FOR AMERICANS WHO REFUSE TO LOOK AWAY
The Porcupine
Sharp, honest, weekly.
He said he loves the inflation, and then it seemed the room moved on. That is the trick of this regime. Not the lie itself but the shrug that follows it; the quiet bet that nobody will keep score, especially when you flood the zone with kaka.
By now, you’ve seen one of the recent episodes where a reporter asked the current occupant whether he was concerned about the latest inflation numbers. Prices are at a three-year high. Energy costs are up over 23 percent. Real wages are falling for the second straight month.
His answer was four words: "I love the inflation."
That is not a gaffe. It’s one of the few honest things you’ll hear from this president. He has no real emotional connection to someone looking at the price while pumping gas, looking for the buy one get one at the grocery store, or asking for the generic at the pharmacy.
“I love inflation.”
What I keep coming back to is not his comment, but the expectation that people no longer care. He has so far proven that he can say anything and it won’t matter.
And so far, at least for too many of us, he has been right.
We have spent years now trying to explain the durability of charisma and the power to tell a lie with confidence. Reporters at the Washington Post counted over thirty thousand false or misleading claims in his first term alone. Didn’t seem to matter. Our closest intelligence-sharing allies, the ’Five Eyes’ partners who have spent decades building the kind of trust that keeps democracies safe, have begun quietly declining or avoiding sharing classified data with the administration.
You know why.
The Justice Department, which is supposed to be the machinery of equal accountability under the law, have been turned into a retaliatory weapon, pursuing the president's critics while burying the paper trail on his family's enrichment during trips abroad. Federal judges, the people constitutionally positioned to check executive power, have begun writing opinions that read less like rulings and more like desperate pleas for someone (us!) to pay attention and stop the charade.
Part of the problem is Fox News, a media organization that makes more money by treating a false claim as if it were credible than by doing the ten seconds of work required to say it is not. The incentive is engagement with more eyeballs, not the truth. A president who says "I love the inflation" generates more clicks than a president who explains the issue.
The lie and the accompanying outrage are much better for show business.
Steve Bannon, another prolific liar, gets booked on a news program and is given the same assumption of credibility as anyone else who appeared that week. I once wrote the editor of the Christian Science Monitor over the forum they gave Bannon, only to get a response that hearing from people close to the president was part of their job.
That is not normal.
The more often a figure like Bannon is treated as a routine participant in standard forums, the more the audience has to do the work of remembering why they shouldn’t be listening to him. Most Americans do not want to do that work every time they turn on the television. Journalism that books proven fabricators as though they were ordinary is not neutral, nor responsible.
Other democracies have built regulatory frameworks on the idea that the public airwaves carry a public obligation.
France has laws that take seriously the difference between protected speech and the deliberate manufacture of false narratives for profit. That is not censorship. It is the recognition that a free press also has to be an accountable press. An accountable press is exactly what keeps the press from becoming a state mouthpiece, like the current occupant loves in Russia.
This has become much harder to protect than you may think.
The entertainment and social media companies profit from our current ecosystem through subtlety, hyperbole, and algorithms. Truth is boring. Too normal. Just like the water, sewer, roads, and electricity we’re so used to working, we don’t give them any thought. The assumption of things working may be because we regulate this type of infrastructure. We do not allow a bridge to be built without asking whether it’s strong enough to hold traffic. Clean water from the tap is typically a given. If electricity goes out, we expect it to be back on quickly.
Just like electricity, roads, and sewer, we should not allow an information network to be engineered for maximum engagement without considering how it affects the end user.
Honest journalism needs to stop covering people whose only function is to get a false narrative into the room. Cover the lie, but don’t amplify it. The people who understand this, who have made the uncomfortable choice to report on what the administration does rather than what it says, are doing something incredibly valuable.
There just aren’t enough of them right now.
What I keep thinking about, underneath all of this, is the low-information voter. The person who saw the "I love the inflation" clip and blew it off. That person is not stupid. They are living inside an information environment that was not built to help them understand the world, inflation, nor how ludicrous such a statement is.
Breaking through to that voter is not just a messaging problem. It is an infrastructure problem that we must tackle just like the roads and bridges. It is about whether the systems we rely on to make a shared reality possible are now operating to deliberately support alternative realities.
A house divided indeed.
The lie is the product.
Know someone who refuses to look away?
Some college kid built a Chrome extension that listens to a live debate or press conference and checks every claim against real sources before the speaker finishes. InTruth, on the Chrome Web Store
I keep wishing candidates had to show some interest and knowledge in our history before we hand them the country, the way this quiz asks it of the rest of us. We test the immigrant at the door on exactly this material and wave the people running for office straight through, and somehow we call that backwards arrangement normal. A history and civics quiz, at the Washington Post
I once saw the linguist John McWhorter speak in person. He has long argued that euphemisms work like underwear, best changed often, because we keep finding softer words for hard things and then those wear out, too. He means it as description, but it lands more as a warning: like a generation of kids killing each other while we reach for gentler words to describe it and accept it.
I studied Russian literature in college and later spent time in Russia itself. It is an impressive country full of great achievements. It is also a culture built on absorbing punishment. Czars, then communism, then a brief and bewildering opening to democracy in the nineties that most Russians barely had time to name before it closed again. The arts survived all of this by going underground, by hiding meaning inside meaning, because doing anything openly could get you killed or exiled or simply erased. Putin has now made such Soviet style law official again. A new censorship law retroactively applies to all cultural content produced since August 1, 1990, the exact day the Soviet Union abolished censorship. The message is that the “free period” never happened.
If you are a writer or musician in Russia in 2026, you know democracy is a lie. One cannot mention drugs in any form, have any relationships other than heterosexual ones, or do anything that might discredit traditional values or the Russian army.
Our current American administration is determined to transform us into exactly this type of oligarchy of rules and repression.
We blew our chance to bring Russia into the democratic world after the Wall came down. That failure and the rise of Putin now belongs to everyone. What we cannot afford now is to pretend that Putin has nothing to do with us. We have a man in the White House who loves what Putin has done and is trying to do the same things here.
His real weapon was likability, and you have seen it work somewhere more powerful.
If you have lived long enough, someone you trusted has taken you for something. It happens. You learn from it. What strikes me about this one, a financial fraud case in the Journal, is how good the man was. Con artists thrive on the exact reflex the rest of us call decency, the pull toward people we like, the assumption that a warm smile means an honest one. Read the details and you will notice a resemblance in a certain someone. The same ability to say something false with a straight face and mean it enough that you believe it, too.
We built this country on caveat emptor, let the buyer beware. We like to blame the victim with an assumption that they should have known better.
That instinct is backwards.
There will always be people who wake up and go to work to purposely defraud others without a flicker of conscience. Personal vigilance is not a good enough defense against this type.
We need regulation with teeth.
The language hasn't caught up to the news. We're fixing that.
truthflation (n.) — the collapse in the value of any true statement when one man produces lies so fast that reality cannot mint facts quickly enough to back them.
By his ten-thousandth documented whopper, truthflation was total, and one verified fact traded at the going rate of a Confederate dollar.
In a healthy democracy, we worry about inflation in prices; in a sick one, we worry about truthflation. Everytime he talks, it’s the slow, invisible devaluation of facts.
truth + inflation. Backed, like all his figures, by nothing.
Before you go
What did this one do to you?
The antidote to a world built to hold your attention is to spend it with purpose. Read widely, read closely, and keep checking claims, because a country full of people who still bother to tell what is truth from false is the one thing, maybe the most important thing, that will stop this regime.
Always strive to be a good human.
