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This is not Trump defending a fragile ego…. This is Trump trying desperately to protect common knowledge. From a weakening dictator’s perspective, the appearance of control is itself his most important form of control. Once weakness becomes common knowledge, the strategic situation usually changes very quickly… Think Biden & the debate… Timur Kuran’s work on “preference falsification” is probably the clearest research framework for this. Under repression, large numbers of people may privately dislike a government while publicly behaving as if they support it. Because everyone sees apparent obedience around them, the regime acquires an “aura of invincibility.” But if some event reveals that opposition is much broader than assumed, individuals often cross their personal thresholds for dissent all at once, very quickly, producing a cascade. Kuran used this mechanism to help explain why the collapse of Eastern European communist regimes in 1989 seemed almost unimaginable immediately beforehand & almost inevitable afterward. This is exactly the insight behind “The Emperor’s New Clothes.” Everyone privately sees the obvious, but nobody wants to be the 1st person to say it. Then 1 child announces: “But he hasn’t got anything on!” The crucial moment is not that the child discovers something new. Everybody already knew it. The child makes their private knowledge public, the crowd then realizes that everyone else sees it too… The emperor’s nightmare is therefore not simply being naked. It is the moment the crowd realizes that everyone else can see the nakedness too.