Selling American Carnage

Donald Trump is a salesman. And he knows that the most credible and persuasive salesman has to convince himself that the product he sells is every bit as good as he claims. In the case of Trump, he is the product. There is no pretense of public service—Trump is public service, he is the embodiment of America, enshrined on baseball caps everywhere. Therefore, transactional to the bone, whatever benefits Trump is simply a by-product of Trump’s selfless gift of his Greatness to the country. And, he claimed, we were starting from carnage.

Yet there are questions that might pester the waking mind of even the most unscrupulous sociopath.

• Wouldn’t the fact that Trump has never even seen half of polled adults approve of his job performance penetrate the protective shell around his ego? Well if the majority is against the product that will ‘MAGA’, the majority deserves to be vilified. And who has more tools in his media arsenal to do that than a sitting president?
• What about the press? Many in the mainstream press have loosely followed a narrative of presidential incompetence, corruption, and politicization. Of everything. Including face masks designed to reduce the spread of a virus that has killed over 190,000 Americans in six months. Well that’s ‘fake news.’ The ‘enemy of the people.’ When you are a salesman and the product, persecution complexes, like conspiracism, weave their way seamlessly into the fabric of persuasion.
• What about the lies? Washington Post’s team, led by Glenn Kessler, has documented over 20,000 lies Trump has told in less than four years. What about when Trump lies and is confronted with it? Former Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, told Bob Woodward that for Trump ‘a lie is not a lie. It’s just what he thinks.’ And even if it is a lie, it is a lie told in service of American Greatness, embodied in his sacrifice of billions in foregone income to be president. His base knows sometimes he must lie. He’s trying to bring down the Deep State, after all, and sometimes you have to fight fire with fire. Or gasoline, as the case may be.
• What about the scandals? Impeached for attempting to extort favors from the Ukraine Government in return for $400 in military funding and a White House invitation, refusing to disclose his tax returns, communication if not collusion with Russian Government officials during the campaign and post-election, dozens of pre-president sexual assault allegations and some payoffs from his campaign chest, using federal agents and tear gas to clear a path to an historic church to hold up a bible for a phot-op as one act in his inflammatory, anti-racist performance art against protests across the nation and in DC. Etc. The list of scandals is long, damning, and ongoing. Fake news, generated by Deep State forces. But once you’ve bought a product—and advertisers know how people’s intimacy with products is stronger if it’s tied up with their self-perception and identity—dismissing the cognitive dissonance, which is what Geroge Orwell in 1984 called ‘doublethink’, becomes the challenge, made easier by the media surrogates that use incendiary click bait to target the Trump base of support for their numbers, audience, and potential to attract advertisers. With a story arc resembling a reality TV series that is sort of like a cross between the X Files and Green Acres. On acid. Echoing inside an epistemic bubble.

Sociologist Max Weber would have pointed to Trump’s ‘charismatic’ source of legitimate authority—one of three he identified. Weber asked a simple and brilliant question—how to get a society to comply with potentially oppressive structures, laws, regulations, and constraints on individuals’ behaviors? Tradition, modern bureaucratic institutions, or personal charisma, where overlap between these sources of perceived legitimate authority could be dumb luck or Machiavellian intent.

But once you have the product, and the product promotes itself, creating a suspect but powerful circular credibility, the need arises to identify the audience, from Weber to the modern science of persuasion. Steve Bannon and the Mercer Family at Breitbart.com, as well as Facebook (allegedly without consent, although it would be hard to argue that Trump’s rise hasn’t been good for practically all social media), provided the algorithms used in the demographic targeting, as journalist Jane Mayer first documented. And truly fake news—not simply reporting unflattering to TrumpCo—weaves itself into that fabric of persuasion.

From a distance these persuasion efforts look a lot like an American flag. And the algorithms flag those most vulnerable to predatory rhetoric and misinformation. They hit on white grievance, immigration and immigrants, law and order, destruction of “housewives’” idyllic suburban cocoons, race-baiting, nationalism, anti-intellectualism, hyperpartisanship, etc. American social media landscape is starting to resemble 1984’s ‘two minutes hate,’ which Orwell describes sort of like a symphony of fear, anger and mass anxiety, focused on critics and ‘enemies’ of the state, reaching an orgasmic crescendo with the appearance of the Great Leader, Big Brother. It’s what propaganda scholars and (what Robert Cialdini refers to as) ‘compliance professionals’ call the ‘fear-relief’ technique. Scare them to near death (destruction of white suburbs through tyrannical housing edicts) and then offer protection (vote Trump-Pence, keep America great).

Just as a human brain coming out of the Ice Age is no match for nuclear weapons and modern technology, the American education system cannot, or at least does not, adequately prepare many citizens for this saturation of sophisticated propaganda. In many cases the public K-12 system incorporates a mainstream narrative, reinforced by local control and a corporate textbook publishing industry, of patriotism that seems undergirded by white nationalism, a denial of some of America’s most pernicious taproots in racism, slavery, and genocide of indigenous peoples on its march from sea to shining sea. Somehow ignoring the fundamental role of immigration in that process. Just like Fox knows its audience and slings it whatever their market research shows will confirm followers’ biases, the Trump White House plays to its base, devising a narrow election victory scenario with a minority of the popular vote. Any cheating in the process—help from the Russians, UAE, Israel, etc., voter suppression in key states, gerrymandering that enables politicians to choose their voters, slowdown of the mail by his corrupt partisan hand-picked postmaster, all representing perversions of democratic process that generally fly below the commercial news media radar. Add a bully pulpit and restricted press access that foment division and strong views, views so extreme that a mass of poor white people will vote for a self-proclaimed billionaire playing populist on TV—who borrowed trillions to give fellow billionaires massive tax cuts, while trying to rally his rabid followers back to workplace petri dishes during a deadly pandemic.

Karl Rove, the architect of the Bush/Cheney ascendance in 2000, once said to journalist Ron Suskind that guys like him [Suskind] were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he [Rove] defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." . . . . That's not the way the world really works anymore. We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors ... and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

George W. Bush’s ‘turd blossom’ is apparently back and advising the Trump campaign (not that his vision of a neocon, republican ‘supermajority’ worked out very well), along with propagandist Frank Luntz (Luntz of course would focus on the tool of his trade—polling—rather than its mass persuasive effect). They know how to merchandise a product. All hands on the deck of the SS Opportunist, apparently.

I had a student once who asked me about a ‘gas pill,’ a gas tank additive that would significantly increase a vehicle’s mileage. Even a crude grasp of the 1st and 2nd laws of thermodynamics would raise an eyebrow, but claims might be possible if the pill embodied a considerable amount of energy potential, meaning it wouldn’t be cheap. Some rote web-checking produced pages overflowing with glowing testimonials from a multi-level marketing scheme. Obscuring more critical viewpoints and no doubt written by some PR hack or a crude bot from a previous decade. Trump’s followers have already managed to deny or suspend any verifiable reality, and as much as anything seem ready for another round of fist pumps when those bastard enemies of Greatness lose. Because certainly, if the former had focused not on the game score, but on policies and their toxic effects on their lives, they’d be storming the castle with tiki torches and AR-15s. Though toxic, that is brand loyalty, and Americans love rooting for a team, and Trump will do as their symbolic leader. Love or hate the grifter’s knack for divorcing rhetoric from outcome, and then turning the outcome inside-out for consumption by the base, it represents master salesmanship.

And really. Who wants to be told the car they bought is a lemon? Or that carnage isn’t greatness?

Bill Grigsby, PhD | Eastern Oregon University

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