Donald Trump Posts Fake Video Of Himself Promoting Fake Medical Technology In Fake News Segment

Possibly you have heard of a concept known as the Swiss Cheese Effect. Visualize any system's defenses against failure—a biological immune system, or a healthcare delivery system, or an aircraft control system—as a series of slices of delicious, creamy Emmentaler cheese. Each layer has a couple of holes (vulnerabilities) in it, of varying size, here and there, but as long as the holes are not aligned with each other, no threat to the system can pass all the way through all the layers, unless uhhh it is the type of threat that can punch its way through several membranes of Swiss cheese. Like a skewer or a bullet or whatever. Now you are being too literal. Stay with me here.

So the Swiss Cheese Effect is when layers of a system happen to line up so that, for however brief an interval, the holes in the cheese slices align and a threat approaching from just the right angle can pass through all of the holes, causing the system to fail—without any particular one or two of the cheese slices having operated(?) other than how they were designed to. The Swiss Cheese Effect, then, is a way of conceiving of system vulnerabilities—the angles and configurations and sequences whereby the holes can be brought into alignment for an overall failure.

You can imagine a sort of converse to the Swiss Cheese Effect. Imagine a stray rocket-propelled grenade zooming toward a building filled with people. By happenstance it passes through an open window; it has not damaged anyone or anything yet. Then Bob happens to duck to tie his shoe at the exact right moment, and the RPG passes harmlessly over his head. Lois crooks her elbow to achieve an optimal nose-picking angle, and the RPG zooms under her armpit instead of blasting her to giblets. Two weeks ago the building's owners happened to complete a remodeling of the break room; it has a bar-height half-wall instead of a floor-to-ceiling wall, and so instead of smashing into that wall and exploding the building, the RPG passes right by. Mounted in the back wall there is for some reason a big industrial fan, and its slowly spinning blades are aligned just so at the moment of the RPG's arrival, so that it passes between them and out of the building altogether. A miracle! The building and its occupants are unharmed!

In many respects the relationship between me and the Saturday-night story of President Donald Trump posting, to his Truth Social account, a fake, apparently AI-generated Fox News video of himself promoting the mythical "med bed" technology believed in by a fringe of deeply addled QAnon-adjacent right-wing types is like that RPG-through-the-building scenario. In fact if you were designing a pairing of person and story that would produce a metaphorical version of this RPG-through-a-building type of deal, you could hardly do better than me and this story of Donald Trump posting a fake video of himself promoting a fake medical technology on his Truth Social account.

I do not have a Truth Social account, for one thing, and have never once visited that website. Also, I do not click the play button on internet videos of virtually anything except for taciturn cooks making greasy street foods in exotic locales. As a rule I avoid anything with Donald Trump's face or voice in it as much as I possibly can. I do not follow or keep informed about fringe right-wing conspiracy theories, whether about speculative cure-all technologies or anything else. The standard cosmetic getup of blonde Trump-era white conservative ladies makes me recoil and twist away as though someone just offered me a bite of a steaming turd out of their bare hand. As does anything and everything to do with Fox News!

The phrase "AI-generated fake Fox News segment featuring Donald Trump promoting fictional medical technology believed in by desperate lunatics" is like a lab-grown Me-repellant. And on top of all of that, at the time this story was pinging around on the social media network I do use, late on Saturday night, I was an hour from home, in my car, driving my kid home from his date to a homecoming dance in a different town. All of this very nearly missed me altogether! But then I happened to idly check Defector's Slack this morning while I was waiting for the coffee to brew, and here we are. In our metaphor, this is like the RPG passing all the way through the building or stack of cheese slices or whatever, and then I was standing like an asshole right at the exit, checking Defector Slack on my phone, and caught the RPG in my earhole. Or whatever! I lost track of the metaphor a long time ago! Get off my case!

Given all of the above, you might ask yourself whether I am in any kind of position to have anything meaningful or insightful or analytically valuable to contribute to the story of Donald Trump posting to his Truth Social account a fake, AI-generated video depicting an apparently nonexistent Fox News segment in which he promotes nonexistent med-bed technology as though either the video or the segment or the technology were actual existing things. You might think that I could and probably should have enjoyed my blissful ignorance of this whole story, and simply let it cruise on by into the past. You might judge that there really was no need for the Swiss Cheese Effect Explainer at the top of this blog, which actually doesn't apply all that well to anything that comes after it, and that this has all been weird and of dubious value except to anybody theoretically visiting Defector dot com to learn the absolute least they possibly could about the Swiss Cheese Effect on a sunny Sunday afternoon.

Right you are!