The Illusion Factory: The Psychology of Keeping a Claim Alive and How Trump Has Used it to His Advantage
Narratives outpace evidence, and the future is such a useful hiding place
A claim hits the air at noon, by dinner it is in the group chat, by midnight it has a slogan, and by morning it is “just common sense.” That is the part most people notice, the speed. The stranger part is what you notice after you have watched it happen a few times. The claim does not have to be true, and it does not have to match itself from one day to the next. It only has to travel. Once you start paying attention to how it travels, you stop thinking of misinformation as a freak accident and start seeing it as logistics. The modern information environment is a freight system for messages that survive compression. Short enough to repeat, hot enough to feel, and clean enough to pass hand to hand without anyone having to open the box and inventory what is inside.
In a functioning democracy, persuasion is supposed to compete on the terrain of reality. Candidates argue over values and priorities, but they do it with one hand touching the same rough ground, shared facts. We can disagree because we are at least loosely looking at the same world. But the system that delivers political information now rewards a particular kind of speech, the kind that arrives intact after being folded into a meme, a clip, a chant, or a caption. That handhold slips, not because citizens changed species, but because the incentives changed.
The first trick is embarrassingly simple and surprisingly powerful.
People do not carry the world around in verbatim form. They carry a bottom line. Literal accuracy, the exact claim, the digit by digit thing that can be audited, competes against gist, the meaning you can hold in your mouth and pass to someone else. The gist is what you feel the statement is doing. The gist is what it says about who you are, who they are, and which side of the story you are supposed to be on.
Trump’s political brand has always been unusually legible at the level of gist. It sells a moral universe in which the little guy has been cheated, elites have rigged the system, and he is the one who will restore dignity to “the forgotten men and women” and make the nation “serve its citizens.”
That gist travels because it is not a policy argument, it is a mood with a villain. It does not require the listener to be able to explain marginal tax incidence or the text of a bill, it requires only recognition. Yes, the system feels tilted, yes, the little guy feels ignored, and yes, someone should break the glass.
Once that gist has lodged, it changes how contradictions land. They stop landing as contradictions, instead they land as details, as necessary compromise, as background noise. You can promise a revolt against the insiders while signing a law that permanently cuts the corporate tax rate to 21 percent, and many supporters will still experience the story as consistent because the gist is doing the moral work. The verbatim details become negotiable because the bottom line has already been accepted as reality.
Now add the second ingredient, the one that makes the whole thing feel like a conspiracy even when nobody has to coordinate, the future can be used as a shield.
