Trump has left people off balance ever since he decided to run. One outrageous statement, another shocking revelation, tumble over each other until a white noise of confusion disarms any coherent opposition. And that confusion is aided and abetted by a twitter army of psychopaths and bots that gum up the social media conversation.
It is a brutally effective strategy -- Trump effortlessly gaslights every criticism -- and pushing back against this tactic becomes a process argument that is easily dismissed and mocked. As reprehensible as he is, Trump is better at conning people than we are in exposing his cons.
So what does one do? If we continue to flail at every outrage, the false equivalencies, the he-said/she-said discourse of modern political reporting, all of that will occupy our time while really horrible stuff takes place under the surface. Political marketing requires a simple message, one easily understood, and one that allows many adjacent arguments.
The right has proved this time and again. Consider the outrage over personal mandates, as just a recent example. Well, today Kellyanne Conway provided the opening for our issue: Trump's taxes. Transparency is a bipartisan issue, and the more he resists coming clean with his finances the shiftier he looks, and the shiftier he looks the more impotent he becomes.
But only if we "focus like a laser beam" on his broken promise to release his returns. This takes discipline. We'd rather have fulsome discussions about substantive issues, but we live in an age of very low attention spans. His refusal to release his tax returns is easily understood and branches out into suspicions about Russian ties, conflicts of interest, and personal integrity.
Everyday he should be hounded by this. He should be showered in memes, plagued by websites that count the days since he broke his promise, and every opposition voice should bring it up every single chance they get. Conway-esque message discipline.
The support for this issue is out there: petitions.whitehouse.gov/… no matter what his minions claim.
I am Canadian, and in the dark days of the Harper government we activists looked to Obama as a ray of hope. And I worked my butt off to defeat the Conservatives two years ago. And I can tell you that we didn't crack his appeal until we made his brittle, unsympathetic and duplicitous character the primary issue.
Trump has put this issue right at our feet. His talking point is that only the media care about this issue. He is dead wrong and we know it. So it is time to hammer away at it until he can no longer ignore it.
