Trump Derangement Syndrome

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Before you listen to this episode of Strong Message Here, just a warning that we will be using strong language from the start.

Hello and welcome to Strong Message Here from BBC Radio 4, a journalist and a comedy writer's guide to the use and abuse of political language.

It is still Armand Unucci.

And it's Helen Lewis.

And this week, a look at President Trump's first week back in office, we're going to discuss, among other things, Trump derangement syndrome, whatever that is.

But I gather, since we last spoke, Helen, you've actually been to the United States of America, Panama, and Greenland.

What was the

test of mood?

I actually watched the inauguration in Sarasota in Florida, looking out at, as we must now call it, the Gulf of America, formerly the Gulf of Mexico.

I find Florida such a weird and fascinating place.

I mean, it's a sort of swamp plus Disney, plus the Panhandle, which is basically the deep south, plus Miami at the bottom, which is obviously very heavily Spanish-speaking.

So it is a very weird state, and everybody who lives there is kind of okay with it.

One of the places that I went to is the Villages, which is the biggest retirement community in America, and which is trumpy as hell.

I mean, you're comparing Trump to hell, but I mean, that's very, that's a very subjective

comparison.

It's true.

It's true.

It's Trumpy as heaven.

If you like Trump, you'd be in heaven because it's full of MAGA flags.

Can we compromise on purgatory?

Can we compromise?

There's a half-life.

Trump limbo.

Yeah.

Trump limbo.

It's one of the only places.

It's very nerdy.

It's one of the very few places I've ever been in America that has roundabouts, which Americans don't really believe in.

They much prefer those really big junctions that you could get T-boned at.

But loads of people own a golf cart because it's full of golf courses.

So instead, like, like you obviously don't get very many cycle lanes in uh america outside the big cities but here you get golf cart lanes and little extra people have a garage for their suv and then they have a separate little extra door like one for kind of umper lumpers but that's for their golf cart

so i love it it's one of the weirdest places uh in america and i was delighted to return there's an old simpsons episode when they visit london and they're in the car and they're going around the roundabout and margarita's just going keep turning keep turning

and it just goes on through the night they just circle the roundabout for 20 minutes.

It was fun.

Sarasota also has a couple of roundabouts, and it's really funny to see the number of people who obviously have just this is like a new and alien foot.

Like they're going,

it's in the road, but it's roundabout.

Could somebody arrest us?

Could somebody shoot this, please?

It's in the way.

They call them traffic circles.

I found out when I filed a piece of copy to The Atlantic about roundabouts.

And they were like, what is this roundabout of which you speak?

What about you?

What have you been up to?

Well, I mentioned Tim Shipman's book, No Way Out, his magnum opus on Brexit and beyond, and just choice quotes from politicians.

And I've come across another one that I just want to offer up, which is,

of course, I need to go into Brexit, which is a bit dull.

But anyway, they were talking about preparing for a no deal.

So they were doing

a just imagineering session on

what will happen if there's a no deal and several like terrible ideas coming up about food shortages, fuel shortages and stockpiling medicine.

And this leaked and was all over the Sunday Times and so David Davis who was Brexit secretary one of his team rang the journalist and said I won't help you again as long as I have a hole in my ass

and we just know that at some point that's going to be mentioned in Prime Minister's question time at some stage given the the lowering standard of debate in the house.

That's a great, that's a really great phrase.

I know.

I know your love of David davis's team and their metaphors i have an update on kiir starmer's weird metaphors oh yeah he's obviously back on his um you know we need to get growth going build baby build so he wrote an op-ed in the times and he has an incredible pair of sentences for fans of mixed metaphors we will finally grasp the nettle on major national infrastructure projects and speed up decision making and we will keep our foot firmly on the accelerator when it comes to planning reform oh great and and he compares um regulations to japanese not weed elsewhere and then he has and this is a phrase i don't I think this phrase is maybe what, five years old, shovel-ready projects.

Yes, it's like boots on the ground, isn't it?

Shovel-ready is like, but it's also, is this, are we genuinely building HS2 with shovels?

