‘Why Does Trump Keep Saying All of These Stupid Things?’
7th June 2018
One of the questions I’m often asked by people who acknowledge that Trump has done some pretty awesome things during his time in office is the fact that they just can’t get over the obvious fact that he keeps saying what they regard as, and which I freely admit to being, ‘stupid things’.
The categories of ‘stupid shit Trump says’ range from inaccurate statements (invariably characterized by his critics as LIES! without considering the primary predicate of a lie, which is an intention to deceive) to infelicitous (e.g. anything that can easily be distorted and taken out of context by his critics) to The Truth That Dare Not Say Its Name (things that everybody knows to be true but which cannot actually be said in public without tremendous amounts of blowback from people who are fundamentally invested in said true thing actually being, or being considered, not true).
Scott Adams, in his Periscope sessions, is constantly pointing out that people are missing the essential ‘persuasion’ part of the picture: Controlling The Conversation.
Once these things are said, the Chattering Class are physically unable to ignore them, any more than a dog is able to resist chasing something running away from it. While they are chattering about these things, which are of no importance, they aren’t talking about what they would prefer to be talking about, which is their agenda. (And they do have an agenda, trust me.) The reason that these things are of no importance is that any connection between what Trump says and what Trump does is, at best, accidental.
Since the mid-1960s, that section of the information economy known at the Mainstream Media have had a lock on what Americans (and, by extension, people around the world) hear being ‘talked about’ — the major TV and radio networks, the big-city newspapers, the informational and opinion publications popular with Those Who Matter (at least in their own minds), and certain publications (like Scientific American and Popular Science and National Geographic) that one wouldn’t ordinarily think had any connection with politics but that have been taken over by Social Justice Warriors and turned into Voices of the Crust because Social Justice Warriors cannot tolerate the existence of any publication (or organization, such as the Boy Scouts) that hasn’t been roped into the Progressive Chorus.
‘Yeah, but how can he stand to say all of these stupid things? Even a second’s thought would reveal how stupid they are.’ The whole point is that Trump doesn’t give them that second’s thought. True or false, wise or foolish, helpful or unhelpful, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that they take control of the public discourse. While the sharks are fighting over the bucket of fish guts you’ve thrown in the water, they aren’t chewing on you or on the thing you’re pulling out of the water, which is worth a lot more to you than a bunch of fish guts. And the sharks can’t avoid attacking the fish guts because that’s their shark nature, which they cannot control. Watch it in action. Any time tha the Chattering Class get into some part of their agenda rather that what Trump wants them to be talking about, he will toss another grenade into the stream just to watch the dead fish from CNN and MSNBC float to the surface. He’s been doing it for at least three years now; my wonder is not that he’s doing it but that more people haven’t caught on to it.
I don’t even claim that this is a deliberate choice on Trump’s part. For all I know, it might be, but I think that he’s been doing this for so long, and been so successful at it, that it’s an entirely unconscious process on his part. He doesn’t have to think about how to Control The Conversation any more than Serena Williams needs to think about how to return a serve — there it is WHAP there it goes….
There is a method to this apparent madness, a very successful one. So unclench the stomach, pass the popcorn, and enjoy the show.