The Evil Brilliance Of Trump; The Shameful Ignorance Of Followers
Trump is able to mesmerize and hold his followers spell bound because he is a master of a debating method that shamelessly uses lies and misdirection and is known among philosophers and rhetorical experts as the “Gish Gallop,” which in Russia is referred to as “firehose of falsehood,” and eventually the propagation of “Brandolini’s Law.”
Or in simpler terms, trump is able to dish out so much propaganda and shovel so much bullshit so quickly as to bury or drown his opponent or the moderator who simply does not have the time to fact check or refute, leaving the viewer little choice but to believe the bullshit. The galloper cares little about facts but mostly about their delivery. The goal is nothing more than to spread confusion and lead the lemmings to accept the grifter’s positions, if only out of sheer frustration. Meanwhile, trump gets a windfall by taking advantage of historically low public trust in both the media and politicians.
Jonathan Rauch, an award-winning journalist, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and a contributing writer for The Atlantic, said trump is using a classic propaganda tactic.
“It’s about throwing spaghetti against the wall,” Rauch said. “It’s anything and everything. It can be wild. It can be random. It’s to create confusion and epistemic chaos. And that’s what we are seeing. And that’s very hard for democracies to deal with.”
A lifelong grifter with the nightmare vision of becoming an American dictator, trump also uses a method known as the “illusory truth effect.” The truth effect is commonly used by the skilled and corrupt salesman who knows that if he repeats unfounded claims about a product it may boost sales because some viewers may forget where they heard the claims and come to think that they heard the claims from an objective source.
It seems counter-intuitive but fact checking trump’s lies hasn’t worked and may even have added to the suspicions that trump fuels in his followers. Although trump may be the most fact-checked politician ever, the public has a hard time in recalling which of trump’s claims are true and which is disinformation, according to a RAND Corp. study.
That is largely why, the RAND study concluded, “Don’t expect to counter the firehose of falsehood with the squirt gun of truth.”
These are some of trump’s tools but the explanation of how he has generated a paradoxical, blind fervor among his followers, has little to do with ideology but mostly with trump’s ability to bring great joy to his minions as he harnesses and expresses emotions of righteous indignation, the sense of what is referred to as “aggrieved entitlement.”
Trump has been inexplicably successful in spreading his deceitfulness, as shown by the proliferation of the label “Trumpism,” which has been applied to national-conservative and national-populist movements in other Western democracies, where leaders have striking similarities to trump.
Among them are Silvio Berlusconi, a conservative, populist former Italian Prime Minister and billionaire who was the first Italian prime minister elected with no prior governmental experience. He also was convicted of tax fraud in 1973 and was banned from holding public office for two years; Jair Bolsonaro. former president of Brazil, who was honored by the the non-profit, Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project for being “the individual who has done the most in the world to advance organized criminal activity and corruption;” Recep Tayyip Erdoğan, the president of Turkey who was once imprisoned for four months for inciting religious hatred; Nigel Farage, conservative, populist, xenophobic leader of the United Kingdom’s exit from the European Union, known as Brexit; Shinzo Abe, a staunch conservative right-wing Japanese nationalist and former Japanes prime minister; Hong Joon-pyo, a South Korean political leader who said he modeled himself after Park Chung-hee, a former Korean president and dictator; Viktor Orbán, , Hungary’s right wing prime minister; and Yoon Suk-yeol, right wing president of South Korea whose campaign included economic deregulation and abolishing the Ministry of Gender Equality and Family.
The best way to deal with all grifters and liars is to show them up for the charlatans there are with a big fat “Truth Sandwich” but that’s not always found at the neighborhood truth store and it may very well not prove gratifying to the consumers.
Trump has been successful to a great degree by continually repeating his claim of being the victim. His cries of being victim of the “single greatest witch hunt of a politician” in U.S. history are used, laundered and re-used, whether in reference to the investigation of Russian influence in the 2016 election, both impeachments and most recently, his insistence that he never, never, never, never met E. Jean Carroll, who won a civil trial accusing trump of having sexually assaulted her in a department store dressing room. By continually protesting, the public may not necessarily believe the lies but they may well come to believe that something must have gone awry if trump said it so many times.
