The Return of Trump’s Firehose

Donald Trump speaks at a press conference at Mar-a-Lago on January 7 in Palm Beach, Florida. Evan Vucci/AP

In a 2018 conversation with author Michael Lewis, Steve Bannon revealed the main media strategy of the Trumpists: “The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” Actually, that was hardly a secret. Trump’s been doing this since he first ran for president. He spews so much crap—lies, exaggerations, outlandish claims and promises—that it’s nearly impossible to keep track of it all. Moreover, each outrageous falsehood and assertion provides cover for or distracts from the others. It’s Trump’s version of what’s been called the “firehose of falsehood” model of propaganda utilized by Russia.

Trump put on a masterclass of this deceptive tactic during a press conference at Mar-a-Lago last week. He let loose a tsunami of excrement. Pointing to the various legal cases filed against him, he insisted, “We did nothing wrong on anything.” He called Judge Juan Merchan, who oversaw the porn-star/hush-money/election-interference case in which Trump was convicted of 34 felony counts, “a very crooked judge.” He said special counsel Jack Smith is a “nutjob” who “executes people.” He boasted his first term saw the “greatest economy in the history of our country.” He railed against windmills and said they were causing the deaths of whales. He stated the Panama Canal is “run by China.” He suggested that the FBI was involved in instigating the January 6 riot and declared that there was not one gun among the rioters. He claimed President Joe Biden blew up a deal that would have averted Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (while justifying Vladimir Putin’s war against Ukraine) and that the level of killing was higher in this conflict than any other since World War II. He repeated his claim that other countries have released “thousands of murderers” and prisoners and sent them to the United States. He maintained the Democrats tried to “rig” the 2024 election and that he won in a “landslide.” He said that Biden’s recent decision to protect 625 million acres of coastline from offshore drilling covered “the whole ocean” and would cost the US $50 trillion in revenue.

None of this was true. For example, the Atlantic Ocean is 26.3 billion acres, the Pacific Ocean is 40.8 billion, and the entire global oil and gas sector was estimated to be worth $4.2 trillion in 2024. There is no evidence that whales are being injured by windmills.

Then there were plenty of brazen or extreme comments and proposals. Trump refused to rule out using military force to gain control of Greenland and the Panama Canal. “It might be that you have to do something,” he remarked. He said he would rename the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America.” He threatened to slap high tariffs on Mexico and Canada, the United States’ two largest trading partners. He vowed that “all hell will break out in the Middle East” if Hamas does not set free the Israeli hostages by January 20. He talked about using “economic force” to compel Canada to become the 51st state. He said he would be issuing “major pardons” for the January 6 insurrectionists.

Just about each and every one of these false statements or threatened actions deserved a front-page headline. Yet this mélange of extremism and disinformation prevents sufficient attention from being paid to Trump, whom MAGA has exalted as an antiwar candidate, for outlining a New Imperialism and hinting at the use of military action for US expansionism. Or to examining what his promise to unleash hell on the Middle East means. Or to his plan to reward violent criminals who assaulted law enforcement officers. Or to his possible trade wars with Mexico and Canada. He said that the FBI knows the identity of the January 6 pipe bomber—suggesting that the bureau was engaged in some sort of nefarious action to cover up this crime. His promotion of yet another baseless and paranoid conspiracy theory is also worthy of much notice and investigation.

Meanwhile...during the 72-minute-long press conference, there was no focus on the first wave of Trump 2.0 crazy: his nominations. He wants to put an anti-vaxxer and conspiracy theorist in charge of the nation’s public health system, just as bird flu is appearing on the horizon as a possible crisis. He’s looking to place the Pentagon and the FBI in the hands of MAGA ideologues who have no experience running such organizations. And his aim is to plop an apologist for Putin and the recently deposed Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad into the top post of the intelligence community. These bonkers appointments have been subsumed by Trump’s more recent surge of extremism—and that improves the odds these people are confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate.

And this is how it will continue to go. In a shitstorm, there are too many turds to notice each one. The press coverage of the Mar-a-Lago presser tended to smush all the nuttiness into single stories. Afterward, the New York Times posted a fact-check of Trump’s remarks that covered many but not all the lies he told. Even in infinite digital space, there’s only so much room within our attention spans.

