Sanity is not statistical

As of three weeks ago the government’s own figures indicated $142 billion in tariff revenue collected, which is 1.78% of $8 trillion, so in other words this is a fifty-fold “exaggeration,” which is the Standard Elite Media Guide to Covering Donald Trump Approved Term for an unbelievably outrageous lie.

“Unbelievably” here is a rhetorical phrase, intended to literally mean “all too believably.”

Returning to the classics:

Bad news coming, thought Winston. And sure enough, following on a gory
description of the annihilation of a Eurasian army, with stupendous figures
of killed and prisoners, came the announcement that, as from next week,
the chocolate ration would be reduced from thirty grammes to twenty. . . .

It appeared that there had even been demonstrations to thank
Big Brother for raising the chocolate ration to twenty grammes a week. And
only yesterday, he reflected, it had been announced that the ration was
to be REDUCED to twenty grammes a week. Was it possible that they could
swallow that, after only twenty-four hours? Yes, they swallowed it. Parsons
swallowed it easily, with the stupidity of an animal. The eyeless creature
at the other table swallowed it fanatically, passionately, with a furious
desire to track down, denounce, and vaporize anyone who should suggest that
last week the ration had been thirty grammes. Syme, too--in some more
complex way, involving doublethink, Syme swallowed it. Was he, then, ALONE
in the possession of a memory?

That Trump’s supporters are either too stupid or cynical to care about such amazing mendacity and/or stupidity is a chilling echo of Hannah Arendt’s point that, in totalitarian societies, the audience for such lies had been so degraded by the effects of mass propaganda that it was “ready at all times to believe the worst, no matter how absurd, and did not particularly object to being deceived, because it held every statement to be a lie anyhow.”

From The Triumph of Stupidity