The most revealing moment of Donald Trump’s week was not the boos that rained down on him at Madison Square Garden on Monday night. It was the almost instantaneous insistence, by him and his media ecosystem, that the boos never happened. What we witnessed this week — the feverish, almost liturgical insistence that a crowd loudly booing the president of the United States was actually chanting “USA!” — is something more disturbing and dangerous than ordinary propaganda. It’s now clear that the crisis we face is not a lack of information; it is a profound detachment from reality, cultivated by right-wing media and anchored by a president who demands that his followers reject the evidence of their eyes and ears.
Because once you understand why MAGA can’t hear those boos, everything else — from the right’s election denialism to Trump storming out of interviews — snaps into focus.
