Bret Stephens of the Wall Street Journal gives the most
refreshingly insightful analysis of Donald Trump ever written. He
took the words right outta my mouth. He's 100% on the bull's eye
about Trump and how he works.
http://time.com/4675860/donald-trump-fake-news-attacks/
Consider this recent exchange he had with Bill O’Reilly.
O’Reilly asks:
"Is there any validity to the criticism of you that you say
things that you can’t back up factually, and as the President you
say there are three million illegal aliens who voted and you don’t
have the data to back that up, some people are going to say that
it’s irresponsible for the President to say that."
To which Trump only replies:
"Many people have come out and said I’m right!"
Now many people also say Barack Obama was born in Kenya, or that
the Earth is flat. “Many people say” is what’s known as an
argumentum ad populum. If we were a nation of intelligent
logicians, we would dismiss the argument as dumb and invalid.
But we are not a nation of intelligent logicians.
It’s important not to dismiss the president’s reply simply as
dumb, dumb though it may be. In fact, it’s darkly brilliant — if
not in intention then certainly in effect (ie. Trump is not smart
enough to be consciously aware of this to be deliberately doing
this, but he inadvertently ends up employing cunningly deceitful
tactics without realizing it) : Trump is responding to a claim of
fact, not by denying the fact, but by denying the claim that facts
are relevant or supposed to have on an argument.
He isn’t telling O’Reilly that he’s got his facts wrong. He’s
saying that, as far as he is concerned, facts, as most people
understand the term, don’t matter : That they are indistinguishable
from, and interchangeable with, opinion; and that statements of
fact needn’t have any purchase against a man who is either
sufficiently powerful to ignore them or sufficiently shameless to
deny them — or, in his case, both.
If a public figure tells a whopping lie or outrageously
offensive comment just once in his life, it’ll ruin his career and
haunt him into his grave. If he lies and offends morning, noon and
night, it will become almost impossible to remember any one
particular lie or offence. Outrage will fall victim to its own
ubiquity. It’s the same truth contained in Stalin’s famous remark
that the death of one man is a tragedy but the death of a million
is a statistic.
One of the most interesting phenomena during the presidential
campaign was waiting for Trump to say that one thing that would
surely break the back of his candidacy.
Would it be his slander against Mexican immigrants? Or his slur
about John McCain’s record as a POW? Or his lie about New Jersey
Muslims celebrating 9/11? Or his sexist attacks on Megyn Kelly
(Trump deduces she disagreed with him because she must be
menstruating), or mocking a physically disabled New York Times
reporter for being disabled? Would it be him tweeting quotations
from Benito Mussolini, or his sly overtures to David Duke and the
alt-right? Would it be his unwavering praise of Vladimir Putin?
Would it be his refusal to release his tax returns, or the sham
that seems to been perpetrated on the saps who signed up for his
Trump U courses? Would it be the tape of him with Billy Bush?
Not only has none of these hurt him, on the contrary, it helped
him lots. Some people became desensitized by the never-ending
assaults on what was once quaintly known as “human decency.” Others
seemed to positively admire the comments as refreshing examples of
personal authenticity and political incorrectness.
Shameless rhetoric will always find a receptive audience with
shameless people. Donald Trump’s was the greatest political
strip-tease act in U.S. political history: the dirtier he got, the
more skin he showed, the more his supporters loved it.
Abraham Lincoln, in his first inaugural address, called on
Americans to summon “the better angels of our nature.” Donald
Trump’s candidacy, and so far his presidency, has been Lincoln’s
exhortation in reverse.
Here’s a simple truth about a politics of dishonesty, insult and
scandal : It’s hugely entertaining. Politics as we’ve had it for
most of my life has, with just a few exceptions, been distant and
dull.
Now it’s all we can talk about. If you like Trump, his presence
in the White House is a daily extravaganza of sticking it to
pompous elites and querulous reporters. If you hate Trump, you wake
up every day with some fresh outrage to turn over in your head and
text your friends about.