Fittingly, the same day of that Trump show, Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta (Facebook and Instagram) announced it would dump fact-checking in exchange for a system like community notes on X (née Twitter) and claimed this would advance “free expression.” (It likely will lead to a greater flow of misinformation, disinformation, and toxicity.) Essentially, this was Zuckerberg continuing with the Big Tech bros’ suck-up to Trump. (Days later, Zuckerberg told podcaster Joe Rogan that he was “optimistic” that Trump will be good for American business—and that corporate America needs more “masculine energy.”) It was the latest surrender to the post-truth culture that Trump has exploited and social media boosted.

At the Mar-a-Lago press conference, a reporter asked Trump about Meta’s decision to cancel fact-checking. Trump approved, saying, “I think they’ve come a long way.” The journalist followed up: “Do you think they’re directly responding to the threats you’ve made to [Zuckerberg] in the past?” Trump answered, “Probably.” This is a win for an authoritarian. Autocrats seek to control reality. Fact-checking—that is, truth—is the enemy. George Orwell summed this up in 1984: “In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it.” 

So Trump is triumphing on adjacent fronts. His firehose blasts away, and reporters, vetters, and voters can’t keep up. Meanwhile, media owners are rushing to be accommodationists and accomplices and accepting his reign of disinformation and deception. As Semafor reported last week, the Washington Post’s deputy democracy editor, Mary Jo Murphy, quietly quit after billionaire Jeff Bezos, the owner of the newspaper, blocked its editorial page from endorsing Kamala Harris, and in a Facebook post she recounted that Will Lewis, the paper’s CEO, had asked a reporter she managed “what the Post could do to attract Trump supporters.” Murphy commented in her post, “I dunno, lie to them?”

Democracy, the Washington Post tells us, dies in darkness. It can also drown in a sea of shit. Especially if no one bails out the bilge. Trump knows that.

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I have friends who will refuse to watch a television series—no matter how hot the buzz is—until it has completed its run. They don’t want to be left hanging at the end of a season and wait for the next one or be disappointed if the show doesn’t return and the story is left unresolved. Also, this allows them to binge-watch series that release episodes not all at once but weekly (as does Max, Apple TV+, and others). If you don’t feel compelled to be up on the latest stuff, this makes sense. Look at Severance, the Apple TV+ hit. The first season came out in early 2022 and ended with a fabulous cliffhanger. Though a second season was given the green light, no new episodes have appeared…until this week. On Friday, Severance fans, which includes me, will finally get to see what comes next in its brilliantly creative story. That’s quite a long interregnum. Will it be the worth the wait? To mark the return of the show—which was created by Dan Erickson and (in the first season) directed by Ben Stiller and Aoife McCardle—I’m rerunning two items about it from 2022. The expectations for Season 2 are high, and I hope they’re met.

Severance. Usually, I wait until I’ve watched a full season of a show before sharing my evaluation. It’s important to know if the creators can stick the landing. But I am going to break with standard operating procedure to advise you to watch Severance, the new Apple TV+ series. It’s billed as a thriller, but that does not do it justice. This is a wonderfully ingenious and imaginative piece of work. The premise, when I first heard it, seemed off-puttingly kooky. Through some high-tech medical procedure, people can have their memories cleaved into two sets: one covers what occurs when you are at work; the other contains your experiences out of the workplace. And never the twain shall meet. That is, when you’re chillaxing at home, you have no recollection of what occurred on the job, and vice versa. The kitschy pitch is, what if you could separate these two spheres of your life? Presto! No worries about the dreaded work-life balance. At the office, you are totally focused on, well, work. No distractions or anxieties. Off the clock, nothing hangs over you. But...it’s more complicated than that.

Severance follows a small group of workers for a mega-corporation who have gone through the procedure. All day long, they “refine” “microdata” at workstations in a fluorescent-lit subterranean, sterile office space. They have no recollection of what transpires in their “outie” lives or in any part of the world beyond this environment. No books, no newspapers, no television, no phones are allowed. It’s all work, all the time. Their “outies” have no idea what they are toiling on for Lumon Industries. And it’s not even clear—to them or us—what Lumon does or what their work produces. (They sort numbers on a screen all day, without being informed about what the numbers represent.) This mystery is compounded by an overall creepiness at Lumon, where the cultish corporate culture is based on the worship of the company’s founder and resembles Scientology. There’s also weird and (so far) unexplained animosity between the departments that is fueled by rumors of past bloody assaults.

