George W. Bush was notorious for remarks like “is our children learning?” and “put food on your family”. The difference is that people laughed at them and called them “Bushisms” instead of massaging them into serious statements that demanded serious discussion.
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The modern GOP: get politics out of our elections, and into your doctor’s office
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I think there was still a lot of doubt in most media, but the phenomenon of “helpful interpretations” and both-siderism goes back decades.
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Yeah I wouldn’t call his ability to echo back people’s discontents and grievances back to them “emotional intelligence.”
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Though at the time, I felt like the attention being paid to his malapropisms, and his delivery in general, served to distract from any sort of analysis of just how stupid the content of his speech was as well. (People who didn’t like him would focus on that, people who liked him could easily dismiss it, and frequently no substantive criticism of his horrible policies and ideas took place.) With Trump, it’s all been pushed to new levels, with completely destructive interpretation - the “translated” text replaces the original entirely.
Especially since he often says things that don’t resonate (or actually would alienate his supporters) - except that they’ve always been really good at ignoring the bits of his speech that don’t align with what they want to hear. He’s really benefited from his incoherency.
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We all saw his method during the first campaign. He says anything that pops into his mind. If it doesn’t get a great reaction, like “once you’re on the wall there’s no way down”, he leaves it. If it does, like “Mexico will pay for it”, he adds it to his repertoire. That’s his whole genius for manipulating people – he repeats the things that get cheered.
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Yep, and “Clever Hans” the horse was picking up on far subtler clues…
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He has trouble maintaining an election.
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Electile dysfunction.
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Somebody once said that his speeches are an example of natural stupidity emulating artificial intelligence. If he says something that gets applause, he amplifies it and says more next time. If he says something that offends his audience, he de-emphasized it and within a week he denies saying it at all, despite being caught on camera.
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Yeah, he engages in the dumbest form of reinforcement learning.
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I think this is the equivalent of “If you owe the bank $100, that’s your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that’s the bank’s problem.”
Bush said a few stupid things, messed up common phrases, but was generally coherent. So it was his problem and basically everybody made fun of it.
Everything Trump says is stupid, and it takes work to figure out what the fuck he is on about. So it became the media’s problem, since how do you report on a candidate/President’s policy and statements if everything they say is just word salad with a dusting of hateful croutons ?
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