True Lies (2/3)
Hey Jordan -
Since the bulk of your note was spent elsewhere than the below two questions, I added comments directly to your post. To your questions:
Jordan: What do you think President Trump’s motives are when making these statements?
Surya: Motives? I think the simplest explanation is that he is incredibly sloppy and ill informed. I’m sure you don’t believe the press reports that Trump hates reading, has refused briefings, and gets bored when in policy discussions. But I accept them (not least because it matches w/my time w/the man where I found him to be superficial and “go with my gut” kind of guy). I think he consumes cable news and so only has a superficial level of knowledge of these things. Then, he doesn’t prepare, so he talks off the cuff and can’t tell fact from fiction and he’s sloppy, so it all gets blurred.
My alternate theory is that this is intentional to create so many targets that the opposition doesn’t know where to focus and so fails to galvanize energy and progress against a singular topic.
That’s what I think. I don’t think that taking the endless misstatements and parsing them for the corner cases of what he actually meant makes much sense.
Jordan: Do you think the opposition’s approach of mocking, shaming, precisely fact-checking, etc. these statements will be effective in changing anyone’s mind about Trump? If so, whose? If not, why not?
Yes. I think there is a non-trivial percentage of Trump voters who don’t advertise it. I think they are embarrassed, but are also the type of people who think Hillary should go to jail, so they voted Trump. I think highlighting the obvious (to me) lies and distortions by this president will increase their discomfort. Whether that plays out in midterms in a year or in 2020, we’ll see.
For the base, the true-believers, it’s not effective and only causes further retrenching. Such is life today.
surya
