jcnporter wrote:A number of people in the media have reported witnessing Johnson deliberately mess up his hair before going on camera, he's smart enough to know that his constructed persona makes him 'relatable' and that the compliant UK press lap it up and amplify it.
I've even read someone saying that, by accident, they happened to watch Johnson deliver the same speech twice to separate audiences. Each time, the hair was the same, the speech was word-for-word the same, including the bumbling pauses, unfinished phrases and exclamations, all in exactly the same places. A complete performance, in other words.
Reminds me of how George W. Bush would regularly misspeak and generally try to come across as a redneck. He wanted to give the impression of a normal every-man against the liberal elite and basically everyone fell for it.
I agree with the assessment of Adam Curtis in Hypernormalisation about Trump as well- that his repeated and blatant lies were not due to stupidity but were a political strategy designed to confuse and frustrate opposition. And it worked. When you saturate the public with so many lies and scandals, it's hard to even know where to start. People spent so much time fact-checkimg and proving he was lying that they missed something important: he didn't care one bit if his lies were exposed. It was misdirection while he used the presidency to funnel money to his personal corporations, elevate his family to positions of power, jack up military spending, and gut social programs.