Is that why it's taking so long?

I mean, it's like a sort of like kind of loom-ready.

Surely we've got a bit beyond that.

I had a thought about Kiyostama's metaphors.

I think we should have the Kiyostama metaphor tree upon which each week, whenever suitable, we hang.

Because we've already, so we've got Japanese knotweed and was it nettle, grasping nettles?

He's injecting AI into our

mainlining.

Yes, it was mainlining AI into our bloodstream.

And then we are not in the tepid bath of menace.

Not in the tepid bath.

So already our tree is festooned with very ripe fruit.

I thought it would be a nice thing to do just to get through January and February and the terrible, you know, storm, Bealzebub, and whatever it is that's coming our way.

Just something to kind of look forward to every now and then.

It's hanging another metaphor on the Girstamma metaphor tree.

That's charming.

It's like Jack and Ore, but for infrastructure projects.

Yes.

Which actually, the three little pigs and their hoses is

ripe for that kind of analysis, I think.

Yeah, one of those pigs was a nimby and therefore deserved to have its house blown, huffed and puffed and blown down.

This, I suppose, this, you know, getting on with infrastructure and talking up the country, getting rid of um miserabilism which was mentioned on the today program this morning miserabilism and being positive takes us to the golden age announced by donald trump uh the week of his inauguration and his inaugural address you said you watched it uh live did it feel any different other than being indoors from his previous one

Well, the first one in 2017, the speech was, if you remember, the famous speech of which George W.

Bush summed up excellently by turning to the Obamas and going, that was some weird shit.

Yes.

Which is, I still think, one of the just the greatest low-key commentaries on Trump's rhetorical style.

Yes.

But this one was Trump's attempt to be statesmanlike.

And we know that it was his attempt to be statesmanlike because almost immediately after, it's quite bitchy nonetheless.

Almost immediately afterwards, he went out to the next bit of the Capitol in Washington, D.C.

and gave another speech in which he said there were loads of bits that J.D.

Vance and Melania wouldn't even let me put in.

I had some great riffs.

You wouldn't believe what these people were stopping.

It could could have been amazing.

And then he went, you know, did all the inaugural balls and then kind of just kept on getting spicier and spicier.

I remember it was, you know, announced as that it was going to be very reconciliatory, it was going to be, you know, heightened, it was about bringing the country together.

And it was, it was advertised as that.

But, you know, reading the speech itself, I think within two or three sentences, you could see just that wasn't true.

And I don't know whether it's the fact that we've become so adjusted and normalizing his already outrageous claims that they appear normal now, you know, the weird shit that George W.

Bush was talking about now becomes, you know, predictable.

And so he needs a second speech to go really out there because my favorite part of his actual inauguration speech was pretty soon into it, he just bad-mouthed everyone behind him in the room, you know, Bidens, absolutely, but also all the tech bros who were lining up behind him.

And he talked about

the other, I'm not going to do a trump uh impression uh the other states are still suffering from a hurricane los angeles where we're watching fires still tragically burning from weeks ago they're raging through the houses and communities even affecting some of the wealthiest and most powerful individuals in our country some of whom are sitting here right now they don't have a home any longer that's interesting what is that

well there was a kind of perfect you know those sort of perfect mythological moments um i'm i think i'm right in saying so mel gibson

you know, of acting and lively anti-Semitism faith,

is now been appointed to some sort of task force, Hollywood task force, where he's going to go in and de-woke Hollywood, possibly, you know, by, I don't know, some sort of action man business.

But he was being interviewed on one of these very trumpy podcasts when he found out that his home had burned down.

And it was just sort of this kind of perfect metaphorical moment for what's happening.

You know, there's all this sort of stuff where we're having arguments about, you know, DEI in federal, diversity, equity, inclusion in federal bureaucracies and stuff like that.

While people's sort of homes are literally on fire, you know, there are, for all that, Trump is this kind of insane showman and what he does, America does have real problems.

Yeah, yeah.

And this guy was literally sort of fiddling while Rome burned some of this stuff.

It's you know, podcasting while California burns.

