Tag: meaning
How Donald Trump’s Doublespeak Really Works—And Is Highly Calculated

How Donald Trump’s Doublespeak Really Works—And Is Highly Calculated

Published with permission from Alternet.

Donald Trump’s speaking style is said to be off the cuff and spontaneous. Far from it. He’s actually using a very sophisticated doublespeak.

One of the obligations of a candidate is to commit to policy solutions. You review a public problem, decide what you will do when in office, and report in detail how you will address the problem. You make yourself accountable for your position.

Instead of doing this, Trump practices what one might call “multiple-choice communication.” Whenever he speaks on a given topic, he gives multiple options on what he might mean.

For instance, at a recent rally in Fresno, Trump stated that, despite five years of low rainfall in California, “There is no drought. They turn the water into the ocean. If I win, believe me, we’re going to start opening up the water so that you can have your farmers survive.”

Now, this is a very confusing statement. What could he mean? Go ahead and choose your answer to this multiple-choice problem. Does Trump mean that:

  1. There never was a drought (perhaps the drought was a myth?)
  2. There was a drought, but it has ended naturally.
  3. There was a drought, but somebody’s fixed it.
  4. There is no drought, because what others call a drought is simply their inability to drain the Sacramento River Delta and use its water for farming.
  5. There is drought, but as president of the United States, Trump will singlehandedly change California water policy. The fact that a huge engineering project, like draining the Sacramento River Delta, is theoretically possible, is the same as there never having been a drought in the first place.

Do you see how many options Trump gives us to believe? Which answer did you choose?

Now imagine some attendees at Trump’s rally. They get to choose their own answers, just like you. Some people simply feel reassured by Trump’s words there is no drought. Whew! What a relief.

Some are farmers who hear Trump say he will send them water. Thank you, Donald Trump!

Some are anti-government and are happy that climate change is a myth. No further government intervention needed. Amen!

Some are pro-government and welcome a huge engineering project. This would destabilize the ecology, the water table, real estate values, and would have countless other consequences. If you want this option, you want heavy government intervention.

These different listeners at the Trump rally are not in agreement on what needs to be done. However, because the speech is given in multiple-choice format, each hears a different promise. It may seem they’re cheering together, but they’re cheering for different results.

Back in the Republican primaries, Trump got massive media coverage by making extreme promises about immigration, trade and religious discrimination. This won him the loyalty of political extremists such as anti-foreigners and white supremacists. At this point in the campaign, Trump needs to expand his share of the American voter base by appealing to more moderate voters.

How does he appeal to moderates without losing his early extremist fans? Multiple-choice communication. This enables him to speak separately to the different listeners without changing his tune. He still speaks to the racists. But he now he’s also speaking to the moderates.

Here’s how it works.

At a rally in San Diego Trump spoke publicly about a judge presiding over a lawsuit against Trump University. After calling him a “very hostile judge” and a “hater,” Trump adds, “What happens is the judge, who happens to be, we believe, Mexican, which is great. I think that’s fine.”

In fact, the judge, Gonzalo Curiel, was born in Indiana.

So let’s do the multiple-choice. Which of these is Trump saying?

  1. Anyone who gets in my way, I can single them out in a speech and focus the crowd’s hate on them.
  2. I can single out any American at any time and bring public focus on their ethnic or religious heritage.
  3. I can describe any American as foreign (as “Mexican”) rather than as an American.
  4. My racist fans may follow my lead and also single out other Americans based on their ethnic, cultural or religious heritage.
  5. Judge Curiel’s professional behavior may be based on his being Mexican.
  6. Judge Curiel’s ethnic heritage is up to my approval, and I think it’s great that he is Mexican (even though he’s not Mexican).

Let’s imagine how this sounds to the different listeners.

Say one of the people in the audience is a man named Tim, who is a white supremacist. As he listens, he hears Trump say that this American-born judge is essentially a “Mexican.” Tim thinks, “I can’t believe Trump can say this out loud! A candidate after my own heart.”

Another listener, Maria, hears this: Anyone who gets in Trump’s way might suddenly be singled out and labeled as a non-American. Especially if you’re “Mexican.” You could lose your citizenship rights. Scary! Keep your head down.

A third listener, Steve, is a moderate independent who came because he was curious. When he hears Trump saying, “it’s great to be Mexican” he thinks “Gosh, I was worried Trump was a racist. But he says Mexicans are great. I guess he’s not racist.”

