More on Jesus Truth v. Regular Truth

Cheryl asked yesterday why the apparent fact that Trump posted a fake AI video about an imaginary interview immediately after 9/11, in which he described how he rushed down to Ground Zero with hundreds of construction workers the next day, and “worked long and hard” at the scene of the catastrophe, wasn’t any kind of news story. It’s certainly an interesting question, given that this incident by itself would have gotten Joe Biden impeached, if not removed immediately via the 25th amendment.

Commenter Burning Ambulance makes an all too salient observation about the lack of coverage:

Seriously, what’s the point? His brain is a puddle of cream of mushroom soup. His approval ratings are in the mid 30s. There are no longer any consequences for any of his actions because he called the system’s bluff and the system retreated. Take all those things together and you get Fuck it, let the old man ramble to himself – it doesn’t make things worse or better one way or the other, and there’s an election in two months, so let’s focus on that.

He called the system’s bluff and the system retreated. That pretty much sums up the last decade, given that it’s been almost exactly ten years since the release of the grab her by the pussy tape, which ended Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign, remember?

My friend JJ summed up concisely how we can know without doing any forensics that such a video must be a fake:

How do even his biggest sycophants not bust out laughing at that one? It’s so preposterous even by his own standards. I believe he can shoot a 59 over 18 holes far more than a story about him helping someone, in any way, ever.

Without exaggeration I would be less surprised to learn that Julia Child was an All-Pro NFL defensive tackle in the 1950s than to find out that Donald Trump did something like this.

The fact that Trump releases AI videos of this type illustrates once again a concept I’ve been turning over in my mind for awhile now, which is the idea of Jesus truth versus regular truth. That Donald Trump is incapable of an altruistic act of any kind is regular truth: That he heroically sacrificed his own safety and comfort through his personal labors at Ground Zero is Jesus Truth, which is to say that it’s something that’s not literally true, but is true in a deeper symbolic way. Trump is a Christ-like figure as a matter of Jesus Truth because that’s who he needs to be for the whole evangelical mythology built up around him to make any sense at all, so he is.

Here’s another example of Jesus Truth, provided by recent convert to Christianity J.D. Vance, when he defended spreading false stories about Haitian immigrants in Ohio eating pet cats and dogs:

“The American media totally ignored this stuff until Donald Trump and I started talking about cat memes,” Sen. Vance said. “If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do.”

That’s Jesus Truth right there — yes, the story about Haitians eating cats and dogs was what heathen empiricists and logicians might call “a lie,” but to the faithful it’s a parable or myth or what have you, that encodes the deeper truth that the story symbolizes.

We share a country with people for who all this makes perfect sense, and indeed provides a flawless justification for re-electing the Christ-like self-sacrificing martyr Donald Trump to the presidency, and may well provide the same justification for making Vance the 48th president of the United States, because he tells the truth through his lies.

But we preach Christ crucified, unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the Greeks foolishness.

1 Corinthians 1:23

Corinthians is a classier book than either Dorics or Ionics, although a lot of people don’t know that.

. . . and just an hour ago:

A little pet theory of mine is that super misogynist men love homoerotic imagery even if they’re not sexually attracted to other men because they hate women so much that it seems unfair!# that they want to have sex with them, and not with the superior gender.