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100 days of Donald Trump is marked by the end of a fake news 'trial'. You couldn’t make it up

Shock jock: Alex Jones arrives at the Travis County Courthouse in Austin, Texas: AP
Shock jock: Alex Jones arrives at the Travis County Courthouse in Austin, Texas: AP

Tomorrow is a historic day. Ninety-nine days ago the world seemed a comparatively safe place: one where the threat of a Third World War had not reared its ugly nuclear warhead for at least three decades, one where you could read a newspaper and believe that what you read was broadly true, and one where world leaders were people with political experience, measured judgement, and generally – if not always – a degree of common sense. They were not, with the exception of Kim Jong Un, Robert Mugabe, Rodrigo Duterte and one or two others in the Middle East, the kind of people who would behave like an angry toddler who’s had his toys taken away when things didn’t go their way, and stamp their feet and point at a world map and scream: “That one... I want to bomb that one!”

But all that has changed. And it would be unfair to blame all of it on Boris Johnson. (That’s a joke, in case anyone is hard of thinking; I’m not talking about Boris).

I don’t know if you have heard of Alex Jones, or whether you have been following his custody battle in a Texas courtroom, which ended today. It’s been rip-roaring entertainment and I can think of no event more relevant to the 100-day reign of Donald Trump than the case unfolding in Austin. Because if you read between the lines, or even just read the lines, you will see that what is on trial here is fake news. And as you know, the idea of fake news was pretty much invented by Trump.

If you’ve been watching the latest series of ‘Homeland’ you’ll have seen Brett O’Keefe, a crazy right-wing conspiracy theorist who hosts a TV channel called ‘Real Truth’ and gets very angry, yelling about all the terrible things being done by the government. Jones, by contrast, is a crazy right-wing conspiracy theorist who hosts a real-life website and radio show called InfoWars who gets very angry, yelling about all all the terrible things being done by the government – and the need to fight gun violence with more guns. I’ll give you one guess who his fans include.

Fashpoint: Alex Jones 'looks like Tony Soprano and loses his temper like a kettle coming to the boil' (AP)
Fashpoint: Alex Jones 'looks like Tony Soprano and loses his temper like a kettle coming to the boil' (AP)

Jones looks like Tony Soprano, talks in a gravelly voice and loses his temper like a kettle coming to the boil. He believes that 9/11 was “an inside job”, that the American government controls the weather (theirs, not ours, unfortunately, because I’d be tempted to send an email about the past few days), that there’s a “secret fungus epidemic” being spread across America to kill Americans, that Hillary Clinton ran a paedophile ring from a pizza restaurant, that the government carried out the Sandy Hook elementary school massacre using actors for victims, and – my favourite – that the government is lining fruit juice cartons with oestrogen in order to turn American boys gay.

Alarmingly, yet predictably for a man likened in court to “a cult leader”, he has millions of followers who believe this baloney. InfoWars is broadcast on 150 radio stations across America, the website has six million unique users every month, and its YouTube channel has two million subscribers. Jones and his fellow alt-right fellow travellers at Breitbart, whose former boss Steve Bannon is now Trump’s right-hand man in the White House , are widely considered a key factor in the election of one of them to US President.

Alex Jones: his lawyer claims that Jones only peddles fake news as an act in order to get ratings (AP)
Alex Jones: his lawyer claims that Jones only peddles fake news as an act in order to get ratings (AP)

Anyway, for the past two weeks he’s been in court in Austin, Texas – Jones, not Trump, sadly – fighting a custody battle with his ex-wife Kelly Jones, who is not the lead singer in The Sterophonics (although some of his followers probably have a conspiracy theory that she is). In a pre-trial hearing she won the gold medal for stating the bleedin’ obvious by telling the court her husband was “not a stable person.” This will not have come as news to anyone who witnessed either of Jones’s two best TV moments. My first encounter with him was in January 2013, a few weeks after the Sandy Hook school massacre, during Piers Morgan’s short stint as an interviewer on CNN. Piers had courageously suggested that perhaps fewer people would be killed in America if fewer Americans carried guns and they were harder to get hold of; Jones didn’t agree, and called for Piers to be deported for expressing un-American views. When Piers invited him on to TV to expand on his views, Jones spent most of the time yelling his head off like a demented... but I won’t spoil it for you because you can watch it for yourself right here:

