The Trump administration seems to have no problem with lying. It is likely a result of the business background, where Trump has learned to exploit people by making them believe what is advantageous to him, a page from the book of “Catch me if you can!” or to quote Leonardo die Caprio : “People only know what you tell them.”. In general if you have to process speech and it requires more focus, or it is a message that touches you in a more powerfull way, you will not remember things that may be important as long as you process the message, even your experiences that are in conflict.
Humans are cognitively unanchored, our brains don’t have set ideas. We may prefer some over others because of the way the brain is structured, and some may be intrinsically rewarding, but never the actualization of the idea, so not the real thing, only the use it has to you (which you have learned from your environment). You will eat a dougnut, or an apple or a Mars bar, all food, so they have the same general function in your daily routine, but you don’t keep having problems with the shape of the dougnut, or the fact you have to unwrap the Mars bar.
Lies are in principle hard to detect. Even if someone tells you the Earth is flat, your brain, having no anchor, tries to start from that idea and tries to make it work. In the state you listen in the words you hear shape other parts of the brain, unlike when you report on what you see, when your visual cortex shapes activity in your Broca area. When the brian follows the words it may come up with a valid position for you to exist in, which is to assume the one talking means “people are stupid”, because it he/she can not mean the Earth is really flat. The facts you carry around and which you base your character on will assert themselves. If the person continues, “No, I really mean our planet is a flat disk!” then you still have to judge whether it is a joke, whether you will abandon yourself and accept the nonsense, or whether you will assert your view, and whether all this is important enough for you to respond to.
People only know what you tell them
The people following Trump, who are instructed by him to shoult “Build that wall!” or “No more muslims!” are not able to recognize the lies, maybe they just don’t have the experience, maybe they have been eating a diet that wrecks cognitive abilities, maybe they are taking debilitating medicine. They are from rural areas, maybe they have been breathing in to much Roundup and other poison floating through the air. They somehow can not get themselves to doubt or check the validity of the statements.
Trump knows this full well, and it has been a strategy for a long time for the right to mobilize idiots, the more stupid the better. Also an attitude of stupididity creates a good follower, one of intelligent discourse only invites opposition. The people are to be divided into drones and masters. If you don’t buy the lie, and you are not a master, you will be crushed.
The painfull reality is that if a small group controlls the majority this is a viable situation. If the master is in the big house and the 500 slaves in the shacks , and enough vigilance and force is applied, and enough deference ot needs is shown, this can a perfectly stabile situation.
Equally if an elite of business owners determines the laws (as has been the case many times in history) The workers can just forget it. They can have a great life buying in the company store, you can check out any time you like, but you can never leave. Our history has been a series of ebbs and flows, and in general an consolidation of the elite over more and more people. Since the Davos meetings you can speak of a world government, of course of a globalist nature. The glue is debt and lies. The need a globalist economic environment is mainly because 1. It brings peace and makes participants rich and 2. Fossil has to be divided most optimally, which is done by distributing money.
Fossil fuels are essential to sustain the need for money, because people have to come back and earn more to pay for gas, their mortgage and all kinds of other costs. Thos costs would not be recurrent or as big if we ran everything on renewables! Robots and renewables are already demolishing the power of the financial elite, life becomes cheaper, debts evaporate, control over people is lost but because there is not scarcity, peace is upon the lands.
Every dictatorship rewrites history
But we are not there yet. The lies of Trump are putting us all in more jeopardy, and that is fine with the elite, we are useless consumers, annoying and obstinate for our class. The risk is real that control of the Trump type of extortionists becomes so complete that history is rewritten after the fact, making the lies seem real.
Saying the travel ban prevents terrorist can later be embelished with fake terrorist attacks before the ban. Saying Mexico will pay for the wall can be explained in many ways later. People only know what you tell them is the reality Trump counts on and hopes to creat. A amnesic populus that follows orders because they no longer connect to their own stories and environment. One that already went to war based on lies, but will likeley do so with itself soon.
Trumps idea is that whoever enters his sphere of intluence is toast, for him to butter and consume. He can pull it off with some. Has in the past. He adopts ideas and abandons them. We don’t know if he has any smarts or is on top of things. But the general goal of his kind of friends is to turn you into either a sucker or an ally. With lies and all other powers at their command if necessary.