First, on the Lincoln Project podcast, we’re joined by special guest Stephen Hassan to talk about his new edition of his amazing book, The Cult of Trump.
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Over at the Enemies List, we’re joined by Jon Michels and David Noll to talk about domestic terror threats in the age of Trump:
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I think what Trump realizes is that people create a narrative to understand their world, and then believe things that fit the narrative and disbelieve things that do not. What this leads them to do is to even cheerlead things they know to be lies because they can be held up as evidence of some greater truth.
The book "Thinking, Fast and Slow" elucidates other important factors in a scientific way. It describes two "Systems" in the operation of the brain. System 1 is based on emotion and instinct, and processes every input fast. System 2 is analytical but slow and (often) lazy. System 1 makes lots of mistakes. System 2 is needed to avoid fucking things up totally.
Trump has his voters in System 1 all the time. He works at it. Sparking irrational fear helps keep them there. So "Haitians eating pets" or "Mexican rapists" serves his ends with his supporters. Truth or falsehood is irrelevant. Slowly moving caravans are the best.
Like other autocratic personalities, he works to maintain a close, almost personal, relationship with his supporters. Chavez used to give frequent, rambling addresses to Venezuelans (I think he had a Sunday talk show where he would go on for up to 8 hours at a time). Trump does the same thing by constant "Truthing" or "Tweeting". It's all fucking nonsense but he keeps their brains in System 1 and focused on what they believe is his fight for them. Or his vicariously-felt injustices ("They are trying to put me in prison!") and slights ("I know all the best words!").
Hulk Hogan ripping his shirt off at the convention or an utterly unmusical guitar lick from Ted Nugent will keep you in System 1 too.
I don't understand anything about mechanisms of "brain washing" but it was interesting to listen to the podcast all the same. Maybe what I see him doing is basically brain washing. I don't know.
NLP as the 'pedia notes is not any more real than homeopathy as a therapy but it does offer communications strategies. It sounds to me like the psychobabble version of New Age creative visualization. We all know the Trump family was close to Norman Vincent Peale and Trump may have gotten his own variety of the schtick from Peale's The Power of Positive Thinking. You can see it operative in the way Trump justifies himself so much more successfully than other political grifters.
Take, for instance, Mark Robinson's denial of his comically lurid posts on a porn site. He may not be pushed off the ballot, but his candidacy will not survive this scandal. I mean, it's one thing to say that some people need killin'. Quite another to say that you're a black Nazi who'd like to own some slaves ;)
He denied this the way your typical sociopathic politician would deny it. The way George Santos would deny it. He looked straight into the camera, bursting with confidence, and lied to his constituents. He called it an oppo dump by his opponent (it was a carefully researched K-File investigation that sussed out the identity of his nom-de-porn) because Josh Stein is "desperate" and doesn't want to talk about the issues but rather "tabloid trash." When Stein is up in the polls ;)
And he topped it off with an exquisite flourish, likening himself to Clarence Thomas who endured a "high-tech lynching" in his confirmation. Hint to Mark: You ain't gonna win friends and influence people these days by likening yourself to Clarence Thomas for _any_ reason; that ship has sailed, LOL
What Trump does, much differently, is that he implicates his audience. That's the link to what I've gathered to be neuro-linguistic programming (or creative visualization or positive thinking).
If it were Trump instead of Mark, first, he'd launch a broadside attack on the Fake News Media for even reporting it. He'd doubtless personally attack Josh Stein for even imagining he'd have the character to use something like this against Trump. And he might well scoff at the very idea that a mac daddy like himself would ever feel the need to visit a porn site. But what he _wouldn't_ do, unlike Mark Robinson, is to pretend to his audience that he simply doesn't have the character to say such disgusting things.
And _that_ is what his superfans mistake as his "honesty" and his "telling it like it is." He implicates his audience because he knows that these are the things that they wish they could get away with saying.