I'm confused, what is more-than-usually concerning about the first quote? I thought we knew his toadies knew no limits. Or is it the insertion of Rove?
I've been trying to figure out why that scene bothered me so much-- I don't know that I'd strongly defend the reaction but it's a combination of:
1) Rove feeding the delusion.
2) The level of disinterest, within the White House about having accurate information.
3) Contemplating the fact that Trump's feelings of injury and moral outrage were (on some level) sincere. That he's not merely fighting for power but might genuinely think he's trying to right a wrong.
On 3, he has no boundary between reality and fantasy. Sure, people fed him misinformation, but he only heard it because it fed what he wanted to hear. He excluded information ahead of the election that contradicted his fantasy. He can't change course from fantasy once it takes root because he lives there.
I had always wondered to what extent Murdoch personally made editorial decisions.
3: Sensible people struggle to grasp this. Trump was publicly preparing this story line for months. Reasonable people assume that he was just being a shameless con man preying on morons, but no. He's a moron himself.
Rove -- genuinely a smart guy -- nonetheless understands the weakness inherent in disciplined efforts to discern reality. He knows that the real triumph -- the challenge that Trump has met and that Wolff admires -- is to create reality.
Trumpism literally kills its adherents, and they imperil their lives willingly. They aren't fucking around when they holler about "Freedom!" and they correctly understand that the biggest constraint on their freedom an insistence on acknowledging reality.
That's the thing that ties Trumpism together -- not exactly racism or authoritarianism, but the freedom to believe whatever the fuck they want to believe, regardless of truth or decency. To be sure, that's only possible in an authoritarian environment, and only possible for a subset of citizens. And certainly a key benefit of Trumpism is the ability to express shameless racism. But at root, Trumpism is about freedom.
Yeah, I think it's been evident for a while that in Trump the cynicism and the sincerity merge.
Also, while the linked article looks pretty plausible, much of it confirmed elsewhere, I thought Wolff had made himself known for not letting facts get in the way of a good story.
Also a bit puzzling how much the article harps on the concept "it was possible to take such ridiculous actions and stances in service of Trump's fantasies because they had so little chance of succeeding." At a certain point when enough people act in accordance with a fantasy, it's no longer playing along, it's the new regime, no matter what they personally think of it.
sincerity
We lack a vocabulary to discuss Trumpism. "Sincerity" doesn't quite describe it, but I can't think of a better word. Maybe the Germans have a word for genuine belief, as an act of will, in nonsense.
The evangelicals understand Trump instinctively. The word we used in Catholic school was "faith" -- and yeah, it is indeed sincere.
It's just narcissism. If I just assume someone made my FIL president all the behavior makes complete sense.
1: It's not clear to me whether the 10:30 pm Rove congratulatory phone call actually happened
'There was a Rashomon version of the president's call with Karl Rove that evening,' Wolff writes.
In this, it didn't take place at 10.30 p.m., but long after Fox's Arizona call at 11.20. Kushner reached out to Rove and said the president was coming apart about Fox, and could Rove call him and say there was still a long way to go. Rove made the call and told the president to hang in there. This wasn't congratulations. It was solace.
That's not how it happened. Once Trump had been told he had won, and then that he hadn't, there was no solace to be had. There was only blind rage.
This is unclear to me, but it sounds like Wolff has 2 sources that tell very different versions of the Rove phone call.
But at root, Trumpism is about freedom.
Dominance, that's my view. Closely intertwined with the right-wing cult of freedom, but I think Trumpism in particular is about the recognizing dominance as the highest human value. However, I'm too tired and bored to argue about it, so I'll just throw it out here for others to pick apart.
This is unclear to me, but it sounds like Wolff has 2 sources that tell very different versions of the Rove phone call.
I thought that was a "what if" version which was just invented as an illustration (though calling it a Rashomon version suggests otherwise)
Sounds like the "early congratulations call" is Trump or Giuliani or someone trying to validate Trump's assertion that the imprimatur of Rove who dislikes him means he must have won, whereas the "late solace call" is one of the Kushners communicating "we are so devoted we tried to get someone else to help comfort him, but we aren't the crazy ones."
Fibbers' forecasts are worthless, as we know, and we shouldn't shade them 20% down and expect something reasonable; same for fibbers' recollections.
I am very glad I and I'm losing whatever skill I might have had in associating anonymous stories to media with court factions.
12: During 2015-16, and thereafter, catechisms of homage to Trump usually rehearsed, or at least alluded to, his void, vainglorious boasting about winning and being a winner, which has always reminded me of the marketing of vicarious victory by pro and college sports teams to the many, many people who don't enjoy many victories of their own.
Among the ugliest displays has been the praise of Trump by professed Christians, who should have learned at some time that winning and being a winner and never shutting the hell up about it aren't in the club handbook.
It's amusing to me that for all the "WHO WILL TELL THE PRESIDENT" hand-wringing, the answer is "nobody has to" or "Let Murdoch do it".