Exactly.

And he was, you know, he was talking about the fires and trying to blame it on, you know, Democrat policies here and local policies there about water and so on.

But that doesn't actually put the fires out.

uh and and so i think you're right you've kind of crystallized the issue here that i think for trump it's it's the words it's the messaging it's the attention he gets rather than the specifics of how he's going to react to events i mean he has a plan and he has lots of measures that he's been uh i think i think the phrase is uh it's not flood the swamp is it it's um flood the zone flood the zone yes which is steve bannon's phrase is what you should do you should just pump out announcement after announcement outrage after outrage.

Just drown your enemies in

policy announcements, outrageous statements, pushing the envelope, whatever it might be, just overwhelm them.

Yeah.

Yeah, and

so all the executive orders that have been issued this week, they are kind of aspirations, there are statements of intent.

Some of them will have very real consequences, but quite a lot of them are things that actually Trump as president doesn't have final power over.

It's whether it's money that's actually been apportioned by Congress rather than him, or whether it's stuff on like agreed citizenship that actually needs to go to the Supreme Court and the end to settle.

But they are kind of statements of intent.

I came across a phrase that actually Trump used this week.

And in fact,

I wanted to make this the phrase that we were going to hang the show on, but

it was faffle.

So what happened was various flights were sent to Colombia with

perceived illegal immigrants back to Colombia.

Colombia refused to let the planes land.

Trump threatened Colombia with trade tariffs, all sorts of 50% tariffs on imports and so on.

So Colombia backed down and Trump posted this AI-generated photo of himself dressed like a 1920s gangster with the acronym FAFO,

which means fuck around,

find out.

Welcome to strong language here.

If you want, if you're anyone affected by the issues raised by that acronym.

It indicates what he likes doing, which is like the showmanship.

You know, I'm going to now act like a gangster and I don't care if gangster has negative connotations.

It means you will talk about me again.

But it also talks a lot about what Trump's style has been and what the energy behind him is, right?

Which is very much, you hear it in the phrases, you know, like owning the libs, cry harder,

you know, enjoy your erasure, you know, all of these kind of things that are exulting.

And I think I'm really fascinated by this moment.

I think, you know, we said before on this program, Twitter used to be quite an unrepresentative left-wing space that dominated the discourse to an extent that was out of tune with where public opinion was.

The same has sort of happened for the right.

And so there's been this kind of orgy of exaltation on the right about Trump winning when he won a relatively narrow margin in overall percentage terms.

And he's got a very easily deadlocked Congress to try and get bills through.

Part of the reason he's doing so many executive orders is because actually getting through a legislative programme with spending attached will be quite difficult for him.

The picture of what Trump actually kind of can do,

particularly domestically, is way out of kilter with the kind of like

kind of like, which is, you know, genuinely where some of the attitude of some of those right-wing influencers are, you know, the kind of total exaltation and this kind of like absolute power that they think that they've got.

I also think there is a kind of enjoyment in the outrage that it causes.

There's something strategic about

the phrases he uses and actually the policies he announces.

It's not like he actually believes in them for what they might achieve.

What he believes in is the hilarious effect it will have on his opponents when they hear what he's about to do, if you see what I mean.

Yes, there's a lot of trolling.

Yes, it comes back to that kind of performative approach to being a politician, which is primarily you're there as a form of,

you know, it's more than entertainment.

It's about a kind of self-expression of who Trump is.

And as long as he keeps doing that,

the voters of the country will be happy because that's what what they wanted.

They wanted this perpetual Trumpification of the president, if you see what I mean.

Yeah, I think that's very true.

Like, we know that he picks people because they perform well on TV, for example.

Like, you know, he is very against people having too obvious plastic surgery or weighing too much.

You've heard that from people around him.

He wants everybody to look like, you know, he's casting for a kind of reality TV show to say, yeah.

So it's like, you know, I'm actually casting for the drama, Trump.1 and Trump point two rather than the reality because for him the drama is the reality the more drama you can create the more you're dominating the reality but you're right he's also very well attuned to the power of language and which is interesting because the writer spent a lot of time complaining that the left was trying to you know was being Orwellian was trying to rewrite concepts but there is also I mean I think the reason they complained about that because they knew how effective it could be.

