How Not To See

A Front Row Seat To The Inauguration

In 1999, psychologists asked a bunch of study participants to count basketball passes within a moving group of people for one minute. They wanted to see how well people pay attention in fast-paced situations (not well, as it turns out). You can do this experiment right now, it's very short — watch to the end to see if you got it right.

Summary of the experiment by NPR:

More than half the time, subjects miss the gorilla entirely. More than that, even after the participants are told about the gorilla, they're certain they couldn't have missed it.

"Our intuition is that we will notice something that's that visible, that's that distinctive," explains Simons, "and that intuition is consistently wrong.”

---

It took me five days of struggling to write about my experience sitting 11 rows away from the podium in the Capital One Arena on Inauguration Day to realize that I probably had footage of Elon Musk’s “heartfelt gesture” on my phone. If so, I could find out once and for all where I was looking when he made it and — crucially — how I failed to see it at the time. Maybe I had my back turned or was fiddling with my phone. Maybe the podium obscured the full motion from where I stood. Maybe, somehow, I wasn’t looking directly at Musk from 25 yards away when he did this:

Some people are describing the gesture as an awkward, autistic motion, but when I watch this video I see something crisp and deliberate, and I see it repeated twice. This motion does not resemble a Nazi salute; it is a Nazi salute. Check out this comparison (and do not play it through your speakers):

As it turns out, I was recording when Musk did this thing. Here’s what I saw, standing 11 rows back. I’ve marked the part where he salutes, because it’s not visible on camera:

There’s an out here if I want to take it, but I know the quirks of my own footage. This strange, low angle happens when I try to capture something on film while watching the event directly. It’s me trying to be fully in the moment, having my cake and eating it too. Which suggests I was looking directly at Musk the whole time, paying maximum attention, and still didn't see it.

(You can see the part immediately after the salute where I realize my camera is badly positioned and adjust it. The timing is interesting — like some part of me understood I’d seen something important. But it didn’t register consciously.)

This article isn’t just about that lapse, though it’s very much about that too. It’s about how Trump ended up on that stage in the first place. How so many people can look at Trump and see America’s savior despite blatant and obvious signs of fascism and financial ruin: people who are good and kind and compassionate. Most of us have encountered someone like this in the course of everyday life. Some of us are related to them.

As I’ve said before, every way out of this mess that I can see involves recruiting some portion of the 77 million people who voted for Trump. If we’re going to do that, we need to understand why they support him. Because it’s not just a matter of ideas. It’s a matter of seeing.

As it turns out, scoring 11th row seats to Trump’s post-inauguration appearance at Capital One Arena is easy. All you have to do is wake up at 2:30 AM, walk to the arena, and wait in line for five hours in 15-degree weather. I was not even close to the first person to arrive, but I was among the first few hundred.

When you’re standing in that kind of line for that long, you’re going to talk to the people around you. Whatever our differences, we had one very important thing in common: we are all demonstrably insane in the exact same way.

The people around me made the reasonable assumption that we also shared a fierce commitment to Trump and the MAGA movement, and they were 99.999 percent correct. Under normal circumstances, they would have been at least somewhat aware that we don’t see eye to eye, but between the cold and the exhaustion I did not have the mental capacity to execute my tried-and-true method for disclosing who I am without immediately alienating and infuriating everyone around me:

1. Build rapport for about 15 minutes. Find common ground

2. Slip in an “I’m probably more liberal than anyone here, but [genuine agreement with some part of what they’re saying]”

3. Keep building rapport, but start to bring up small differences in opinion while still sticking mostly to common ground

4. Disclose that I’m a journalist, make a joke about Fake News Media, and say that a lot of the work I do is trying to explain that not everyone who voted for Trump is a Nazi.

Oh the irony.

You’d be surprised at how well this works, and it might have worked well on the 20th too, but I will never know, because I got frozen in Stage 1. If you are someone who was standing in line with me: I’m sorry. At no point did I lie to you, I just didn’t tell you everything. Would you really have wanted to fight with me so early in the morning, when you were so cold and so happy?

Anyway, there we were, two hours into a five-hour wait for the arena doors to open, and one of the people in my group wondered aloud how liberals can believe the bizzaro things they do. Why do they accept what their biased media tells them without ever asking questions? How they can ignore the evidence of their own eyes and ears and instead fall for the lies, again and again?

And then someone else said: the crazy thing is, they say the same thing about us. It was a surprising insight, and I seconded it loudly. Everyone else got quiet, and then we moved on. No one wants to look at that too closely.

This is the looking-glass world of MAGA events, and it’s difficult to explain to people who don’t go back and forth how closely these worlds mirror each other, not in ideology or in fact, but in framing. Almost everyone is terrified for America’s future. Our side might not be perfect, they/we say, but it’s better than the anti-American authoritarianism the other side plans to unleash if they triumph. They lie, they cheat, they’ll stop at nothing to gain power, and the people who support them are either dupes or monsters: maybe both. No one is sure how things got to this point. Everyone is horrified by the constant, virulent hatred. Everyone is sad about family members lost to the other side, about dehumanizing rhetoric, about feeling like they’re under constant siege by this creeping evil, this sickness, consuming their country and their home.

Their joy mirrors our grief. Their excitement mirrors our dread. The crushing worry that would have lifted off our shoulders had Harris won is the weight that left them when she lost, only moreso, because Trump is more than a stay of execution for them. They believe that he’s about to save the country.

When the security checkpoint opened, secret service announced that they would not allow any bags through; understandably distressing for nearly every woman in the crowd (“What, am I supposed to leave my Gucci purse out here?”). The delay and confusion meant we got through the line ahead of vacillating people who had arrived before us, which meant we were among the first to obtain the event tickets volunteers were distributing on the other side. Instead of a seat assignment, our tickets just said: “Floor.” This, it turned out, meant the couple hundred folding chairs set up directly in front of the podium. Holy shit.