There was some equally compulsive viewing when Jones appeared on Andrew Neil’s TV show here, rambling on about Bilderberg, and about the Euro being “a Nazi-German plan to take over countries economically.... now that’s on record.” That’s before he started yelling, which went on and on and on, right through the closing titles and possibly all the way back to America for all I know, after they faded him out. By the end, Neil was reduced to laughing and making comical “woo-woo” gestures, while David Aaronovitch sat uncomfortably by his side, looking bemused. But don’t take my word for it because that’s on YouTube too:

Anyway, Mrs Jones from The Stereophonics had more to say about her ex-husband and why he was not the best person to have primary custody of their three children. “He wants J-Lo to get raped,” she told the court, adding: “He says he wants to break Alec Baldwin’s neck.” Jones, who earlier said he had forgotten some key information about his children because he’d eaten “some wicked chilli” and admitted smoking marijuana once a year “to test its strength”, has adopted an unusual defence to such allegations. His lawyer argued that his whole on-air persona was just play-acting, and that to judge him by what we see on the TV and hear on the radio is no more appropriate than judging Jack Nicholson by his performance as The Joker in ‘Batman’. An odd analogy, I thought, since I have always judged Jack by the character he played in ‘The Shining’, specifically at the point where he hacks through the bathroom door with an axe, grinning maniacally and yelling: “Heeeeere’s Joooohnnnny!”

Anyway, the case – Mr Jones had custody of the couple’s three children and Mrs Jones wanted to get it back - went way beyond the question of whether or not Jones was a fit and proper person to look after his children, and into the slightly surreal realm of questioning whether or not he is the person he appears to be. His lawyer claims that Jones only peddles fake news as an act in order to get ratings and, presumably, riches in return. But, in a twist worth of a ‘Homeland’ scriptwriter, Jones himself denies that. He insists his persona is not an act at all, telling his followers that his own lawyer’s words had been twisted by “globalists” intent on portraying him as a bogus loon when he is, in fact, a real-life loon of the first order, although he doesn’t bring his rage and “bombasity” (#notarealword) back when he comes home to tuck the kids in and read them a bedtime story about government agents planning Armageddon and putting something in the water to make everyone Jewish, or Muslim, or homosexual, or black, or Mexican, or something. Of course he didn’t put it exactly like that. He put it like this: “We’re the most bona fide, hardcore, real McCoy thing there is. Everybody knows it.”

Everybody, that is, except his own lawyer, who knew it made much more sense to paint a picture of a kind, gentle satirist using sarcasm as some kind of performance artist, even though Jones kept sabotaging his own case by contradicting his lawyer’s argument. At one point he tweeted film clips insisting that he believes everything he says, while blathering on about “freedom and lower taxes”, which is the mantra of every libertarian loon – and could double as a summary of the Conservative manifesto for the upcoming election.

Back in the real world – and the Austin courtroom – Mrs Jones agreed with her husband in one respect: that his public persona is very much real. She argued that the man we see and hear onscreen is the very same “violent, cruel, and abusive man who engages in hate speech at home and in public” and said “he’s enraged and out of control all the time.” The judge evidently shared at least some of her concerns, because, in a humiliating defeat for Alex Jones, she was awarded joint custody in today’s verdict, along with the right to decide where the children live (Clue: not with Mr Jones).

The jury, meanwhile, is still out on whether or not Donald Trump is the same person as his public persona. After the first 100 days it’s still impossible to tell.