And one of the things that he did in the second speech on Inauguration Day was he referred to the people who were arrested at the capital for trying to storm it on january the 6th as hostages you know and and that was a prelude then to freeing them and commuting their sentences in some cases pardoning them in other cases including two leaders of right-wing militias including people who had attacked police officers and now this is somebody who ran on you know back the blue blue lives matter yeah you know i hate the idea of defunding the police exactly yeah yeah and and which is kind of you know fascinating to me but it was achieved by this rhetorical flip of saying these are politically persecuted people who are just having a picnic, just having a high spirit.

Who among us has not had a high-spirited day that has ended with defecating on a congressman's desk?

Yes.

We've all done it.

I certainly have.

Exactly.

Who among us has not tried to hang Mike Pence by turning up at the Capitol with a leader zip ties?

It could happen to anyone.

Sucks.

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be honest.

Winner, best score.

We demand to be seen.

Winner, best book.

We the man to be quality.

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs.

Playing the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.

I think, you know, the question of does he believe this or does he know that he's just using it, it's almost like that becomes irrelevant.

It's not whether something he says is true or not.

In his head, I think it's more whether what he's saying has the required effect.

It's about that everything is strategic for something else.

So by calling them hostages, he knows people will be outraged on one part.

He also knows a lot of people will applaud.

It's almost in his head, it's irrelevant whether he believes that or not.

Yeah, I think it's a really incredibly effective strategy because it's about everything that we've talked about in this series about political language.

It's about finding an issue and turning it into a dividing line by using a language.

Are you prepared to go along with me that these people are hostages, or do you think they're insurrectionalists?

You know, is it an attempted coup or was that a high-spirited protest that got out of hand?

And by forcing people to either accept or reject a particular linguistic framing, you have condensed the entire issue into a nutshell.

It is his particular political genius, I think.

And also, he and those around him and his supporters invalidate any kind of approach even to criticizing that by calling, if you try and analyze what he said or question it, you're automatically accused of having Trump derangement syndrome, which I ought to let you know is not an actual disease in the official category of whatever the official category is of official diseases.

You know, it's not something the World Health Organization has recognized, which is probably why he's pulled out of it.

It's just a way of batting back any criticism,

which then means that

he's sealed off his own language and the values and meanings he wants to give to those words by forbidding any critique of it, by saying Trump derangement syndrome.

It already raises a question as to whether that's valid or whether you're just a crazy person to doubt the wisdom of the president.

I think that was helped by there's a version of cherry picking, which is known as nut picking, which is when you take the most extreme examples of your opponent's arguments and you claim that that they're representative.

And I think that that was helped by take there were genuinely people who had some extremely cringe meltdowns about Trump.

You know, you saw them on cable news sort of wailing and gnashing their teeth and also doing things that were completely performative and useless in actually opposing his legislative agenda, but that were these kind of big, you know, sort of almost kind of evangelical kind of weepy moments.

So I think there were people who genuinely did have, you know, and I, and, and also not to be cruel about some of these people, some people who were really afraid, you know, if they'd got relatives that they thought might be deported or if they, you know, they thought some of their rights were being rolled back.

People were genuinely fearful about it.

There was also some extremely high octane kind of melting down, but that was taken to represent all of liberal opinion on Trump, right?

That was, I think, the point of Trump derangement syndrome.

I had another phrase that I wanted to bring up to you, which was malicious compliance, which is another phrase that does exactly what you're saying, which is rebuts anybody trying to criticize you.

So Trump has been trying to defund diversity, equity, inclusion, DEI programs.

He's also been trying to massively cut federal budgets.

And so, for quite a time this week, there was some concern about whether or not things like meals on wheels, you know, taking meals to elderly people who can't get out, about the future of that service.

And immediately, you had, you know, when the person who is national coordinator of this said, we don't know whether or not we can continue.

