The great wall -- a modest proposal

Trumpanzees' gullibility and imperviousness to evidence can be maddening to deal with.  Tell them anything they don't want to hear and they'll just say "fake news", no matter how solid your sources of information.  This is really the natural culmination of a trend which has been part of the right-wing mentality for decades.  People who reject evolution, global warming, Keynesian economics, etc. need to develop the ability to ignore mountains of evidence while believing only what their trusted puppet-masters tell them -- and eventually they'll start applying that ability everywhere.  It's no wonder right-wing sites are festooned with ads of the "dermatologists HATE this man" and "INSANE credit card" genre.  Scammers know just where to find the kind of easy marks who think they're "standing up to the experts" when in fact they're just being conned.

Yes, it's frustrating to deal with, but what if we could turn the tables by treating this Trumpanzee attitude as a resource to be exploited for positive purposes?

If there's one campaign promise they have their hearts set on, it's the wall.  Trump himself seems to realize this, repeatedly insisting that the wall is in fact being built, or is about to be built, even though it isn't.  The thing is, though, the Trumpanzees believe it.  On the far-right discussion site F169, since the inauguration, I've sometimes seen liberals taunt the regulars about the wall not getting built.  The regulars have responded by insisting that it is, posting links to stories about fencing construction that have nothing to do with Trump, random pictures of sections of wall that were built years ago or aren't even in North America, whatever they can find.  They stubbornly refuse to admit the stupid thing just isn't being built.  (A lot of them are similarly convinced Mueller is soon going to indict Hillary.  I'm not kidding.)

I say we go with it.  Trump should simply announce, one day, that the wall has been built and is now complete along the whole border.  Nobody has to so much as put one brick on top of another -- just make the announcement.  Once Trump says it, in the Trumpanzee mind, it will become true.  Anytime they see a news report mentioning that there's no wall, they'll dismiss it as fake news.  If you tell them it's not there, they'll call you a "dumbass libturd" who watches CNN and MSNBC.  If sites like Breitbart fail to play along, they'll start losing viewers (this has happened a few times when they deviated from wingnut "reality").  The 'zees will get their beloved wall (in their own heads).  Trump will get credit for keeping a major campaign promise.  The government will save the $30 billion or whatever that it would take to actually build the damn thing.  Americans will avoid having a huge permanent standing insult to our neighbor and second-biggest export market.  Everybody wins!

In fact, this approach could solve a lot of problems.  If Trump announced that North Korea had caved and given up its nukes, Iran had been bombed into oblivion, almost all illegals had been deported, Europe was paying tribute, everyone had switched back from solar power to coal, and Christianity had been made the US official religion -- the 'zees would believe him.  He'd be acclaimed everywhere he went, which is what he really craves.  Maybe we could even get him to resign, if certain wingnut news outlets could be persuaded to keep on reporting that he was still President and still winning bigly every day.  He could spend all his (non-golfing) time attending rallies as "President" without the hassle of actually running anything or worrying about Mueller.  The real media could still report on what the actual President and government were doing.  There'd be no risk of the 'zees catching on -- it would all be "fake news" to them.

Wouldn't it be dangerous, you might ask, to have one-third of the population of a superpower living in a world of total self-delusion unmoored from objective reality?  Well, hasn't that been the case since the rise of Fox news, if not the Scopes trial?  We might as well make the best of it.  And if their delusions keep sloshing over into the real world the way they've been doing under Trump, we probably won't remain a superpower much longer anyway.

[Image at top by Mario Piperni, whose blog is sadly long-defunct, though he occasionally posts on Twitter]