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Trump uses his combination of ignorance, bluster & malice "like a nuclear bomb of misinformation"
From Paul Waldman at WaPo's Plum Line:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/plum-line/wp/2017/10/17/trumps-lie-about-obama-and-fallen-soldiers-shows-how-he-makes-america-dumber/
Trump’s lie about Obama and fallen soldiers shows how he makes America dumber
-snip-
It would be easy to just add this to the mountain of lies Trump has told, but it’s worth taking a moment to examine it, because it provides an important window not only into his own thinking but also the way that the president is succeeding in making the entire country stupider and more misinformed on an ongoing basis.
-snip-
When a normal person is in a state of ignorance, he or she might exercise some caution and refrain from making a volatile accusation that, for instance, his or her predecessors were callous to Gold Star families. But not Trump. You’ll notice that the first time he says it, he asserts it as simple fact: “If you look at President Obama and other Presidents, most of them didn’t make calls.” When he’s challenged, he equivocates: “I don’t know if he did … President Obama I think probably did sometimes, and maybe sometimes he didn’t. I don’t know. That’s what I was told.”
Now here’s why this matters. Yes, many news outlets pointed out that Trump wasn’t telling the truth. But there are probably three interns at Fox News who are now scouring old news reports to find some family member of a fallen soldier who didn’t get a call from Obama. If they find it, that person’s story will then become the subject of a segment on Sean Hannity’s show, and it will then get retold on a hundred talk radio programs and conservative websites as proof that Obama was a monster and the media are all lying about this. (Trump’s insistence that there was “fake news” at work is another way of telling his supporters not to believe whatever they hear about this subject that comes from sources not explicitly supporting him.) And I promise you that if you took a poll two weeks from now, you’d find that 40 percent of the public (or more) believes that Obama never called the family of any fallen soldier, and only Trump has the sensitivity to do so.
And that’s how Trump takes his own particular combination of ignorance, bluster and malice, and sets it off like a nuclear bomb of misinformation. The fallout spreads throughout the country, and no volume of corrections and fact checks can stop it. It wasn’t even part of a thought-out strategy, just a loathsome impulse that found its way out of the president’s mouth to spread far and wide.
If you’re one of those who marvel at the fact that Trump’s approval ratings aren’t even lower than they are, this is a big reason for that. It’s absolutely necessary to correct Trump’s falsehoods, but we shouldn’t fool ourselves into believing that any poisonous lie he tells won’t find an eager audience. And the whole country gets dumber and dumber.
-snip-
It would be easy to just add this to the mountain of lies Trump has told, but it’s worth taking a moment to examine it, because it provides an important window not only into his own thinking but also the way that the president is succeeding in making the entire country stupider and more misinformed on an ongoing basis.
-snip-
When a normal person is in a state of ignorance, he or she might exercise some caution and refrain from making a volatile accusation that, for instance, his or her predecessors were callous to Gold Star families. But not Trump. You’ll notice that the first time he says it, he asserts it as simple fact: “If you look at President Obama and other Presidents, most of them didn’t make calls.” When he’s challenged, he equivocates: “I don’t know if he did … President Obama I think probably did sometimes, and maybe sometimes he didn’t. I don’t know. That’s what I was told.”
Now here’s why this matters. Yes, many news outlets pointed out that Trump wasn’t telling the truth. But there are probably three interns at Fox News who are now scouring old news reports to find some family member of a fallen soldier who didn’t get a call from Obama. If they find it, that person’s story will then become the subject of a segment on Sean Hannity’s show, and it will then get retold on a hundred talk radio programs and conservative websites as proof that Obama was a monster and the media are all lying about this. (Trump’s insistence that there was “fake news” at work is another way of telling his supporters not to believe whatever they hear about this subject that comes from sources not explicitly supporting him.) And I promise you that if you took a poll two weeks from now, you’d find that 40 percent of the public (or more) believes that Obama never called the family of any fallen soldier, and only Trump has the sensitivity to do so.
And that’s how Trump takes his own particular combination of ignorance, bluster and malice, and sets it off like a nuclear bomb of misinformation. The fallout spreads throughout the country, and no volume of corrections and fact checks can stop it. It wasn’t even part of a thought-out strategy, just a loathsome impulse that found its way out of the president’s mouth to spread far and wide.
If you’re one of those who marvel at the fact that Trump’s approval ratings aren’t even lower than they are, this is a big reason for that. It’s absolutely necessary to correct Trump’s falsehoods, but we shouldn’t fool ourselves into believing that any poisonous lie he tells won’t find an eager audience. And the whole country gets dumber and dumber.
9 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
Maybe if we paid people to be there in the room. They could, I don't know, have a note pad to write stuff down, or better yet have a video camera running to record these poisonous lies. But they'd have to be able to tell the public or show them the video. How could we make that happen? It's a puzzlement, that's for sure.