This is, you know, we don't know how to interpret this order.

People like that were accused by Katie Britt, the senator from Alabama, of malicious compliance, which is basically the idea that we all know that Trump was only going to cut bad spending that is unpopular, not not good spending, which is popular.

And people in the bureaucracy should know that.

And by doing the things that he told them to do, maliciously, that was kind of undermining the president.

So what happened essentially is with some of these executive orders, massively overwritten and broad.

And then people then followed them.

There was a huge backlash.

And then those civil servants are accused essentially of maliciously complying with them.

It is malicious compliance.

Now, who's doing that accusation then?

Is that the Democrats accusing Republicans of malicious compliance?

Or is it

Trumpists?

so trumpists are accusing brackets liberals

the deep state of almost deliberately doing more than they were asked to do to create a stink yeah that's so that was senator katie britt who's a republican senator for alabama she said you know implementing our own policies is malicious compliance

i mean that's a perfect example of where you cannot get out of that you're trapped in this language game because anything even something that factually disproves what you're saying can labeled as something that was deliberately put there.

It was almost like, you know, saying, you know, God put the fossils in the rocks to tempt us into thinking that the world wasn't made 6,000 years ago.

It's like even evidence for the other side is actually maliciously put there, you know, in order to trap us rather than to engage us in argument.

It's a perfectly like hermetically sealed logical system by which Trump can never do anything that was.

In this case, I think it's quite hard to write executive orders and foresee unintended consequences.

I mean, you know, it's something that could happen to any presidential drafting committee.

And as we know, America loves to have a lawsuit over the exact wording of something.

Do you want to hear about somebody who has found a way to change their language on Trump?

Oh, yeah.

Go on then.

And that is our Foreign Secretary, David Lamb.

Ah, yes, no.

So he previously called Trump a tyrant in a toupee, a serial liar and cheat, deluded, dishonest, xenophobic, narcissistic.

He said Trump is not only a woman-hating, neo-Nazi, sympathizing sociopath, he's also a profound threat to the international order that's been the foundation of Western progress for so long.

Update regarding beloved President Donald Trump.

David Lamy now says the Trump I met as a man who had incredible grace, generosity, very keen to be a good host, very friendly, very warm.

But the best thing about it is the New Yorker has a new profile of David Lamy.

Can you guess how he won over Trump at a recent dinner in Trump Tower?

I think probably by praising him, getting his attention.

That's That's what I've been told works.

Funnily enough, that was part of it.

Yes.

Sam Knight in the New Yorker writes, it was Lammy rather than Keir Starmer who led the British charm offensive, laughing at Trump's jokes.

Yes.

Taking a second helping of the entree and praising the surroundings.

Yeah.

Yeah.

There we go.

Somebody who worked in the Trump, the first Trump administration said, all you have to do is listen to him.

Just show that you're willing to listen.

He's a talker and he loves to talk.

Just listen and you will already have gone up in his estimation.

You know, don't argue back.

Don't interrupt him but you must also eat his pudding

i ask for more of his pudding you must go back around to the buffet that's right yeah i really appreciate that i was thinking you know isn't there an ai program that you know kiostama can use when he gets a call from trump which you just switch it on it will in real time have starma just saying i know

now tell me great point donald yes you know you could go on for hours could go on through the night suddenly starma will be like his golden child takes us to uk politicians and their ever-evolving attitude to Trump in that there always has been because of the special relationship there has always has been this kind of transatlantic pirouette where leaders of the opposition who may have criticized an American president become prime minister and have to slightly backtrack on that

to show that they can maintain a constructive relationship and that Britain is at the heart of the American project and all that sort of thing.

But I think it's become much more pronounced because, you know, as you've

indicated, when in opposition, the reaction to Trump was so strong that to do the vote fast, it's so gargantuan a leap from one to the other.

So it becomes much more startled.

But that's,

I mean, lots of America's full of politicians who have changed their minds openly and publicly about Trump.

I think it's really interesting to look at the fact that I think probably in his first term, particularly because he won the Electoral College, he didn't win a popular vote victory, there was a tendency to treat him like an aberration.

