PILOT SPIN
Spin Zone => Spin Zone => Topic started by: JeffDG on April 01, 2016, 03:47:59 PM
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From Jonah Goldberg: (Sorry, it's an e-mail newsletter, I think a link gets posted tomorrow)
Trump is a master of a kind of passive aggression -- though it can often just seem like plain old aggression. When caught in a lie, Trump doesn’t merely stick to the lie, he enlarges it. Not only did Lewandowski do nothing wrong, he saved Trump from an assault! That pen could have been a bomb! A bomb!!! (Remember when he suggested a protester who charged the stage was with ISIS?)
By embracing and enlarging the lie, Trump gives his most ardent fans no escape. They must either fall in line with yet another comfortable story about how their leader is both supremely right and a victim of deceit or open themselves up to the possibility that this one instance of deception and boorishness isn’t unique but utterly representative, which it is.
I think many of us have known people like this. Inveterate liars and other kinds of sociopaths test the limits of polite society. They break the implicit bargain that says you can get away with lying only so long as everyone agrees not to notice. Obvious lies are insults, because they rest on the assumption that the person being lied to is either too stupid to recognize the lie or too weak to say anything about it. In this sense, Trump has been insulting his biggest supporters from day one.
We’ve all had dinner parties or family gatherings ruined by that oaf who refuses to bend to simple politeness. They force polite people to either swallow small -- or large -- insults for the sake of civility. “I didn’t want to make a huge deal about it because it would have just made things worse,” is a rationalization we’ve given voice to on the drive home.
Trump is doing this on a massive scale. Like all demagogues, he’s using his lies as a loyalty test for his followers. He’s exploiting his popularity and abusing the devotion of his fans to force them into going along with his fictions until they are in so deep psychologically, they have no choice but to carry on. It’s an ancient psychological tactic of authoritarians, Mafia dons, and the like: Force your followers into sharing the blame for your misdeeds so that they can’t break ranks[size=78%].[/size]
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Trump certainly does enlarge the lie. He's the most conservative on every policy position out there, long before the other candidates were. I tend to agree with the article, especially with basically forcing his supporters to believe whatever he says. Somehow he gets away with it and his polls seem to rise along with it. Trump is a bully in the end, however, and when you ask his supporters questions about where he stands on policies, they tend to have a hard time giving a definitive answer. To an extent I don't really blame them since Trump has changed his positions on several issues throughout the candidacy. I've said it before, Trump is the angry vote, not necessarily the right vote.
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Good article. I agree. He even has to lie on inconsequential stuff. For example, he keeps stating the HE supplied the tape to the police for the Lewendowski incident, as if he had detached and disinterested generosity. Yes, it was his facility's tape, but he would have had to hand it over either way when they received a subpoena.