The Pee Tape is too perfect to be real

There's a video purporting to be the legendary Donald Trump piss tape going around. It's perfectly executed, starring a great lookalike Trump and filmed in the right $18000-a-night hotel room or a perfect replica thereof, yet fakeness seems built-in at a level somehow beyond apparent realism. Ashley Feinberg writes that "what makes it most unreal is how believable it is."

The more I tried to prove to myself it wasn’t real, the less confident I became in my own skepticism.

This was, however, also a very, very powerful reason to keep believing it was fake: that the most extraordinarily damaging piece of evidence against the president could just be waiting there, in plain sight, with no one doing anything about it. If there are any lessons we should have learned by this point, in 2019, they’re that nothing could ever be that easy, and that few enough things are real.

Pixel telling time! I think it's fake because of two specific things:

1. The quality and light level are as high as they could be without revealing details of "Trump's" face and hair, or other trickery.

2. The shaky zoom in and out of Trump, a "mockumentary" cliche.

But those are both meta things. Feinberg sleuths out a killing blow to its credibility. Read the rest

There's a video purporting to be the legendary Donald Trump piss tape going around. It's perfectly executed, starring a great lookalike Trump and filmed in the right $18000-a-night hotel room or a perfect replica thereof, yet fakeness seems built-in at a level somehow beyond apparent realism. Ashley Feinberg writes that "what makes it most unreal is how believable it is."

The more I tried to prove to myself it wasn’t real, the less confident I became in my own skepticism.

This was, however, also a very, very powerful reason to keep believing it was fake: that the most extraordinarily damaging piece of evidence against the president could just be waiting there, in plain sight, with no one doing anything about it. If there are any lessons we should have learned by this point, in 2019, they’re that nothing could ever be that easy, and that few enough things are real.

Pixel telling time! I think it's fake because of two specific things:

1. The quality and light level are as high as they could be without revealing details of "Trump's" face and hair, or other trickery.

2. The shaky zoom in and out of Trump, a "mockumentary" cliche.

But those are both meta things. Feinberg sleuths out a killing blow to its credibility.