Dominance is a good word, too, and also conveys the concept that I'm groping for. At root, we're talking about dominance over reality and decency -- absolute freedom for some is necessarily about dominance over the rest. (Authoritarianism is the word I used.)
As I say, our rationalist vocabulary fails us here.
The view is that they can't be "free" if they aren't dominant because considering the views of the lesser people is tyranny.
Dominance, that's my view. Closely intertwined with the right-wing cult of freedom, but I think Trumpism in particular is about the recognizing dominance as the highest human value.
Dominance rings truer to me than freedom. There are a million examples of ways they don't actually value freedom - most of them concerning people who aren't white Republican men invested in Trumpism.
These freedom rats won't suppress themselves.
Freedom's just another word for do what I want.
There are a million examples of ways they don't actually value freedom
But of course, there are many examples of their direct opposition to dominance, too. One could reasonably say that Trumpism is characterized by subservience. The vocabulary is a challenge ...
It's like Amway for eating shit. You have to eat a little shit from your higher up to get the downline to eat your shit.
25: Brooke Harrington has a good sequence of tweets operationalizing Goffman's "cooling out the Mark" that describes this phenomenon.
The Amway people put it differently but that's the gist. You give to them and they promise to pay you back by getting someone else to pay you. It's rational to go all in after you start because your payment depends on the success of the system.
"Trumpism literally kills its adherents, and they imperil their lives willingly."
Well, I've been afraid of changin'
'Cause I've built my life around you
Obviously, starting is not particularly rational.
28: I've been having that song in my head this whole time too.
25: My version of that is lots of people are perfectly willing to live in mud as long as they know somebody else has to live in shit.
I like to insult Amway while I'm at it.
28: Indeed, 2020 was a Trump Landslide.
Wolff should be taken with a grain of salt and both the excerpt from the book and the review are confusingly written on Rove's call so I don't really know what either is trying to say. In all the accounts I have seen it was really Giuliani who really advocated the "Fuck 'em, say you won" strategy. Trump and his true believers had been laying the groundwork for that approach anyway, but I think the Arizona think threw them a bit.
As I think I talked about at the time, I believe the Arizona call really was premature; and even though it turned out to be correct it was probably too early to call by usual standards. In particular Arizona was in some sense the reverse of the other states with late mail-in Counting as Trump cut into the lead from a couple of hundred K to ~10K (AZ had counted mail-ins a they came in which trended Dem, but the very late ones trended R). And the AZ call led to the spectacle of no new organizations willing to call other states like PA when it was much more obvious that Biden had them (and most ludicrously Nevada where they waited until it was almost mathematically impossible forTrump to win).
The really worrisome thing for me during the post-election was when Trump skipped New tear's Eve at Mar-a-Lago to come up to DC. With good cause it sadly turned out.
Oh, And I am pretty sure Fox did subsequently get rid of their behind-the-scenes election team (or at least the main guy). They went through various gyrations post-election and although Murdoch might hate Trump I am sure he will be just fine with a State Leg/Congress/Supreme Court soft coup in 2024.
28: I've been having that song in my head this whole time too.
Me three.
I don't know much about Norman Vincent Peale and his cult of positive thinking. I do know that if there's any Christian influence on Trump, it came from there. What I do know for sure, is that if you want to understand Trump, you need to watch _Glengarry Glenross_. He's a consummate salesman, and from watching his recent rally where he tried to introduce the line about vaccines, he hasn't lost much of a step. Really hasn't.
To a real salesman, there is no reality: there is only the patter of the sales pitch, the expected objections, and the "objection blockers" [that's an actual term in the biz] deployed to block those objections. As they say, "a true salesman doesn't learn too much about the product; it gets in the way of being sincere with the customer" and "hey buddy, sell what's on the truck".
We do ourselves a disservice when we ascribe any sense of reality-adjacency or desire for reality-adjacency, to Trump's "beliefs". As Harry Frankfurt said in _On Bullshit_, "in the end, sincerity is bullshit".
He is, has been, and always will be, a gaslighter. It's all he knows. It's all he's ever known.
P.S. A gaslighter is not going to surround himself with people who will tell him the truth. What grifter would surround himself with truth-tellers? the question answers itself.
I've never seen Glengarry Glenross. I find myself extremely stressed when I listen to clips from it.
38: I don't disagree with most of your points but I think we should distinguish "gaslighting" from "lying like a rug". Gaslighting is a targeted manipulation tactic, different from spreading the Big Lie in the knowledge others will follow suit.
41: But I still think the vocabulary is hard on describing the pattern. Trump just uses words "operationally", sometimes it is easy to classify as a "lie," other times it just whatever he thinks will work without any knowledge or regard for what the truth was. The media never figured out how to talk about it*. I do recall Maggie Haberman semi-chastising reporters for saying Trump had lied after he claimed a NY state judge who was on some case was a "democrat judge" or beholden to Cuomo or something like that. The judge had in fact been appointed by someone else (maybe Pataki). Haberman's semi-correct point was that Trump had no idea who had appointed the judge so he had not lied (but it was of course pure BS per 38)**.
