I am continually astonished that Donald Trump supporters do not diminish their enthusiasm for him no matter how outrageous he says things. You might think that treating military deaths as “suckers” and “losers” would give people pause. Even if reports of this are regarded as lies, Trump did say on the record that McCain that he was not a hero because he had been captured would seem to patriotic citizens to regard as an affront. But I heard one Trump supporter say that the antagonism between Trump and McCain was just politics and so just dismissed the matter, as if politicians say and do just anything and so are to be discounted, though for some reason what is said or attributed about Clinton or Biden will not be discounted. So there is an attempt to make sense of whatever is the point of view of the Trump supporters, even though they are not, as a matter of fact, socially or economically disadvantaged, nor because they are poorly educated, in that since the uneducated clearly enough supported FDR because they clearly enough saw what was in their interests. The Trump supporters remain a puzzlement. Are they angry for no reason? Are they disturbed at the way society is changing? Part of the explanation, I suggest, for Trump supporters are partly the verbal confusions that occur in political discourse so as to evade or obfuscate issues. Verbal ju-jitsu allows people to support them for whatever other are the real reasons of a preference, whether that is racism or Covid denial or whatever other are the Trump concerns.The verbal gymnastics are longstanding and are currently on parade. But they also have to do with the particular kind of rhetoric in which Trump is involved, ways in which he cannot help himself, and that help along his obfuscations and so have made quite an appeal for him for five years now. I will try to parse out some of his peculiar verbal constructions.
Last week, Bob Woodward released a tape of Donald Trump that had been recorded on Feb. 7th.Trump said that the coronavirus will be much more serious than was not yet known. The President in public, however, said that coronavirus would just go away. All three people, The Press Secretary, the Republican National Chairman, and the President himself,said that the President is not misleading the people about the coronavirus even as the President says he is misleading the people so as not to lead people to panic. That means a statement is not misleading or a lie if it is done for a good purpose. So there is a confusion between an event, the fact of being misleading, and the purpose for that event, as if the event doesn’t occur if it had been done for a good cause. If that is the case, then the difference between the Democrats and President Trump is a matter of emphasis, as something either outrageous or understandable, even if both sides are saying the same facts. The deliberately verbal confusion allows there to be a controversy when there is no controversy about the facts. It is just taking sides.
One way to clarify that would be to invoke a standard or an imputed comparison. So Trump says that the alternative of lying would have been to engage in panic, and so he was being statesmanlike by playing down the coronavirus. But there was no need to create panic and still not lie. George W. Bush was at the smoldering rubble of the World trade Center. He did not do anything very eloquent. He just said in the bullhorn that he was supporting the workers cleaning up the mess. There was no lie, just fellow feeling. Moreover, any number of leaders can, like Churchill, tell the truth about how bad things are without leading to panic. Trump, however, said there was no alternative but to lie, which says a ton about how he thinks of things in general.
Set aside whether Trump is being devious. The nature of Trump’s rhetoric is, as has long been known, to use sentences that end with an empty adjective, such as “fabulous” and to engage in invective, he never having ever learned that there is nothing wrong with ad hominem arguments. In fact, he does not make arguments that he marshalls evidence or chains of causation but, instead, he only declares a conviction that is to be treated as self-evident. This becomes a very successful rhetorical tool because everybody just gets down to his verbal level and so anything is just assertions without any engagement about evaluating the merit of what is said. So Trump said Woodward took the Kool aid, and so simply ridiculous, rather than arguing the merit of whether Black people had burdens those of white privilege do not have. He doesn’t argue; he just maligns, and Trump dumbs everyone down to his level.
Consider the Woodward tape about dissembling and disregard whether Trump lied or not. Just look at the difficulty Trump labors to make his point. He gets around to it, but what he says is hardly crisp, even barely articulated. A listener is so grateful that Trump fulfills his statement that an auditor is relieved that Trump does so, as when Fauci sometimes says, startlingly, tht the President got the point, as if that might elude him about something that is very straightforward. Here is what the President said: “It goes through the air. That’s always tougher than the touch. You don’t have to touch things, right? But the air, you just breathe the air and that’s how it's passed. And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. That’s a very delicate one. It is also more deadly than even your strenuous flus.” It is painful to watch him make his points. It takes three sentences for him to get out that it is harder for contagion to spread in touch rather than in air. Then he labors for an adjective that is not quite correct. Trump says it is “tricky”, and then “delicate”, when what he means is just “important”. And then he comes out with another lame aductive by saying that flus can be “strenuous” when what he means is “virulent”.
