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Trump Lovers Gullible, Easily Conned, They Believe All Trump Lies - Even The Most Transparent Ones

Cross-posted to 5 groups.

Followups directed to: alt.atheism, talk.politics.misc, alt.fan.rush-limbaugh

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It’s hard to understand Trump supporters’ willingness to excuse his 
blatant falsehoods

There’s a part of human nature that, rather than wanting to know what’s 
accurate and true, wants to believe certain things, whether true or not.
By Eric Black | columnist	
President Donald Trump	President Donald Trump delivering his State of the 
Union address to a joint session of the U.S. Congress on Tuesday.
REUTERS/Leah Millis
Feb. 6, 2020	

Here’s a shocker: President Trump’s State of the Union message was riddled 
with falsehoods and exaggerations – obvious deceptions of the sort that 
clearly warn a careful listener of this obvious truth: You are listening 
to a liar. Sometimes he lies cleverly, by taking things out of context or 
using phony comparisons. Sometimes he only exaggerates, which is a common 
flaw of politicians, but he does it more often, more blatantly and more 
shamelessly than most. But fairly often he just flat lies. Says things 
that are provably untrue and that anyone paying attention knows are 
untrue. But he somehow, sorta, gets away with it.

With the help of FactCheck.org, I’ll pass along below a link that will get 
you chapter and verse to on some of the untruths from the SOTU message. 
But allow me to get both philosophical and nostalgic for a moment first.

I’ve been a professional journalist since 1973. You can do the math. (OK, 
I’ll do it. In August, I’ll celebrate my 47th anniversary of scribbling 
for a living.) MinnPost refers to me as a columnist, but for most of those 
years I was a “reporter.”

Back in the ’70s and ’80s, the heyday of journalism’s “objectivity” model, 
that “O” word carried a fair bit of heft. It meant reporters reported 
facts and didn’t express their own opinions. Opinionizing was reserved for 
a relative few columnists and editorial writers.

Article continues after advertisement

The model, designed to prevent journalistic bias, was flawed. If reporters 
were biased, the bias could and very likely did influence which facts 
reporters reported, and which they didn’t, or in what order the facts were 
presented and how the facts were framed and described. All serious flaws.

But as a veteran of several newsrooms where that model was enforced, I can 
also tell you that the power of the objectivity paradigm ensured the 
pretty much every statement asserted was based on a verifiable fact, and 
that when an issue that was part of some larger public debate was 
discussed, representatives of differing sides would be quoted, accurately 
and honestly, so that readers could decide for themselves which side they 
found more trustworthy or persuasive.

That was the old religion, and it’s mostly gone. Even newspapers are 
mostly gone. Most “information” is now carried on the internet and social 
media platforms. TV news is divided substantially between righty and lefty 
shows. There are winners and losers in the new information economy, but 
one of the biggest losers has been the old religion about the importance 
of basic factual accuracy and what used to be called “balance.”

I’m sentimental for the old system, even while acknowledging its 
shortcomings. I’m horrified by what has replaced it, which has quintupled 
the old demons called “selective perception” and “confirmation bias.”

There’s a part of human nature that, rather than wanting to know what’s 
accurate and true, wants to believe certain things, whether true or not.

I’m not one who thinks Donald Trump is a genius, but if he is a genius, 
his genius is rooted in his understanding of that above-referenced feature 
(or bug) of human nature.

It’s not that he’s clever about it. He’s blatant. He lies all the time. In 
the age of fact-checkers, his lies are easily and quickly identified and 
publicized. But this easy access to a catalog of his lies has no apparent 
influence on the bond between him and the roughly 40 percent of the 
electorate that supports him or at least “approves” of him, as measured by 
approval polls.

I assume, and more than assume, that some portion of his 40 percent knows 
that he lies a lot and wishes he would lie less, but doesn’t disapprove of 
that aspect of his leadership as much they approve of some of his 
policies. I don’t know, and probably can’t know, how many of his 
supporters view it that way. I try to respect their beliefs, which differ 
from mine, on many of these policy issues.

Article continues after advertisement

But – maybe it’s because I’m an old reporter indoctrinated in the 
importance of factual accuracy – it’s hard for me to understand a 
willingness to excuse such lying. Still, they are free to make that 
choice.

I worry more about those, presumably most of his supporters, who cannot 
bring themselves to acknowledge the lying. It’s frightening. It’s cultish. 
It’s 1984-ish.

And I assume that many or most members of that cult don’t read what I 
write. But if you do, and if you doubt the level of Trump’s mendacity as 
I’ve described it above, I offer two links, as promised at the top of this 
screed, from factcheck.org and the Washington Post’s “Fact-checker” 
operation, shedding a bit of truth onto some of Trump’s falsehoods from 
his lie-filled State of the Union address.

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Trump Lovers Gullible, Easily Conned, They Believe All Trump Lies - Even The Most Transparent Ones RichA <rander3127@gmail.com> - 2020-08-17 12:48 +0000

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