Susceptible to the Truth?

 I leaned over to my parents in a movie theater last night, and showed them the headline glowing on my phone. "This is horrible," I said. "Which one?" my mom asked; "the fact that Trump just fired the labor statistics person, or the fact that he just moved a bunch of nuclear submarines into position?"

Really, I could have been talking about either. And the New York Times has a piece out this morning arguing that they are really two facets of the same story. Both reveal that whenever Trump is confronted with stubborn facts he can't control—he acts impulsively to blot them out of existence. 

Trump has of course spent most of his career showcasing an eerie affinity for Vladimir Putin's autocratic government. But now—on the basis of one or two inflammatory social media posts from Russian officials—he seems barreling toward a nuclear confrontation with the same regime. Go figure. 

I didn't expect—when I woke up yesterday—that the day would end with a miniature Cuban Missile Crisis redux. Nor did I expect we'd ever get a Cuban Missile Crisis redux just because Trump couldn't stand to be out-trolled on social media by a Russian troll. But lo, that's what actually happened. 

I admit I don't really feel scared. "Just another ridiculous Trump thing," I find myself thinking. But perhaps that's what everyone will be telling themselves right up until the Big One comes. "We have talked our extinction to death," as Robert Lowell put it, in his poem about the Cuban Missile Crisis. 

And then there's Trump's reaction to yesterday's disappointing jobs numbers. Instead of accepting these data as real and trying to figure out how to improve them—as anyone with even a toddler's sense of object permanence would do—Trump simply decides to fire the person who brought him the news. 

Trump appears to believe that if knowledge of the economy's real condition can be kept from the public, then the public will never worry. If you can't see it—it's not really there. If you kill the messenger, then the news they just brought is no longer true. It's the proverbial head-in-the-sand approach. 

But—eventually—people do start to notice actual changes in their real lives. Even if the government started cooking the books on jobs data, it wouldn't change the fact that many people were out of work. And hearing the government tell you it's all fine wouldn't make you feel much better. 

"And yet it moves"—as the apocryphal quote attributed to Galileo goes. We say the same thing to Trump today. He may feel that he can suppress the truth about the economy by firing the statisticians who tell him about it. But that won't mean the real state of the economy behind the data just goes away. 

"The evidence of your own eyes is a very seductive thing," as Brecht's Galileo puts it in the play. It's a lesson in the sort of basic object permanence Trump would like to deny: "If anybody were to drop a stone […]—and tell them it didn’t fall, do you think they would keep quiet?" (Laughton trans.)

People do remain, Brecht's version of Galileo says—in the classic play about the life of the scientist—at least somewhat "susceptible to the truth." If the shadows cast from a certain angle make a woman at her stove look like a witch at her cauldron, the play argues—you just need a different vantage point. 

Or perhaps not. And that's where Brecht's play ends on a more ambivalent and pessimistic note. For the child who is lifted up to see the woman at the stove—in the play's final scene—concedes only momentarily that she is not a witch. A moment later, he is back to crying: "A witch! A witch!"