The super-villain ain't so super anymore

These days, so many crazy things get done and said, it’s hard to keep track.

Years ago, the American author David Shenk came up with a name for it: data smog. There’s so much stuff clogging up our devices and TV screens - words, images, propaganda - that it becomes data smog. There’s too much of it. There’s only so many hours in the day.

So we turn it off.

This happens a lot, now, during the Trump era. Pollsters have taken note of it, on both sides of the border. The American Psychologists Association found that nearly 80 per cent of Americans say they have anxiety about the future due to Donald Trump. Up here, it’s the around same number: Leger, one of our best pollsters, says that 8 in 10 Canadians now experience what they call “Trump anxiety” - anger, anxiety, exhaustion.

In stressful environments, people will turn away from sources that make them upset.  Propagandists - these days, Iran, China, Russia and sub-state groups like Hamas - take advantage of that. Information voids don’t stay empty for long. As I’ve written in my book, propagandists and bad guys scramble to fill the gaps with lies and chaos.

When it comes to distracting people, and commanding attention, Donald Trump has been more effective than any politician in recorded history.  Trump may be lousy at many things, but at one thing he has been without equal: dominating the discourse, controlling the agenda, focussing attention. Every single day, Trump would roll a metaphorical silver ball across the floor, and all of us - journalists, politicians, the public - would chase after it.

And there he was again, this week, playing the same game.  Everything he said was newsworthy. Every word he uttered had serious consequences for Canadians. Here’s a summary of what he said in the Oval Office.

• “I can tell you this: you know, Canada has been ripping off the United States for many, many years, for decades, many decades.”

•  “They take advantage of our farmers. They take advantage of our tourists. They take advantage of airlines.”

•  “They basically don't allow banks of America to be in Canada. That's sort of emblematic of the way they treat us.”

• “We have more oil and gas than they do. We have tremendous forests. We don't need their lumber. We don't need the things they have. They need what we have…They need us. We don't need them.”

Trump went on like that for six full minutes, uninterrupted. He railed about Canadian-made automobiles and planes. He talked about naming Lake Ontario “Lake America.” He insisted that dictatorships are better to deal with than us. He concluded: “Canada has taken advantage of us. They have ripped us off for years, and now we're turning the tables.”

Except: no, yeah, no. Everything Trump said, pretty much - about farmers, tourism, airlines, banks, oil and gas and more - was false. It was wrong. It was a lie.

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