The Trump Shooting Was Fake News
On Events and Non-Events
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When the world learned that a bullet had grazed Donald Trump’s ear it felt like a political earthquake with profound ramifications. Commentators rushed to assert that Trump’s return to office was now certain. It was said that independent voters would move decisively towards the bloodied-but-unbowed hero in that picture - “the picture that wins the election”. It was said that existing Trump voters would be energised, some of them by anger at the perfidy of the Deep State. It was said there were consequences for the Democrats, too: it suddenly seemed more likely that Joe Biden would retain the party’s candidacy.
On the morning that the news broke in Britain I posted a short thread arguing that this event probably didn’t make much difference to anything. My reasoning was not sophisticated. It was based on the psychological principle that almost everything that happens in life is less important than it seems when it is happening (Leslie’s Razor #4, with credit to Daniel Kahneman), and on the political principle that, well, this is America.
As we all know, American voters are highly polarised - in other words, the great majority of them have made up their minds about everything already, including and especially Trump. Remarkable as that image was, I found it hard to believe that it would change anyone’s perception of him. The voters who liked him already saw him as heroic and defiant. The voters who didn’t like him, or didn’t trust him enough to be president, would not suddenly be converted by a photo. People are really not that simple.
The second reason is that the American news cycle is garish, melodramatic, and fast. Events leap out at you, shake you by the shoulders and immediately recede into a hazily recalled stream of crazy moments.
January 6th, 2021 seemed to be seismic, and yet, as I suggested might be the case at the time, it didn’t actually make much difference. Trump’s reputation was not fatally damaged by it, as many observers predicted, nor did it lead to a split in the Republican Party. As with last weekend’s shooting, the shocking imagery made it seem more consequential than it was.
On Twitter, most people disagreed with my blasé assessment of the shooting’s consequences, among them the great Simon Schama. (I stress that we’re talking about the political consequences - the event was horrifically consequential for the spectator who was killed). Was I right? It’s too soon to say for certain, but early signs suggest I was, even if only by accident. Polls taken after the event show no movement whatsoever. Even I’m surprised by that - I thought there might be a bounce in favour of Trump.
The event wasn’t as culturally controversial or narratively fertile as many thought it would be. Before the identity of the assassin was revealed, people guessed that it was a liberal activist deranged by hatred for Trump. That was the implicit assumption behind the calls to move past the politics of division and so on (including a heartfelt one, rising above the usual boilerplate, from Melania Trump). If that assumption had held, those calls would soon have been superseded by a toxic debate about toxicity and who is to blame for it. As it it turned out, the shooter was a registered Republican. He was, it seems, just a damaged young man who chose this awful method to make a name for himself. Sometimes, someone insane does something appalling and there isn’t much more to be said.
A final reason the shooting seems less important at the end of the week than at the start is that the image of Trump’s magnificent defiance has been replaced and leavened by a new image of him (and his followers) with a bandage over his ear. Now, I don’t want to diminish his trauma, or the truly impressive sang-froid with which he arranged himself for the cameras seconds after nearly losing his life. But there is something about that ear-bandage which reminds us he is an essentially comic figure, not a heroic one (comic figures can do a lot of harm, but that’s another topic). His bandage reminds me of the one Jack Nicholson’s character wears in Chinatown, which Polanski leaves on Gittes specifically to rob him of gravitas.
All of this raises the question implicit in my not-entirely-serious headline. How do we distinguish between real news, by which I mean an important, game-changing event, and fake news, by which I mean an event that dominates headlines and social media feeds but isn’t actually significant?
This is a far stickier problem than what is commonly meant by “fake news”. For years now, alarms have been raised about the danger of AI-enabled content spreading lies and confusion among low-information voters. In the recent British election campaign, however, deep fakes were a dog that didn’t bark. There were no videos of Keir Starmer calling for the legalisation of heroin or Rishi Sunak sex tapes, and if there had been it’s doubtful they would have had an impact.
Perhaps the real test presented by our news environment isn’t distinguishing what’s real from what’s fictional, but what matters from what does not. The people who find that the hardest are high-information voters; people who follow the news closely. We act as if single new events are desperately important, when what really moves the tides is the accretion of news events over time; the underlying trends rather than the over-hyped data points.
Knowing which events are significant and which are not is hard in any context. A group of social scientists designed a machine learning model to study two million diplomatic cables sent by the US State Department between 1973 and 1979. Most of the cables were about trivial events, a few were about important ones - or rather, ones that seemed important at the time. The researchers compared this corpus to the fraction of the cables which were later deemed important by historians. Events that seemed important to the diplomats turned out not to be; events that seemed unimportant turned out to consequential. Even experts - perhaps especially experts - are highly unreliable judges of historical significance.
Having said all this, we recently had evidence that hype about a single event can be entirely justified. Although it has taken longer than I thought it would for Biden to fall, the first presidential debate really was as important as it seemed at the time. But there is good reason to think that was an exception rather than the norm. The debate didn’t actually shift public opinion much, if at all; it just made the Democratic Party’s power brokers unable to continue pretending they were blind to what everyone could see. This event felt important to high-information pundits and politicians - and that made it important. Most of the time, politics doesn’t work like that.
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After the jump: thoughts on Labour’s start; two jawdropping stories about the sclerotic British state; the correct take on Jonathan Haidt’s book; three great eighties bands; the funniest video on the internet; Buddhist Beatles, and much more.
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