The series conjures up a small-scale dystopian universe, with its own language and set of rules. At least, we think it’s small. Who knows how far it reaches and what Lumon is up to? Adam Scott of Parks and Recreation and Big Little Lies plays Mark Scout, a Lumon worker who lost his wife in a car crash and sought the supposedly irreversible severance procedure so he can escape for at least eight hours a day the painful memories of her death. His co-workers include Irving and Dylan, each played superbly by, respectively, John Turturro and Zach Cherry. A newcomer to their pod is Helly (Britt Lower), who after one day desperately wants to quit. But her “outie” won’t let her. She is stuck in this hell. Patricia Arquette is delicious as the malevolent and colder-than-ice manager, who communicates with the ominous “board” and presumably knows the dark secrets of Lumon. Christopher Walken is the head of another department, who seems sweet on Irving and who may or may not be a devious plotter. Meanwhile, a former member of this group, Petey (Yul Vazquez), who disappeared one day, contacts Mark on the outside, tells him severance can be undone (though the side effects appear rather unpleasant and perhaps lethal), and signals that serious evil is underway at Lumon. Back at work, Mark, with no memory of Petey’s warning, starts to realize something wrong is afoot. As did HBO’s Westworld, Severance presents us a tech-jiggered world that raises questions about identity, memory, and free will. Its slow pace intensifies the menace and paranoia that power the narrative. The first episode is a fabulous setup that prompts a binderful of questions. And I curse Apple for not dumping all the episodes at once. I have no idea where the series is heading, but I want to remember it all.

After viewing the first few episodes, I raved about the new Apple TV+ show Severance, and encouraged you to watch. But I added a cautionary note. “It’s important to know,” I wrote, “if the creators can stick the landing.” Now that the first season has concluded, I can render a judgment: a perfect finish. Severance became even more intriguing as the show progressed. The puzzle got more puzzling. If you don’t know the basic idea—which sounded a bit silly to me before I began watching—the series follows four workers at mega-corporation Lumon who have gone through a process in which their memories have been cleaved in half. Inside their sterile workspace in the bowels of an immense corporate HQ, where they are engaged in a process called “data refinement,” they have no recollections of their lives beyond the office. At home, they have no memories of their day job, which means there’s no personal baggage at work and no work anxiety at home. Why would anyone submit to this? Well, Mark S. (Adam Scott) lost his wife in a car accident, and now he can escape the grief and painful memories for at least eight hours a day.

There are plenty of mysteries. It’s unclear what data Mark and his three colleagues are refining, or, for that matter, what refining even is. Other departments in the severed division engage in odd and unexplained activities (one of which involves baby goats). Lumon seems to operate more as a cult than a Fortune 500 company. It’s my hunch that the work being done by Mark and the others is not the important thing: It’s the severance that counts, and the process is much more than a workplace efficiency tool. Lumon has other—perhaps diabolical—plans for it.

As the series hits the final three of its nine episodes, it focuses more on the subject of identity: who are the “innies” (the workplace versions of these people) and what agency do they have? Are they just secondary beings in service to the “outies” who have families, pets, friends, hobbies, and pasts—that is, life beyond work? Do they have rights of their own? What if they want to quit? What happens when they wish to know more of their outside lives? In this regard, the show enters Westworld territory, but in a more subtle and sophisticated manner. The question is obvious in Westworld: What happens when robots created for a high-end amusement park develop consciousness and desires of their own? In Severance, it’s a conflict between two human selves, between two separate but related identities residing in one person.

The series has not one but two cliffhangers. The penultimate and the last episode each conclude on a precipice. They expand the scope of the show without resolving the main riddles. Indeed, Lumon is up to something big, but we don’t know what it is. Is severance being deployed in other ways, for other purposes? Is it being used—or will it be used—to turn people into part-time zombies? Is the larger public at risk? And where’s the profit in this? (Soldiers who cannot remember their actions?) I don’t know, but I am eagerly awaiting the answers. Severance is one of the most fascinating offerings in streaming land these days. After you've finished the season, it is hard to forget about.