Like this is a sort of, you you know, it was like a sort of rum springer, or it was like America's kind of gap year where they just went to Bali and had too many cocktails, you know, like, oh, just let them blow off steam and then they'll go back to, you know, sensible, NATO-friendly politicians, and we can all get over it.

And I think that this time, it's, I think the language has really changed because his dominance of the Republican Party is so complete.

You know, he won a competitive primary and then he won the popular vote of the election.

There are clearly a big constituency in America for what he's selling.

You know, the dominoes have kind of fallen.

The number of people who are now opposed to him within that party is tiny.

Almost all of them retire, you know, people like Mitt Romney,

who voted to impeach him, the senator from Utah.

Just he retired in the end.

He did.

And he said he wasn't going to criticise Trump and asked why.

He said, because you know, I've got a family.

He's got a, he's Mormon, so he's got a very, very big family.

Yeah.

Kind of implied, you know, there was a threat there.

And we discussed last week Zuckerberg and

his support of Trump coming not long after Trump had written that Zuckerberg might go to prison for the rest of his life.

Right.

And also Trump just took away the Yem Secret Service protection for people like John Bolton, who worked in his administration, who has been the subject of an assassination attempt by Iran.

And when asked about it, he didn't try and sort of dance away from it.

He just said, he said something that I'm paraphrasing lightly, but was like, well, it's not my problem if something bad happens to them.

They should pay for private security.

I mean, his approach works because he makes threats and people believe the threats.

That's really what happens in Trump world.

But it is, and I mean, it's always, I mean, it's always amazing when you read, when you put the quotes next to each other of people who previously criticized him and then turn around.

My favorite is Rick Perry, who was once governor of Texas, was a kind of presidential tip to run for president, fell apart in a debate when he said he wanted to close four government departments and name three of them, but then couldn't remember the fourth one, which was energy, which then Trump made him energy secretary.

So put him in charge of the department that he'd forgotten about.

But Rick Perry said, quote, that Trump was a cancer on the Republican Party.

And then not long later said, Trump was one of the most talented people who's ever run for president I've ever seen.

Again, it's like, I meant cancer in a good way, one of those good cancers.

That's right.

Yes.

It's like one of those

improv games they used to have on Whose Line Is It Anyway, where when the buzzer goes, can you completely change your opinion or change your,

Trump is a cancer on the state,

which is very refreshing.

We need more people like that,

which would be a disaster,

which would shake things up.

But again, rather like Trump, do these people saying it know that we know they don't actually believe it, but that we accept that that's now part of the language game we have to play, which is it's all about no, forget about the past.

Don't compare anything to anything that happened.

beforehand and don't think about anything that might happen later.

I don't have anything that can measure what's going to happen later.

Stick to the present.

And as long as we stick to the present, anything we say is as valid as anything else.

You're not allowed to compare it to anything.

You're not allowed to compare it to anything.

Well, I guess the question is, do they...

not believe what they're saying, the nice things about him now, or did they not believe the nasty things that they said about him before?

They might have thought, you know, he's a shark and a predator, and I rather like that, but I should probably, for form's sake, in order to get elected, can say, oh, comments about Mexicans are a bit strong though.

So yeah, you just don't, you know, were you, were you lying then or are you lying now?

Is the, is the kind of question.

But it's funny, you mentioned earlier that word evolve.

And my Atlantic colleague Mark Liebovich is a very funny writer.

Trump had said to Mark for a piece that he reported that his opponents would evolve.

This was the quote, it will be very easy.

I can make them evolve.

They will evolve.

And you know what?

They have evolved.

Correct.

He called it completely correctly on that one.

It turns out if you just go, but I'm the president, I will have a huge amount of power of patronage.

Then everybody goes,

Okay, we like you now.

And how about his famously erratic behavior, which he sometimes tries to defend as being deliberately unpredictable, disruptive?

I suppose, trying to put a positive on that element of, you know, I mentioned Trump derangement syndrome, but there is this other countering theory of, you know, the madman theory of, you know, if I can persuade my enemies that I'm mad and unpredictable, they'll be more terrified of me.