The connection between repetition and belief was apparently shown in a June 2017 poll from Politico and Morning Consult that showed that 53 percent of Republicans had an unfavorable impression of Robert Mueller, who led the Russia probe, up 26 percent from July 2017. A July Ipsos poll showed that 75 percent of Republicans believe that the Mueller investigation is politically motivated against Trump, a number substantiated by a CBS News/YouGov Battleground Tracker poll that found that 70 percent of Republicans believe the investigation to be a “political witch hunt.”
The term “Gish Gallop” was coined in 1994 by anthropologist Eugenie Scott, who named it after American creationist Duane Gish.
Gish was like trump in that he believed that whatever advanced the cause of creationists was true and whatever damaged the creationist argument was false. This Machiavellian perspective makes it a simple task for trump or Gish to lie, lie, lie and for followers to go down the rabbit hole in belief.
The Gish Gallop is a technique where the debater overwhelms the opponent with an avalanche of arguments, without concerns over their accuracy or strengths. The Gish galloper sacrifices quality of the argument for quantity. By virtue of the amount of lies, half-truths and misrepresentations, the debater leaves his opponent with little time to refute or fact check. Each point raised by the Gish galloper takes much more time to refute or fact-check than it did to state the argument in the first place, which is known online as Brandolini’s law.
Brandolini’s law, also known as the bullshit asymmetry principle, emphasizes the exhaustive effort of debunking misinformation, in comparison to the relative ease of creating it in the first place. One expert on Brandolini’s law, said “the amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than that needed to produce it.”
One example of Brandolini’s law is the claim that vaccines cause autism. The sheer amount of false claims keeps the false belief alive despite extensive investigation showing no relationship between vaccines and autism.
The adage of Brandolini’s law was formulated by Alberto Brandolini, an Italian programmer. Brandolini came up with the theory after watching an Italian political talk show with former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi and journalist Marco Travaglio.
A RAND Corp. report issued at the height of the 2016 presidential election focused on the “firehose of falsehood.” The report found that lies didn’t have to be believable and even clear falsehoods, repeated widely and frequently enough, could be effective in warping public opinion in the propagandist’s favor.
The firehose of falsehood technique is an outgrowth of Soviet propaganda techniques in which many messages are broadcast rapidly, repetitively, and continuously over multiple channels or in the case of trump, to multiple tweets, to many digital platforms and various media outlets, who are quick to repeat the unchecked claims.
The report could have been referring to trump when it noted that “new Russian propaganda entertains, confuses and overwhelms the audience. The experimental psychology literature suggests that, all other things being equal, messages received in greater volume and from more sources will be more persuasive.”
RAND notes that the firehose of falsehood puts a lie to the common belief that “the truth always wins.” But even when people are aware that sources generate misinformation, “they still show a poor ability to discriminate between information that is false and information that is correct.”
“Stories or accounts that create emotional arousal in the recipient (e.g., disgust, fear, happiness) are much more likely to be passed on, whether they are true or not,” the RAND report found.
The Russian government used the technique during its offensive against Georgia in 2008, and continues to use it in Russia’s war with Ukraine. The model has been adopted by other governments and political movements around the world, including and quite successfully, by trump.
It’s a debate style that is often used by authoritarian leaders but also by proponents of zany fringe beliefs like homeopathy, flood geology or the moon landing hoax, where a true review of the facts would unhinge the fringe believer or dictator.
Homeopathy is a pseudoscientific system of alternative medicine that has been roundly debunked by legitimate science. Flood geology is a pseudoscientific attempt to interpret and reconcile geological features of the Earth in accordance with a literal belief in the global flood described in Genesis 6–8. Believers in the moon landing hoax are convinced that the whole situation was filmed on earth.