You see, if Trump communicated his proposed policies (build the wall, deport, ban Muslims) like a normal candidate, we would be seeing him as an extremist and as a cruel man. That would not be very fun and would not win more voters. It’s smarter for Trump to court moderates and undecided voters by confusing them with multiple-choice statements.

Multiple-choice communication is not unique to Donald Trump. You may also have seen it in advertisements, especially when the advertiser doesn’t intend to deliver on their promises. For instance, you may see shampoos that promise men “thicker hair.” Men buy it thinking they will solve their hair loss. Nope. The shampoos make your individual hairs thicker, but don’t stop hair from falling out. The shampoo maker knows customers will make this mistake, but it’s not false advertising. You simply heard the wrong option.

The problem, of course, is that people at a Trump rally each leave having heard a different promise. And if Trump should become president, there is no way he can fulfill all of those different expectations. Which reminds us that the people who would be most let down by a Trump presidency are the people who believe in what he says.

Mark Peysha is CEO and cofounder of the Center for Strategic Intervention.

Photo: U.S. Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks at a campaign rally in Sacramento, California, U.S. June 1, 2016. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson

On Hearing The Real Dr. King

WASHINGTON — We tend to honor the Martin Luther King Jr. we want to honor, not the Martin Luther King Jr. who actually existed.

We forget the King who at the time of his ministry was labeled an “extremist,” who explicitly called out “moderates” for urging African-Americans to slow down their march to justice, who quite brilliantly used the American creed as a seedbed for searing criticisms of the United States as it existed.

The postponement of the planned ceremonies dedicating the new memorial to Dr. King did not come in time to stop the tributes from flowing in advance. This was a blessing. Debating the meaning of King’s legacy is one of the best ways of ensuring it endures — although some will always try to domesticate him into a self-help lecturer who’d be welcomed at the local Chamber of Commerce or even a Christian Coalition meeting.

That we have failed to live up to King’s calls for economic justice — a central commitment of his life’s work to which my colleague Eugene Robinson rightly called our attention — is one telltale sign of our tendency to hear King’s prophetic voice selectively. But selectively hearing him is better than not listening at all, as long as it doesn’t lead to a distortion of what he believed.

One of the many things King understood was the always incipient radicalism of the American idea. At a time when paying homage to our nation’s origins seems far more a habit of the tea party than of progressives, King, like Abraham Lincoln before him, threw our founding documents in our faces and challenged us to take them seriously.

His “I Have a Dream” speech was an extended and impassioned essay on the American promise. The civil rights movement’s demands, he insisted, arose from American history’s own vows.

“When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence,” King proclaimed, “they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the ‘unalienable Rights’ of ‘Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.'”

One of the most dramatic moments in the speech came next. “It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note, insofar as her citizens of color are concerned,” King said. “Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked ‘insufficient funds.'”

This is the wonderful paradox of King: A Christian preacher, he understood the power of rooting arguments in a tradition. But this did not make those arguments any less radical. His emphasis was on those words “insufficient funds,” on our sins against our own claims.

This focus on calling out injustice — pointedly, heatedly, sometimes angrily — is what the people of King’s time, friend and foe alike, heard. It made many moderates (and so-called moderates) decidedly uncomfortable.

Anyone tempted to sanitize King into a go-along sort of guy should read his “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” from April 1963. It’s a sharp rebuke to a group of white ministers who criticized him as an outsider causing trouble and wanted him to back off his militancy.

“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” King replied. “We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality. … Anyone who lives inside the United States can never be considered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.” Yes, pleas for justice ought to be able to cross state lines.

King also declared himself “gravely disappointed with the white moderate” who, he feared, was “more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice.”

And recall King’s response to being accused of extremism. Though “initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist,” he wrote, “as I continued to think about the matter I gradually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label.” Jesus, he said, was called “an extremist for love,” and Amos “an extremist for justice.” The issue was: “Will we be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremists for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice?”

We have rendered Dr. King safe so we can honor him. But we should honor him because he did not play it safe. He urged us to break loose from “the paralyzing chains of conformity.” Good advice in every generation — and hard advice, too.

E.J. Dionne’s email address is ejdionne(at)washpost.com.

(c) 2011, Washington Post Writers Group