*However, sometimes it was a clear lie, for instance after Helsinki when he claimed he was supposed to say he did not know why Putin "wouldn't" do it but slipped up and said "would" instead. I recall a lot of body language and eye rolls from TV commentators on that one, but in the print media I did not see where any prominent outlet labelled it as a "lie." My contention is that an outlet would have been justified to headline a straight news article with "President Trump Floats Absurd Lie About What He Meant to Say in Helsinki." Everyone knew it, and that is how you would treat your 9-year old when they did it. And the content of the article should then have included a quick analysis of how his alternate wording did not logically match any of the other things he said.
**Haberman I think did have good insight into his style, which I think made some of her reporting (and others at the Times) when they led Trump to make "newsworthy" controversial quotes. For instance it was Haberman (with asshole Glenn Thrush) who prompted*** him into saying that he thought Susan Rice "committed a crime." He was blabbering on about her in his rambling style and they prompted with the question of "did she commit a crime?" And then ran with it (Glenn Thrush pushed it hardest, Maggie's smarter). The headline was subsequently modified to add "without evidence" after an outcry, but the whole thing was sleazy. Just another black woman in government smeared, who cares...
**To their credit the Times does often publish the transcripts of their interviews. A similar thing happened when Michael Schmidt led Trump into saying that Mueller going after financial record would cross a line. Once again Schmidt provided the pithy quote and got Trump to agree to it.
"President Trump Floats Absurd Lie About What He Meant to Say in Helsinki."
The NYT will, every now and then, call something a lie. What they won't do is use words like "absurd" or "nonsensical" or "ridiculous" or "peculiar" to accurately describe Trump's words and behavior. As you say, "without evidence" is a favorite -- as though there might be some evidence out there; Trump just didn't provide it, and it's not the job of the humble journalist to seek out a factual basis for something Trump says.
Any serious-minded objective journalism would describe the "stolen election" as nonsense. Every time it comes up.
Minivet: > Gaslighting is a targeted manipulation tactic, different from spreading the Big Lie in the knowledge others will follow suit.
Actually, I think The Big Lie is a great example of gaslighting. The goal of The Big Lie is not merely to convince you of some set of propositions. It is to convince you to support the Nazis. And if they can find true statements that help with that goal, then they'll use those. As Harry Frankfurt explained in _On Bullshit_, it isn't about some set of statements that they wish to convince you of. It's about using the process of convincing you of the truth of those statements (some possibly true, some false) to get you to believe or act on something entirely else.
So in Glengarry Glenross, the goal isn't about convincing you to believe certain things regarding swampland in Florida: it's to get you to sign on the dotted line and hand over the money.
In our most recent example of The Big Lie (2020 election), the goal wasn't merely to convince you that TFG had been robbed; it was to convince you that he'd been robbed, and you needed to act to restore him to power. The latter part was always the actual goal, and so we see the systematic ratcheting-upward of claims of illegitimacy of Biden's admin, the Dems, all progressives, etc. B/c at every step, they're preparing their base, preparing their troops, for *violence* to reinstate TFG.
That's the polite definition at least.
After the last couple weeks of events are there still people who think Biden is actually faking being President with the help of a complicit media? Do they think we didn't actually withdraw or do they think we did and Trump actually gave the order?
They think JFK jr is soft on Islamic extremism.
are there still people who think Biden is actually faking being President
In some sense, the answer is clearly yes, at least for some people. But to get there, you have to address the underlying question: What methods of belief are people using to arrive at this conclusion?
As the wise person said above: It's about dominance.
'The question is,' said Humpty Dumpty, 'which is to be master -- that's all'
At least 'til the fall of the wall in Pall Mall.
I mentioned in another thread recently the use of a Bible quote in an online tribute to Herman Cain on his website after his death from Covid. Courtesy of the Wayback Machine, here it is:
Romans 2:6-7 says: "God 'will repay each person according to what they have done.' "
This neatly distilled my own thoughts on Cain's passing, and I think speaks poetically to the underlying truths of Trumpism.
47. I read it as The Fat Git, but same difference.
If memory serves, Harry Potter was puzzled by folks' reluctance to name Voldemort. Rowling was thus lampooning a standard trope in fantasy literature.
But I get it now. I find myself not wanting to use the name of That Fucking Guy.
"He Who Must Not Be President Except It's Too Late So I guess We Should Say "'He Who Must Not Be President Again'" doesn't really roll off the tongue.
"The goal of The Big Lie is not merely to convince you of some set of propositions. It is to convince you to support the Nazis"
This is basic info ops. The object of an info op is to achieve an effect; to make someone else do something they wouldn't otherwise do. The nature of their own internal beliefs isn't really the point.
They made me spend weekends working for Biden.
OT: It's really a lot of rain here.