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The thing I love most about this article is this one throw-away little line right here:
It just illustrates who Trump is so well. First, he hears a term that he doesn't understand, like: "election interference". Like what he did when he incited his cult of morons to attack the capitol during January 6th to prevent Congress from certifying the election. Then, he takes that term that he doesn't understand and uses it improperly to insinuate that that's what's being done to him. This is either because he's too dumb to know what it means and too stubborn to look it up, or because he believes that about his cultists.
This is the exact same playbook he used for "puppet" during his debates with Hillary, "Fake news" when he was campaigning, "witch hunt" when he was being investigated for impeachable offenses, etc.
The man is a complete god damned moron, and yet somehow, he's managed to figure out that a significant number of Americans are even dumber than he is, and he has become their messiah. It's awe-inducing.
This is what fascists do. They co-opt the language of their political opponents, and divorce any meaning from the word.
The strategy is to deny their opponents the vocabulary they need to organize. This is part of the same strategy as burning books that teach black history and banning students from saying the word gay.
They never taught their slaves how to read either
What's the counter to this strategy of theirs, is there one?
To not focus on the semantics but the main point. It's obvious whoever is doing it is being childish and immature so the counter tactic is to be the adult in the room and to talk to them as if they were a child you were disciplining.
Alt-right playbook
That's not Trump not understanding what things mean, that's modern Republican messaging strategy. MTG literally just called a protest Tlaib led "an insurrection" last week. They water down words until they have no meaning anymore, and explicitly accuse the other side of what they're doing to feed the "both sides" narrative, and take weight off genuine accusations from Democrats or the media. They've been doing it for a while. They've also done it with "weaponization of government" recently and a few other words and phrases I can't think of right now. This is why people talk about Republicans being hypocrites and "projecting". They do it very much on purpose.
He's watering down the terms. "Fake news" is a perfect example. He completely stole the term and directed attention away from all the literally fake news websites created to help his election.
Can't attribute that to Trump, news themselves watered down "fake news" when they started putting up fact checks that weren't very factfull
You don't have to be smart to be a conman. And being not the brightest bulb in any room, might actually help Trump doing what he does best (conning people): ethical or non gullible people are very quickly put off by him, leaving him surrounded by unethical people who have no qualms enabling him (as long as they believe that they stand to gain from it) + gullible people that can be milked for all their worth. This is why it was such a smart move for Trump to leave the democratic party and become a republican: the republican party loves gullible voters + unethical fellow travellers. Basically the same reasoning as to why spam phishing mail is so obvious usually: scammers don't want to waste their time on non gullible people.
This is why Jerry Falwell approached Ronald Reagan: they both loved money, power, and authority that those provide. Falwell provided Reagan with millions of followers who had been brainwashed from birth to blindly obey a male authority figure. Hence, the modern Republican Party: millions of "Christians" whose beliefs are diametrically opposed to the teachings of their God. Cognitive dissonance at it's finest.
He's a moron's idea of an intelligent man.
He's genius is in his ability to market himself. the fact that he is a moron just means he's often stumbling on stupid shit that will resonate with morons, and he has that keen sense to take advantage of it.
Trump's defense strategy: "No, YOU!"