Mr. Trump in the Multiverse of Madness
Marvel Cinematic Universe fans are familiar with the concept of the multiverse. This physics hypothesis and common sci-fi trope posits that there are an infinite number of universes, and that anything that could happen has happened in one of these universes. So there’s a universe where the Soviets beat America to the moon, one in which Jeb Bush is currently in his second term as President, and even one where the Falcons went undefeated and won the Super Bowl last season.
Of course, whatever universe you happen to be in is just “the universe”, as far as you know. If someone from a different universe showed up here in ours, he’d think we were the crazy ones. And if you were only getting your news from the Jebverse, you’d laugh at anyone claiming Trump or Biden had ever been elected President.
So let’s take a look at a couple of these hypothetical universes. In one, Donald Trump was a successful self-made billionaire businessman who sacrificed a life of luxury to run for President and make America great. He was brutally attacked by swamp creatures in the government and media who liked the corrupt status quo, was impeached twice under false pretenses, had his re-election stolen from him, and has been arrested by his political opponent on phony charges for misplacing some documents that he had every right to take, just to prevent him from winning office again and defeating the deep state once and for all.
In another, Trump was a con man who used family money to run a series of business ventures into bankruptcy before running for President on a campaign of racial grievance. He used his office to enrich himself and his family while cozying up to America’s enemies and insulting its allies. After losing re-election, he made multiple attempts to illegally overturn the results, including fomenting a riot at the Capitol, and was finally indicted for stealing massive quantities of top secret documents and conspiring with his underlings to lie to the government to keep it from getting them back.
Most attendees of the GOP convention last weekend will immediately recognize the first universe as the real one and the second as a work of fiction. But I expect many readers of this site will have picked out the second one as real and the first one as fake. And who’s right depends in a very real sense on which universe one lives in.
I’ve pointed out before that there’s a media ecosystem on the right that caters primarily to feeding people news they want to hear, and in turn directing those people to other news sources and sponsors that keep the feedback loop going. Of course, there are left-wing media sources dedicated to telling tales from the progressive universe too, but that’s not the primary focus of Peach Pundit.
It’s a problem if much of the Georgia GOP leadership and its most active members are getting their information from a different universe than the one in which the majority of Republican primary voters, let alone the state electorate as a whole, lives. We can debate policies, but without an understanding of reality in common, we have no frame of reference to win those voters to our policies and candidates.
There is a solution, of course, for those who want one. We don’t need Infinity Stones to get news from other universes. All we need to do is change the channel every once in a while.
Never Trumpers should seek out information from pro-Trump sources. Trump loyalists should read and watch traditional conservative news and opinion sources. All conservatives should at least sometimes pay attention to both mainstream and explicitly left-wing media. It doesn’t mean we have to agree with them. But we should understand that our political universe isn’t the only political universe, and reality is somewhere in between all of them. Our best tool for connecting with voters in other universes, and our best weapon for defeating bad policies and politicians, is understanding what their political reality is, and meeting them there instead of trying to force them to reject their reality and accept ours.
Now, I’m going to see if I can find some news from a universe where the Braves held onto Dansby.