So it's better to do that, which I think was an official kind of Nixon policy at the height of the Cold War.

But I also think he's kind of the software update president.

So the way that lots of startup companies work in tech is that they iterate, you know, they just try things and try things and try things and they get wrong.

This was the idea behind, you know, move fast and break things.

And there's a similar thing, which you've seen with these executive orders, right?

You must always be moving forwards, doing things, and then you break stuff along the way, and then you row back, and then you you say it was malicious compliance.

Oh, we didn't actually mean to do that.

We only meant we cut bad spending, not the stuff that people like.

This is legacy media reporting on things that have now happened.

Yeah, exactly.

I think one of the things that people like about him is they feel he's a disruptive force and a force for change.

And that, yes, you know, when you talk to his supporters, they say, of course, he gets things wrong, but at least he's trying.

And there is a feeling on the other side, and this comes back to Starma talking about his feelings about growth, that politics has become very static.

You know, people talk about the vetocracy, the fact that so many people have a veto.

Kirstama is like me obsessed with the HS2 bat tunnel, that basically the existence of a couple of hundred bats seem to be blocking this, you know, or adding millions, tens of hundreds of millions to the cost.

And Trump is the opposite of that.

Trump doesn't care about the bats.

He smashes through the bats.

And then if it turns out people like the bats, he'll say, oh, well, we'll get some bats from somewhere else.

Bats for everyone.

Have a bat.

Everyone has a free bat in the post.

Right, exactly.

With the word Trump on its wings, you know.

It is the the challenge of covering him because he's a very active president and you have to work out which bits of it are actually happening and which bits of it are just the wheels spinning in the mud.

But again, that takes us back to it's the immediacy of it, isn't it?

Immediacy of it, the fact that it's an action that he's talking about now.

It's not something, you know, you'll never get him to talk about something that if we start working it now in 10 years' time, we will have achieved this.

You know, he even talked about getting a planning of flag of the United States on Mars within the next four years, which I don't think has even come into Elon Musk's agenda yet.

I think he's saying it's going to take longer than that.

Right.

And he also said he would end the Ukraine war on day one.

And, you know, it's fine.

I never expected him to do that.

That was extremely ambitious.

But it is that kind of sense that you can promise things and kind of get away with not delivering them because the attention span has moved on to something else.

And have we become much more affected by the attractiveness of the promises rather than the practicality of whether these things can be carried out successfully or not.

Aaron Ross Powell, I also think it's a bit about the shift from the media from text to video and speech.

And this is my thesis

on the media: is that there was a time when the internet made it very data very expensive.

So you kind of ended up having this great flowering of people writing stuff down.

Now, it's much easier to follow links, check sources when you're reading written text.

It's why academic journals are written down rather than it being some, you know, someone recording a three-minute TikTok to camera with their latest findings of their polypeptide research.

But we've now ended up in a situation in which a lot, you know, the majority of young people are consuming their news through videos.

And that does just, you know, that charisma matters far more than your footnotes in that situation.

That's right.

And that's something we picked up on before, the fact that everything now is the headline, and that's the headline is actually now the only source of news.

That we don't go beyond the headline to read the article attached to it.

So we just take in what's in the headline.

And therefore, people in the public eye, people like Trump, are all about grabbing the headline.

I keep reading this phrase again and again that, you know, attention is the new currency, that actually people's value grows via the amount of attention they receive.

So Trump's job, as he sees it, is to command the world's finite amount of attention on himself and see his value grow.

The fact that he's even started his own currency, Trump, kind of is almost like literalizing the metaphor about the value growing from the amount of attention he receives.

So again, I go back to my matrix theory of they all want us just to live in our head and not bother with anything else.

Well, in that case, this is a very good time for me to ask you about submarine names.

Why?

Do you want some?

I don't have any, but I can.

Well,

sinky mcsink face.

Yes, thank you.

The Navy announced at the weekend that it had a new attack submarine that was going to be called HMS Agincorp.

Yes.