Here is another Woodwrd passage of Trump’s: “This is more deadly. This is five per--you know, it is five percent versus one percent and less than one percent you know. So, this is deadly stuff.” Trump couldn’t manage to spit out that the five percent of the population would become ill for Coronavirus and that one percent was the flu epidemic in most years, or some such base on which the percentages were made. Instead, he treated the number as nominal: five is five times bigger than one. But he does get the idea even if he can’t articulate it.
Because Trump is not capable of extending arguments or explanations, he resorts to a much more primitive kind of utterance. He engages in invective, where what happens is the degree of venom and disdain rather than the cogency of what is thought. It is like a schoolyard chant that your mother has army boots. It is childish but effective and people like Marco Rubio who tried to lower their level of discourse find it unsettling and lame, while Trump thrived by calling Rubio as “Little Marco” and speaking of Jeb Bush as “Sleepy Jeb”. Trump has not done as well as labelling a name for Trump or Harris, and that is to his loss, perhaps a sign that even his level of cognition is even more seriously deteriorating. The disadvantage of Biden, however, is that however much Biden tries to deal with issues, as when he offered last week in Michigan a protectionist set of financial incentives to make the auto industries more prosperous, Biden is also required to also disdain Trump’s own iniquities, such as his remark about “jerks” and “losers”, in which case Biden is on Trump’s level in that both sides just treat the other as disgraceful, which means both are doing the same thing and so both cancel one another out even if Biden is being noble while Trump is being gross. It is just all politics and therefore dismissed so as to consider grievances of one’s own that disregard the substance of the issues before the electorate. So dumbing down discourse abets Trump even if he is pathetically inarticulate if one bothers to consider what he is indeed saying.
There aren’t just Trump out there alone out of his verbal peculiarities that generates verbal confusions. This is a very deep seated one that has always developed between Liberals and Conservatives even if Trump is also educing a verbal evasion. Trump, like predecessors, speaks of “law and order”. That is a particular idea of a social problem in that people present the fact of its danger rather than a plan to resolve the situation. Putatively, people will reestablish law and order even if it means having to kill a great many people to do so. That is not paradoxical in that the idea is that law and order can preside when the small or even considerable number of disorderly people or rioters are eliminated. But if that were the cae, that there was a problem with rioting, then the population would take the leaders responsible for not having resolved it. To the contrary. However, Trump is not regarded as having failed to create law and order even though he has been President for almost four years and said he would get unrest over control. Rather, disorder is a perennial evil ever relied on as something essential to a society whatever are the other movements or social structures that are supposed to be alleviated, such as inflation or trade imbalances or pandemics. It is simply the image of righteousness and so is always ever the condition of unrest, the very idea of unrest aside from any other issues. Everyone cringes at Burke and Joseph de Maistre and so does not ask the reason for unrest even if there are reasons and even if non-Conservatives work hard to distinguish peaceful movement from riot, those who engage in violence against the disorderly are not treated as disorderly but as the restoration of order. This is an equivalence hundreds of years old that Trump easily can cling to.
Endless are the verbal strategies whereby rhetoric engages in confusion. It is understandable that Paul Lazarsfeld, the sociologist of the Thirties to the Seventies who was the guru of popular opinion research, was inclined to find out a way around the ever flexibility of popular opinion, sometimes the masses shifting themselves about, sometimes taking a fancy for facism or democracy or whatever phrase seems to cling, such as “Remember the Maine” or “Fifty-Four Forty or Fight”. Instead, Lazarsfeld said there was a solid footing in political life. People disregarded slogans in that whatever they claimed to be their slogans, people voted because of their economic interests and their social status identifications. People were somehow wise rather than fooled. That Biden is not twenty points ahead of a President for whom so many things have gone wrong, makes uncertain whether the Lazarsfeld credo is to be sustained. Maybe flim-flam is enough, one political campaign after the other. Perhaps do not despair only because Trump is so successful a flim flam artist that his success might just be a fluke.