I am terrified.
Sincerely and utterly terrified.
Not because Trump is now the nominee, but because I don’t think Clinton can deal with him.
(This isn’t a launch into an appeal for Sanders. That ship has sailed and even if he pulls it out, the same advice would apply to the Sanders campaign.)
No, my point is that I don’t think that anyone in the Clinton camp truly understands the field that Trump is playing on.
Clinton’s campaign’s cannot equip itself to win if they don’t even know where they are fighting.
I feel like our side is going to be sitting there on November 2nd saying how we won every battle but lost the war.
Simply put, Trump is a master of playing on an emotional level and Clinton is not.
When we say Obama is a good politician, some of us are talking about policy, but most of it’s talking about how his speeches made us feel, how funny he is at White House Correspondents dinners, and how he just seemed like a genuinely cool guy.
Trump for all of the racist, xenophobia, (insert unintelligent thing here) is good at seeming like an interesting person and at talking to his audience. Right now, the assumption is that Trump can’t help himself and that he is a creature of raging id. The first rule of the successful con man is to always seem dumber than the mark.
So while I love the “381 electoral college votes” and “Landslide in the House” articles on here, I think that they are premature at best and dangerous at worse.
Right now, Clinton and Trump have high unfavorables…. Trump about 14% higher than Clinton.
Now here’s a question and answer honestly…. Which do you see as more likely Clinton’s unfavorables going up or Trump’s coming down? Or even a little bit of both as Trump really narrows in on Clinton’s many unfavorables and the media demand for false equivalence buoys Trump?
Now that he has the nomination, Trump is going to moderate and the story is going to be about Trump’s “surprising change” and “A New Nicer Trump.”
Even if not everyone believes it, it’s still going to be “Teach the Controversy” except with Trump’s turn to the presidential instead of Climate Change.
That’s going to be the story for months.
Imagine something even better when he has a “Come to Jesus” moment on immigrants and starts actively eschewing some of the more divisive parts of the Republican platform. Nothing is better than a sinner who genuinely repents.
Or the best is what I call, the stealth “good policy moment.” It’s where he breaks with Republican orthodoxy in a single statement or interview, the media picks it up and spreads it around, and then Trump goes back to being a doctrinaire Republican.
There was a recent article that came out that said that although Trump says he believes Global Warming is a hoax… his golf course built a seawall to protect against it. OMG? Does he really believe in Globall Warming. This type of thing is a useful anchor for those on the left who want to believe the best in Trump. He’s done for taxes on the rich, replacing Obamacare and numerous other policies
Trump’s Weapon that Clinton doesn’t understand.
My fear is that Trump is a very instinctual player in the emotional game of persuasion. While I don’t support his politics, look at how prescient Scott Adams (of Dilbert fame) has been about Trump and the race in general.
His “3rd dimension of persuasion vs. the 2nd dimension of politics and policy” framework has allowed him to make accurate predictions about Trump’s rise when everyone else was laughing Trump off.
Adams has had an amazing track record by looking at Trump as a master of persuasion. Not persuasion in the reasoning sense, but persuasion in the sense of instinctively knowing how to attack opponents in a way that sticks, how to get around what would be embarrassing to others, and how connect to people’s aspirations. Trump communicates via emotions and he is doing his best to make the electorate think, “Trump is an asshole, but he’s our asshole” is a message I can see expanding beyond Republican voters.
Trump is framing all of his appearances to implant in the minds of everyone that he is strong, likeable, funny, in control, and having a good time. People are irrational and generally the mind will make up explanations to justify how a person is feeling.
It doesn’t matter what Trump actually says as long as he gives off that impression.
The internet and the rise of the 24 hour media cycle have created a whole new solar system when it comes to voting. So far, based on the admittedly limited data set that is the Republican primary, Trump is using a Copernican model while the media, we here on the Dailykos, and the Democratic camp in general are trying to predict the motion of the political planets using epicycles.
Trump is instinctual and effective in creating memes and memorable moments in a way that Hillary is not.
There have been articles about this… sort of.
Andrew Sullivan’s link “America Has Never Been So Ripe For Tyranny.” nymag.com/…
Scott Adams was interviewed by the Washington Post in March. www.washingtonpost.com/...
However, what scares me more has been Scott Adam’s blog about Donald Trump as a master of persuasion where he shows specific examples.
Look at his recent blog post about Hillary’s strategy. From here…blog.dilbert.com/...
Dangerous Donald
Opponents of Trump have started making the case that he is “dangerous” and “risky.”
You know who likes dangerous men? Answer: Everyone.
Seal Team Six is dangerous. George Washington was dangerous. Abraham Lincoln was dangerous. Women like dangerous men. Men want to be dangerous men.
"Dangerous” borders on being a compliment. When you need to thwart some enemies – such as a useless Congress, or ISIS – you want to send in your most dangerous fighter.
“Risky” is a slightly different vibe. I already blogged about “risky” being a bad choice when life is going well, and a good choice when you need to shake up a broken system. We’re in a broken system situation. Intelligent risk is what you want, not what you avoid.
Or this one about how Clinton’s “Imagine President Trump” campaign ads are likely to backfire.
Clinton’s team continues to churn out anti-Trump hit pieces that ask you to imagine President Trump in office. By November, voters will think Trump has been running the country for a year and it looked a lot like the Obama administration. That’s called “graduated exposure” and it’s a well-understood psychological phenomenon. The Democrats are working overtime to make Trump feel less scary while believing they are doing the opposite.
I share Adams sentiment in that I don’t think Hillary Clinton’s team is thinking this stuff through… and she needs to be. She needs to be thinking it through right now. Use images of Trump being petty an unpresidential, use images that were taken by non Trump photographers (i.e. not his tweets, not his speeches, but him at a deli or in the background or sitting in the audience. )
Anything that makes Trump seem strong or associates him with the presidency should be avoided. The words “President Trump” should never escape her lips. Trump is going to try to be the badass outsider who gets things done for the common man. Calling him dangerous is helping him. It makes him seem badass and effective. “Inept” is better. “Hazardous” would have been better as it deprives Trump of agency. “Treacherous Trump” has the alliteration and it works with the whole Putin thing…
The goal is to make it seem like Trump is erratic and doesn’t have any control over himself. Showing him defying Republicans or simply being inconsistent on policy isn’t enough. Constantly show him lacking self possession.
Hopefully, Scott Adams is wrong.
Hopefully, Trump’s advantages are all from the structure of the Republican primaries that he was running in.
Hopefully, this persuasion and subconscious linguistics is all hooey. But on the off chance that it isn’t, Clinton’s team really, really needs to start paying attention.
