny. But the scary thing is that a lot of people who should know better believed it to be true. It confused many and juuuust enough ran with the idea that the whole thing turned inside out.
The joke went too far for @pixelatedboat, who felt the need to clarify that it actually wasa joke and that Trump really didn't sit in front of the TV talking to gorillas he believes can hear him. He even changed his Twitter name to "the gorilla channel thing is a joke" and even offered something like an apology.
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Pixelatedboat's joke is a prime example of people choosing to believe what some part of them wantsto be true.
And it's far from the only time it has happened.
A pattern has quickly formed where people make mountains of angst against Trump out of molehills of evidence.
It's pretty easy to look back on Trump's first year in office and find a number of stories that seem taken out of context by an internet that wants to project its own feelings onto events. It goes way back to the inauguration.
Remember Michelle Obama's sober face when she greeted Donald and Melania with a gift? There's no telling what she really felt at that moment, but that didn't stop many from believing they knew what was in her mind.
A pattern quickly formed where people make mountains of angst against Trump out of molehills of evidence.
People think they know how unhappy Melania is with her life. They empathized with Chief of Staff General Kelly (a man who believes Robert E. Lee was an "honorable man") putting his hands over his face during one of Trump's pressers. Even this week, as Vice President Mike Pence swore in Doug Jones to the Senate, the internet jumped at the chance to say Jones' queer son gave the side-eye to Pence. And maybe he did! But there is no way to know for sure.
Hell, the same can be said of the internet thinking Ivanka Trump is in love with Justin Trudeau. There are so many examples.
These fictional narratives only serve as reflections of our own confirmation bias. They reinforce our already held beliefs and separate us further from things that can actually be proven true.
Don't forget, Fox News is so successful because it promotes thinking like this.
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Taking that one step further, Donald Trump himself is a victim of similar thinking. No proof at all seems to exist for the millions he claims voted illegally in 2016, for Obama wiretapping Trump Tower, for the need of a southern border wall, for even the 'war' on saying "Merry Christmas." But none of that has stopped him from publicly saying that all of this is true and probably believing in his heart that it is.
The thing is: there is plenty of factual information out there that calls Trump's actions into question.
These Trump opinions prove how dangerous this line of irrational thinking can be and also how it is a slippery slope indeed. After years of similar statements coming from the president, you can understand how people would believe Trump sits for 17 hours watching a gorilla channel. However, this sort of political environment, full of pointing fingers and cries of 'fake news,' means that people should have even more caution with what they choose to believe.
Because, the thing is: there is plenty of factual information out there that calls Trump's actions into question. You don't need to latch onto comforting internet narratives to arrive at the conclusion that this is not the most stable presidency and that the Commander in Chief has... imperfections, shall we say. Plenty of well-researched, well-reported information is out there to back that up.
Or you can just look at Trump's Twitter TL.
It's concerning because I don't want facts to lose any more ground than they already have. The truth has taken a back seat in many, many things that Trump has championed in his administration, from climate change to the need to revitalize the coal industry to him again saying today that his collusion with Russia is turning out to be a "hoax."
Knee-jerk, confirmation bias thinking is a slippery slope and that can only make the divisions that exist deeper. Facts matter because they are a stable starting place for discussion and possible unity. It's hard to debate with a person knee-deep in bad information they got from sources that serve to back up their preconceived beliefs. But if everyone goes down that dark path, it will be an utterly devastating impossibility.
UPDATE: Feb. 6, 2018, 4:48 p.m. EST
And it happened again. On Feb. 5, the stock market fell over a 1,000 points. So, @HoarseWisperer made a joke with some quick sloppy Photoshop showing an "old tweet" from Trump in which he disparaged the very same thing. The Twitter user made it clear that the tweet was a joke from the outset, but that didn't stop the internet.
People took it seriously, because they wanted it to be true.
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