Bait Used to be Believable

Trump derangement syndrome is back in a big way, as is the Troll-in-Chief.

In the era of social media I find it endlessly fascinating how Donald Trump manages to get reactions from every outlandish statement he makes. Nobody seriously thinks he will genuinely annex the Gaza strip and evict all the Palestinians who live there. The logistics of that operation would be positively insane, not to mention the diplomacy needed to actually get the project off the ground. Yet global media credulously reports on it as a serious policy proposal by an American president, even after media types have had discussions since November on how to cover Trump better this time, with less panicked and breathless reporting on Trump’s social media feed.

Who has not encountered a troll who makes statements for the sake of getting angry responses in the year 2025? This type of behaviour is as old as humanity itself and we have had to deal with it constantly since Mark Zuckerberg opened up a space where trolls can provoke while being safely being out of punching range in 2006. There’s a whole lexicon that has developed around it: trolling and the trolls who do it, sockpuppeting, clickbait, rage bait, copy pasta, and flaming. Does the fact that the US president is doing the trolling really make it qualitatively different?

Perhaps it is the fact that a 78 year old boomer is a troll that it throwing people off. But with everything publicly known about Trump it would be far more surprising if he weren’t a troll. He loves the spotlight, likes demeaning political opponents with nicknames, has no qualms about lying, and was on Twitter for 12 years until he was suspended in 2021. He has had a bromance with the final boss of twitter trolling, Elon Musk, for the last six months. It is hard to assemble a profile more suited to trolling.

Feeding the trolls is always a bad time. Flaming Trump for his hopeless and illegal plan to develop the Gaza strip into the “Riviera of the Middle East” is not just giving Trump the attention he wants, but actively benefitting Trump politically as any engagement with him on the substance of the issue validates his premise that he perhaps could do it. The best counter-trolling tactic is to ignore the original troll. Nothing is as frustrating to someone desperately trying to get your attention as you simply refusing to acknowledge what they said or wrote. The reaction to Trump’s Gaza comment should be “cool story, bro”.

I’ll start taking his plan seriously when there are ships taking Palestinians out of Gaza and American contractors are arriving. Until then words are air, and if you want to have a stress free four years ahead of you consider adopting that approach too. Not everything Trump says is empty posturing, and if you don’t waste your time and energy thinking about what would happen if an obviously unrealistic plan were to come to pass you will have more energy to call his bluffs and focus on what really matters. What frustrates me about the Gaza comments is not what Trump said, trolls are going to troll, but that so many  people lost their cool over an obvious attempt at trolling.

Bait used to be believable.

If you liked this post you can read a previous post about the madman theory here or the rest of my writings here. It'd mean a lot to me if you recommended the blog to a friend or coworker. Come back next Monday for a new post!

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I've always been interested in politics, economics, and the interplay between. The blog is a place for me to explore different ideas and concepts relating to economics or politics, be that national or international. The goal for the blog is to make you think; to provide new perspectives.

Written by Karl Johansson

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Cover photo by The Lazy Artist Gallery from Pexels, edited by Karl Johansson