Whichever way, it’s exhilarating. Haven’t all of us noticed that
everything feels speeded up, more vivid, more intense and
consequential? One of the benefits of an alternative-facts
administration is that fiction can take you anywhere.
Earlier today, at his press conference, the president claimed
his administration is running like a “fine-tuned machine.” In
actual fact, he just lost his Labor Secretary nominee, his National
Security Adviser was forced out in disgrace, and the Intelligence
Community is refusing to fully brief the president for fear he
might compromise sources and methods.
But who cares? Since when in Washington has there been a
presidential press conference like that? Since when has the denial
of reality been taken to such a bald-faced extreme?
At some point, it becomes increasingly easy for people to
mistake the reality of the performance for reality itself. If Trump
can get through a press conference like that without showing a hint
of embarrassment, remorse or misgiving—well, then, that becomes a
new basis on which the president can now be judged.
To tell a lie is wrong. But to tell a lie with brass takes
skill. Ultimately, Trump’s press conference will be judged not on
some kind of Olympic point system, but on whether he “won”—which is
to say, whether he brazened his way through it. And the answer to
that is almost certainly yes.
So far, I’ve offered you three ideas about how it is that we
have come to accept the president’s behavior.
The first is that we normalize it, simply by becoming inured to
constant repetition of the same bad behavior.
The second is that at some level it excites and entertains us.
By putting aside our usual moral filters—the ones that tell us that
truth matters, that upright conduct matters, that things ought to
be done in a certain way—we have been given tickets to a spectacle,
in which all you want to do is watch.
And the third is that we adopt new metrics of judgment, in which
politics becomes more about perceptions than performance—of how a
given action is perceived as being perceived. If a reporter for the
New York Times says that Trump’s press conference probably plays
well in Peoria, then that increases the chances that it will play
well in Peoria.
Let me add a fourth point here: people's tendency to rationalize
in service of their own political agendas.
One of the more fascinating aspects of last year’s presidential
campaign was the rise of a class of pundits I call the
“TrumpXplainers.” For instance, Trump would often give an
unprepared, illogical and outright dumb speech or reply.
But rather than quote Trump, or point out that what he had said
was grammatically and logically nonsensical, the TrumpXplainers
would tell us what he had allegedly meant to say. They became our
political semioticians, ascribing pattern and meaning to the
illogical, nonsensical and incomprehensible rune-stones of Trump’s
mind.
If Trump said he’d get Mexico to pay for his wall, a
ridiculously illogical idea that he isn't smart enough to carry out
on his own, you could count on someone, a supporter or staff, to
provide a complex tariff scheme to make good on the promise. If
Trump said that we should not have gone into Iraq but that, once
there, we should have “taken the oil,” we’d have a similarly
high-flown explanation from a supporter or staff as to how we could
engineer this impossible theft.
A year ago, when he was trying to explain his idea of a foreign
policy to the New York Times’s David Sanger, the reporter asked him
whether it didn’t amount to a kind of “America First policy”—a
reference to the isolationist and anti-Semitic America First
Committee that tried to prevent U.S. entry into World War II. Trump
clearly had never heard of the group, but he liked the phrase and
made it his own. And that’s how we got the return of America
First.
More recently, I came across this headline in the conservative
Washington Times: “How Trump’s ‘disarray’ may be merely a
strategy,” by Wesley Pruden, the paper’s former editor-in-chief. In
his view, the president’s first disastrous month in office is, in
fact, evidence of a refreshing openness to dissent, reminiscent of
Washington and Lincoln’s cabinet of rivals. Sure.
Overall, the process is one in which explanation becomes
rationalization, which in turn becomes justification. Trump says X.
What he really means is Y. And while you might not like it, he’s
giving voice to the angers and anxieties of Z. Who, by the way,
you’re not allowed to question or criticize, because anxiety and
anger are their own justifications these days.
