(2025-07-15) Guinn The Emperors New Prose

Rusty Guinn: The Emperor's New Prose. *Donald Trump is the best storytelling president we have had, at least since Teddy Roosevelt.

There are few leaders who have ever possessed his effortless capacity to call on symbols that move us.*

in the intuitive manner of a Charles Manson, Ben Franklin, or Jesus of Nazareth.

some people just have such a knack for understanding, playing around with, and summoning at will the meaning cultures collectively ascribe to certain symbols that they do it without even trying.

It’s what makes the administration’s botch job on immigration so surprising

No, not on policy. On messaging. Storytelling. The threat of the foreigner is such powerful memetic stuff that even leaders with zero charisma can wield it to great advantage. Pat Buchanan, maybe the skin-crawliest man to ever run for public office in these United States, won several states in the 1996 primaries on an unapologetically nativist platform.

One of the necessary conditions, I argue, for the breakdown in memetic power in this case was the loss of verisimilitude. The story that immigrants were bad and making everything in America bad and we had to do everything in our power to stop them, laws and courts and Constitution be damned, well, stopped seeming true to a huge portion of Americans. But factual accuracy is rarely enough to cause a story to break these days. For a story to truly break down, often you also need a break in semiosimilitude, or what the story means in the minds of those probing it for symbolic connection.

...the story of The Emperor‘s New Clothes to illustrate the power of Common Knowledge.

It’s a good illustration as far as it goes, but it abstracts from the extent to which people have imbued the story with part of their identity, their self-worth, their ego integrity, their livelihoods, and their grip on reality.

There is another Emperor’s New Clothes that we might tell. In this version of the story, there is a front row of apparatchiks who have built careers on the naked emperor. They have been enriched and empowered by his fame.

do you think that common knowledge will truly change? Simple truth, even one we know that everyone else heard, is not enough to break a story that we need to be true.

Verisimilitude cannot break a story we need to be true unless semiosimilitude breaks as well.

The study of the Springfield Moment from this weekend’s piece – and the months that followed it – is the story of a breakdown in both verisimilitude and semiosimilitude

...reframing it as “Even if they’re not literally eating our pets, they’re figuratively doing the same thing by taking over our cities, filling our jobs, etc. etc.” And while this messaging did take place here, too, as we wrote, it didn’t work.

It didn’t work because the memetic imagery the administration and its supporters chose over the weeks and months that followed broke a story that the crowd needed to be true: they needed to believe that they were not cruel.

Do not mistake me. An otherwise good people may coaxed into cruelty.

the imagery and symbols used to support immigration policies violated the semiosimilitude of a story tens of millions of Americans told themselves about themselves: “I am not cruel.”

Most people can stomach actual cruelty. Feeling as if they are cruel, though?
Nobody was buying the emperor’s new prose.

The administration is pivoting its messaging. We might not like how the Department of Homeland Security framed an otherwise perfectly decent Morgan Weistling painting of a powerful scene – a pioneer family with a new child in a Conestoga wagon – with “Remember your Homeland’s Heritage.”

But it doesn’t break semiosimilitude. It doesn’t challenge the meaning of a story people have attached to themselves. Frankly, most earnest and decent people will see it as wholesome, harmless, and uplifting. That’s why this kind of thing makes for excellent propaganda. That’s why this kind of art has been used and reused and coopted by politicians for effect for years.

The lesson remains an important one: Yes, the child telling the truth mattered. But the true reason common knowledge shifted was that the story being told violated what too many supplicants needed to be true.