But it will instead be called HMS Achilles.

Now, I'm saying Achilles notoriously was a very good warrior right up until the point that it was a good idea.

He died, but he had one weak spot and then it went very wrong for him.

Yeah.

Not a potential great name.

But other people have bigger objections to this.

Both Grant Shaps and Ben Wallace, former defense secretaries, they said this was woke nonsense and they changed the name in order to avoid upsetting the French, who frankly they thought could take it.

The French who, when they take the train away, arrive at Waterloo.

Right.

So, anyway, but this led to my now second favourite question ever to the PM spokesman.

My first ever was last year, if you remember, what was Keir Starmer's attitude to sandwiches?

Yeah.

Which he replied that Kirstama is quite happy with a sandwich lunch and he's partial to a tuna sandwich and occasionally a cheese toastie.

Vital information being delivered here.

Starmer's spokesman this week was asked whether he was proud of the English army's victory at Agincourt.

And what did he reply?

Absolutely.

And also proud of our role in the Second World War.

But I just love that the idea that somebody might have decided to go freestyle and go, actually, you know what?

I think the French were robbed.

Yeah.

Or there should be an inquiry because things happened at Agincourt that only now are emerging.

I mean, some of the arrows used were perhaps not.

The procurement from those longbows was appalling, actually, full of corruption and waste.

They were actually French arrows.

I mean, you know, what's the irony?

Yeah.

But there we go.

So down to Kirstama's weird metaphors, we also have what is the weirdest question that the Prime Minister spokesman will be asked this year?

We're currently at what is Kiostama's opinion on Agincourt?

Further bids, gratefully received.

So that can be our advent calendar.

You know, weird questions to ask, Kiostama.

We sometimes end talking about a phrase or a word that we've encountered this week.

I want to talk about a noise, actually, a sound, because I went to a concert this, we've been commemorating the 80th anniversary of liberation of Auschwitz, and I went to a concert the Wigma hold this week, which was music from Auschwitz, which was the any prisoner who could play an instrument, they were put into orchestras they had to play music for the guards and the SS families for Sunday picnics and so on and some of the sheet music composed by the prisoners has been found and there was a recreation of the concert and the thing was the concert was unrelentingly jolly the music was promenade music and there was this disjunction between the enforced jollity of the sound against the memory of uh and in the the hole with some survivors, of what actually was going on, that disassociation that families of SS guards could enjoy this real action music.

And it did remind me that

these

use and misuse of language, sound, context, you know, we should still be remembering it and looking out for it.

So I sort of feel that the argument that the events of 80 years ago are so in the past is so wrong.

Yeah, I think if you look into the history of that period, it's very clear that the prelude to the attempted genocide of Jewish people in Europe was a whole linguistic suite of calling them rats, calling them vermin.

You know, that the propaganda was absolutely relentless about Aryan supremacy and the idea of the untermensch.

So that was a historical atrocity that was helped along by language, which points to everything everything that we've said in this series about the often there'd be fun and fripperies, but this is also really powerful stuff and it is worth worth talking about.

Yeah.

Well, thank you for listening to Strong Message here.

We'll be back next week.

All our episodes are available in our feed, so make sure you subscribe on BBC Sounds.

Goodbye.

Goodbye.

Hello, this is Marion Keys, And this is Tara Flynn.

We host a podcast you might like for BBC Radio 4 and BBC Sounds called Now You're Asking.

Each week we take real listeners' questions about life, love, lingerie, cats, dogs, dentists, pockets, or the lack of, anything really, and apply our worldly wisdom in a way which we hope will help, but also hopefully entertain.

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Tanking You.

Suffs!

The new musical has made Tony award-winning history on Broadway.

We demand to be home!

Winner, best score!

We demand to be seen!

Winner, best book!

We demand to be qualified!

It's a theatrical masterpiece that's thrilling, inspiring, dazzlingly entertaining, and unquestionably the most emotionally stirring musical this season.

Suffs, playing the the Orpheum Theater, October 22nd through November 9th.

Tickets at BroadwaySF.com.