Magic Tricks and Our Garbage Discourse
Donald Trump just revealed his secret.
1. The Pledge and the Turn
Penn and Teller turned the world of magic on its head by performing tricks illusions and then showing the audience how they did them.1 It’s fascinating to watch.
Yesterday Donald Trump did the same thing, though unintentionally, I think. He showed the Americans how he tricks them into changing the subject.
When Penn and Teller reveal their secrets, the tricks are still entertaining to watch. When Trump revealed his, he suddenly looked weak, tired, and pathetic.
By Tuesday night, Donald Trump had a problem. His Madison Square Garden rally blew up when Tony Hinchcliffe came onstage and called Puerto Rico a “floating island of garbage.”
We could tell that this was a real problem, and not a manufactured problem, because Trump took the rare step of disavowing Hinchcliffe, instead of doubling down and sticking by him. That soft posture is not his modus operandi. Usually, Trump refuses to retreat because he thinks that disavowing makes him look weak. The disavowal is a maneuver he reserves for special cases when he thinks he’s in real trouble.2
So when Trump said that he didn’t know who Hinchcliffe was and didn’t know anything about the Puerto Rico joke, it was a tell. It was an admission that the Hinchcliffe joke was a genuine liability and not just a kayfabe scandal unfairly created by the media/socialists/enemies of the people.
That admission was the first part of Trump’s trick.
The next step in the trick—the turn—came Tuesday night after Joe Biden said (or didn’t say) that Trump supporters were “garbage.” Trump’s team latched onto this like a drowning man going after a life preserver.
They went into overdrive trying to change the conversation from Hinchcliffe, Puerto Rico, and Kamala Harris’s 75,000-person show of force on the Ellipse to fake outrage and a defense of the sacred honor of Trump voters.
A brief aside: Some people are cross with Biden for inserting himself and creating an opportunity for Trump.
But Trump was going to run this playbook no matter what. If Biden had never said the word “garbage,” then Trump would have found something else to use as a pretext. If he couldn’t find a pretext, he would have created something on his own—like his NABJ interview, when he said Harris wasn’t black.
The point of the turn is misdirection and it does not matter what the new subject actually is.
I promise you that if Biden had never appeared on that Zoom, we’d be having the exact same conversation today—it would just have a different fake outrage at the center.
2. The Prestige
What I’ve just described to you are the first two acts in a trick: the pledge (where Trump reveals that he’s actually in trouble) and the turn (where Trump latches onto Biden’s “garbage” line).
The real magic comes in the third act: the prestige.