Spending inauguration day surrounded by people overjoyed at an outcome I believe will destroy America sounds a lot worse than it turned out to be. Dissociation helped, as did cold and hunger and exhaustion; better not to think or feel too sharply on a day like this. Also, the happiness surrounding me was real, rooted not in sadism but in misguided hope for the future. It was helpful to remember that 77 million people did not vote for what I think is going to happen, but for what they think is going to happen. The man next to me cried tears of joy several times. Yes, people talked about stuff like deportations and prosecuting Faucci and punishing the “lawfare” against the President, which sucks. They also talked about their anger at our untenable status quo and the belief that everything would be better now. We wouldn’t have to be so afraid and so insecure. Goods would be cheaper, wars would end, the fentanyl supply would dry up. Trans rights came up exactly once — when, in an act of courage and defiance, JD Vance’s high school band (which marched around the stadium along with other bands intended for the cancelled outdoor parade) placed a trans member of their color guard at the front, openly and proudly. “I don’t really care what [trans people] do,” the man next to me said. And then he got onto the subject of trans women in sports, and fairness, and by the time the conversation ended he’d remembered he’s supposed to consider it a mental disorder. But he didn’t start that way.

This man was a passionate Elon Musk fan. Gushed about him periodically all day. Wanted to send me a physical copy of the Walter Isaacson biography, which I bought on Kindle then and there to assuage him. My parents have been after me to read that book for years. Like the man next to me, they believe Musk is a once-in-a-generation genius who will get us to Mars and beyond.

I have a robust history of despising Elon Musk, whom I described back in December as “one of the most evil men alive.” I also think space exploration is cool as hell. Our curiosity and desire to explore, our determination to make the impossible into reality: these are some of my favorite things about humanity. Also, I’d rather we direct our aggressive tendencies towards space than towards war. The tech billionaire vision for space is horrifying for reasons best explored in a different article, but the point is: I get why people who want to go to space (and ignore most other things about him) see Musk as a hero and a genius. If I didn’t see him as a carnival barker who lies constantly about what he’s done and what he will achieve, someone who exploits the brilliance of others in the name of pretending to be Iron Man, wrecks their health and sanity with 16-hour days while he posts online and snorts ketamine and cheats at Diablo IV — if I didn’t see him as a eugenicist and a goddamn Nazi — I might feel the same way.

When Musk made his surprise appearance I was viscerally disgusted, but also happy for the earnest man next to me who loves the bastard so much. Fascinated, too, by the audience’s outsized reaction; the most enthusiastic of the day thus far. You can see me panning over the crowd in that video above, you can see how stoked they are in the leadup to this moment.

And then I turned forward, and I looked right at him, and I missed it. I didn’t see the gorilla.

And later, when I saw the headlines and looked up the clip, you would hardly believe how much I didn’t want to see the gorilla. Pride is a hell of a thing.

---

I have encountered Christian nationalists who dream of a theocratic state based on biblical law. These people see Trump for what he really is, and they approve. I have encountered “race realists” who dream of purging people of color to create a white ethnostate. They see Musk’s consistent words and actions for what they are, and they approve. There’s no reasoning with people like that: not because we don’t see eye to eye on Trump’s agenda, but because we do. They want this country to become an authoritarian hellscape. They’re excited about it.

Many Trump voters, in my experience, are not like that. There are very important differences between our respective sides’ visions for America that cannot — must not — be downplayed. There is also overlap, and these similarities should not be downplayed either. We both want people to have enough money to raise their families in comfort. We would both like to put racism in the rearview mirror. We want a world where everyone has a fair shake at the good life. We agree on the end state; we vehemently disagree on how to get there. The problem isn't that they support Trump’s authoritarianism or tech bro fascism. The problem is, they don’t see it.

This is why it’s so hard to reason with a Trump supporter. They don’t see the gorilla, and what’s more, their self-conception depends on not seeing the gorilla.

My barrier to acceptance of Musk’s heartfelt Sieg Heil was relatively low: I felt foolish and incompetent, but I didn’t have to reassess my life. Imagine if you’d spent years laughing at the idea that Nazis support Donald Trump. Imagine your hope for the future hung on Elon Musk’s brilliance. Imagine you’ve donated, boosted, and gone all-in on Trump for nearly a decade, imagine being so committed to MAGA that you’re willing to travel across the country to spend hours in the freezing cold for a chance to spend hours inside an arena for a chance to see the man you believe will save America. Seeing that gorilla means you’re everything the libs said you were. It means you were the bad guy in all those nasty arguments you’ve had with friends and family and, worst of all, it means you were the kind of person who got taken in by a charismatic fascist. It means you bear some responsibility for what’s about to happen to this country that you love.

I cannot imagine how painful that would be.

This is why recrimination and insults don’t work. To recognize their mistakes, people have to feel safe enough to face the demons that come after. They have to feel supported. The truth is, they fell prey to manipulative liars. The truth is, they were used.

I'm far from perfect on this messaging in my own life. It's exhausting and shitty and infuriating and punctuated by the horrific consequences of the actions of the leaders who manipulate and lie. No one should make themselves into a punching bag; everyone should tell assholes to fuck off. We should also, to the extent that we can, offer people a way out.

It doesn’t matter whether this method is fair or not, whether we should have to shoulder that emotional burden or not. You may have noticed that life is spectacularly unfair and places heavy burdens on people who do not deserve them, some far more than others but all of us included. I’m sorry we have to live through this time, that our lives have to be this and not some other thing. There’s an alternate universe, very far from this one, where I’m a history professor with a family. But we don’t live in that world. We live in this one, and the burden is ours to bear.