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It doesn't matter whether Trump is a genius or an idiot: his media strategy works
Donald Trump is a uniquely tiring politician to follow, and the wall-to-wall coverage of his state visit to the UK makes you wonder how Americans aren’t completely exhausted.
Before he had even touched down on British soil, he had told the Sun newspaper in a recorded interview that Meghan Markle was “nasty”, then insisted he had said no such thing, before later telling his mate Piers Morgan that it was “OK for her to be nasty”. Within his first 48 hours in the country he said that the National Health Service would be “on the table” in any post-Brexit trade negotiation, and then that it was something he didn’t “consider part of trade”.
Much has been written about Trump’s ambivalent relationship with facts, and seemingly tenuous grip on reality. Some suggest he is playing 4D chess, skillfully manipulating the press into addressing his manifestly false statements seriously. Others think he is just an idiot, who isn’t aware of what he said yesterday, let alone whether it was true.
The thing is, of course, that none of the above matters – because wherever it comes from, Trump’s approach to what he says is pretty astonishingly effective. It not only distracts a media unused to dealing with such blatant untruths from what’s actually going on; it also creates such uncertainty about what is true and what can be trusted that the public, even those resolutely opposed to and distrustful of Trump, begin to doubt their own sense of what is real.
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Trump is only the most prominent expression, and successful execution, of a new approach to subduing the public that has been brewing for years, whether he knows he’s doing it or not. That feeling of frustration and disbelief with which most of us greet his pronouncements is only going to grow more familiar.
Before he had even touched down on British soil, he had told the Sun newspaper in a recorded interview that Meghan Markle was “nasty”, then insisted he had said no such thing, before later telling his mate Piers Morgan that it was “OK for her to be nasty”. Within his first 48 hours in the country he said that the National Health Service would be “on the table” in any post-Brexit trade negotiation, and then that it was something he didn’t “consider part of trade”.
Much has been written about Trump’s ambivalent relationship with facts, and seemingly tenuous grip on reality. Some suggest he is playing 4D chess, skillfully manipulating the press into addressing his manifestly false statements seriously. Others think he is just an idiot, who isn’t aware of what he said yesterday, let alone whether it was true.
The thing is, of course, that none of the above matters – because wherever it comes from, Trump’s approach to what he says is pretty astonishingly effective. It not only distracts a media unused to dealing with such blatant untruths from what’s actually going on; it also creates such uncertainty about what is true and what can be trusted that the public, even those resolutely opposed to and distrustful of Trump, begin to doubt their own sense of what is real.
-----------
Trump is only the most prominent expression, and successful execution, of a new approach to subduing the public that has been brewing for years, whether he knows he’s doing it or not. That feeling of frustration and disbelief with which most of us greet his pronouncements is only going to grow more familiar.
[link:https://www.newstatesman.com/world/north-america/2019/06/it-doesn-t-matter-whether-trump-genius-or-idiot-his-media-strategy-works|
Gaslighting 101
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