Trump's Paris Pullout
Amplification//Annihilation | Cafe Oto | Resonance Extra
Trump's Paris Pullout is a sonic treatment of the entire speech of Donald Trump announcing his decision to withdraw U.S. participation in the Paris climate agreement on Jun 1st, 2017. Using various fact checking publications, Trump's speech is distorted according to the level of untruths within it. From minimisations to exaggerations to outright fabrications, what is revealed is that within this speech is that it is difficult to ascertain when Trump is telling the truth at all. As written by Vox "It is a remarkable address, in its own way, in that virtually every passage contains something false or misleading. The sheer density of bullshit is almost admirable, from a performance art perspective. Trump even managed to get in some howlers that had nothing to do with climate change. He started by citing an act of terrorism in Manila that wasn’t terrorism". As Scientific American writes, "President Trump justified his decision yesterday to leave a global climate accord with debunked conservative talking points and studies funded by groups with ties to the fossil fuel industry... From the costs and benefits to the global impacts, the president cherry-picked his talking points to support withdrawing from the agreement."
This sonification of Trump's untruths comments on the lack of balance in the climate debate, and serves as a temporal intervention, retrospectively giving the facts agency to deny the corrupt speaker. Any attempt to misinform, fabricate or lie is distorted, informing the listener of both the act and the level of the act whilst ridiculing the attempt. Mirrored in this is the notion that climate change also is unresponsive to such manipulations, and has broader contexts and stakes that are massive, real, and that need to be confronted.
Sources:
FactChecking Trump’s Climate Speech | Factcheck.org
Fact check: Trump’s Paris Agreement withdrawal announcement | ClimateAnalytics.org
Factcheck Shows Trump's Climate Speech Was Full of Misleading Statements | Scientific American
Fact check: Trump's Paris climate speech claims analyzed | The Guardian
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