> “challenging our relationship to the truth“

I’ve seen a lot of great illusionists who never claimed to be doing real magic, and they were no less entertaining or mystifying. We don’t need to give up on respecting truth to enjoy a bit of fantasy.

Penn and Teller, for example.

Or, going back a lot further, Paul Daniels, who did the same kind of thing Penn and Teller did on his TV show decades earlier, where he'd show you a trick, then show you it slowly, then show you how to do it, then show you the same trick with a twist you'd never figure out - real magic :-D

He actually wrote a computer game in the 1980s where you had to learn to do some close-up magic tricks in real life in order to solve the in-game puzzles.

The real magic is showing people exactly how the trick is done, and *still* fooling them with it.

Skeptics also debunked him fairly trivially by pointing out that he was using spoons made of a special metal

Not special per se - they are normal spoons. But some spoons are much better than others for spoon bending tricks.

You could lump-sum them into the dollar store variety, that are not as thick and sturdy as expensive ones, but look reasonably the same.

Indeed an “entertainer” who “challenges our relationship with the truth” would be a good description of Trump.

This isn’t a glib comparison, as it gets to the heart of what is so wrong with letting public figures slide by with the excuse that they shouldn’t be taken literally. I can attest that many close relatives of mine literally believe the 2020 election was stolen b/c Trump says so. And as for Geller, he’s nothing special as a magician — his blurring of the actually true line is the very essence of his undering appeal.

But… there is no spoon.