A Never-Trumper | One

A Never-Trumper

[By Chuck Almdale | September 20, 2020]

Definition: Never-Trumper – One who immediately recognized that Trump was dangerous, incompetent and unfit for high office.

Part one of a series on Trump

I was a never-Trumper before the phrase was born. All it took was his June 16, 2015 announcement that he was running for president. As I heard the statement below, I felt an icy fist in my chest. “Uh oh. We’ve got a guy here who understands propaganda and is not afraid to use it.” Trump’s statement was to be repeated perhaps a million times by TV, radio, papers, magazines, and all over the web, amounting to billions of dollars worth of propaganda distribution, absolutely free. (Time.com)

I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I’ll build them very inexpensively, I will build a great, great wall on our southern border. And I will have Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words.

Let me back up a bit.

Before that moment, I knew little and cared less about Donald Trump: he owned a gambling casino in Atlantic City, maybe a hotel or two, suffered some bankruptcies, cheated on his blond wife and had a messy divorce. He then became part of the “birther” scam against Barack Obama and after Obama’s 2012 presidential reelection, Trump was perhaps the only “birther” still standing. Every so often he’d put out some absurd statement about Obama’s birth certificate (ABC News Aug. 2013):

Well I don’t know. Was it a birth certificate? You tell me. Some people say that was not his birth certificate. Maybe it was, maybe it wasn’t. I’m saying I don’t know. Nobody knows. And you don’t know either, Jonathan. You’re a smart guy. You don’t know either.

So I also knew that about Trump: he liked baseless innuendo. It’s not much, but more than I wanted to know.

I did, however, know something about propaganda, what it sounds like, how it works.

During the 2004 campaign Presidential, I’d become thoroughly disgusted with the unending lies from the G.W. Bush campaign and their supporters. Two items were particularly high on the list: the “Swift Boating” of John Kerry, and the phony “Nigerian Yellowcake” plot and Weapons of Mass Destruction campaign against Iraq, which led to the outing of Valerie Plame as a CIA agent, and the outing and possible deaths of some in her network of operatives. I like to read, so one thing led to another, and I came across some fundamentals of propaganda which, once you know them, help you recognize propaganda almost instantly. [We’ll go into this more deeply in a later installment.]

(Yahoo.com – Matt York-AP)

Here’s that paragraph from Trump again, and a few earmarks of his style of propaganda:

“I would build a great wall, and nobody builds walls better than me, believe me, and I’ll build them very inexpensively, I will build a great, great wall on our southern border. And I will have Mexico pay for that wall. Mark my words.”

• Repetition: I, me, my – 7 times, Wall – 4 times, Great – 3 times, build – 3 times.
  There’s only 44 words in these 4 sentences, and 17 of them (39%) of them are repetitions. That sticks out like a sore thumb.
• Provoke: It attracts your attention and provokes feelings of anger and revenge.
• Pander: It’s directed towards the angry, resentful “masses,” saying in effect, “We’ll get them.” It contains no intellectual content, no reasonable argument, no facts.
• Blame, dehumanize: Mexico and Mexicans are to blame and we’ll make them pay for it. The entire speech is filled with blame and dehumanization of not just his targets, but of everyone who doesn’t agree with Trump and share his anger at these targets.
• Crisis: We’ve got to do this NOW, before we’re swamped by “them.” It’s black and white, no gray areas.

That’s a lot of powerful propaganda packed into a 44-word statement. The rest of the speech was more, much more, of the same. Here’s a few more winners:

When was the last time anybody saw us beating, let’s say, China in a trade deal? They kill us. I beat China all the time. All the time.

When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.

We have a disaster called the big lie: Obamacare. Obamacare. Yesterday, it came out that costs are going for people up 29, 39, 49, and even 55 percent, and deductibles are through the roof. You have to be hit by a tractor, literally, a tractor, to use it, because the deductibles are so high, it’s virtually useless. It’s virtually useless. It is a disaster.

We have to repeal Obamacare, and it can be— and— and it can be replaced with something much better for everybody. Let it be for everybody. But much better and much less expensive for people and for the government. And we can do it.

And remember the $5 billion website? $5 billion we spent on a website, and to this day it doesn’t work. A $5 billion website. I have so many websites, I have them all over the place. I hire people, they do a website. It costs me $3. $5 billion website.

I will be the greatest jobs president that God ever created. I tell you that. I’ll bring back our jobs from China, from Mexico, from Japan, from so many places. I’ll bring back our jobs, and I’ll bring back our money.

That was all I needed to know that Trump was going to be a major problem for America if he become elected. I hoped, but was not hopeful, that the Republicans of America, who are by-and-large decent, normal people, many of them devoutly Christian, would see right through this man and recognize him for what he was: a terrific liar and a thoroughly amoral man in search of great power. The Biblical “Father of Lies.” We’d wind up with a Democratic president, perhaps Hillary, perhaps Bernie.

I could not have been more wrong. I underestimated the power of Trump’s propaganda and his willingness to tell any lie, to do anything, to get elected and hold power.

Fast forward eighteen months. The election is over, Trump lost the popular election by over three million votes, yet won through that perennial systemic glitch known as the Electoral College. It’s January 20, 2017, Presidential Inauguration Day. I didn’t watch it on TV or listen to the radio. Trump is now the most powerful man on the planet.

The next day Trump gave a speech to the CIA which included this statement about his inauguration crowd:

…it looked like a million and a half people. Whatever it was, it was. But it went all the way back to the Washington Monument. And I turn on — and by mistake I get this network, and it showed an empty field. And it said we drew 250,000 people. Now, that’s not bad, but it’s a lie. We had 250,000 people literally around — you know, in the little bowl that we constructed. That was 250,000 people. The rest of the 20-block area, all the way back to the Washington Monument, was packed. So we caught them, and we caught them in a beauty. And I think they’re going to pay a big price.

That statement contains a half-dozen lies. Sean Spicer and Kellyanne Conway buttressed these lies over the next few days. (FactCheck.org)

Spicer: “This was the largest audience to ever witness an inauguration — period — both in person and around the globe.”

Conway: “What – You’re saying it’s a falsehood. And they’re giving Sean Spicer, our press secretary, gave alternative facts to that.”

Here’s two side-by-side photos from Reuter’s, widely distributed on the web. Check the crowds for yourself.

Two inaugurations. Left: Trump’s Jan. 20, 2017. Right: Obama’s Jan. 20, 2009.
Equivalent time of day & distance.(Source: Reuters/Lucas Jackson (L), Stelios Varias/File Photo)

 I – along with at least half of the American population – was mystified that Trump would not only concoct such a stupid, silly, pointless, easily disproven lie, but he would then repeat it and defend it, and then he’d get his press people to double down on it, to spin his lies, and then add additional lies of their own. Even four years after the fact, I can only shake my head in amazement.

Little did I know that this was just the start of the tens of thousands of lies, fabrications and misstatements he would make during his administration. Here’s a few sites on this:

• Washington Post Fact-Checker 7/9/20: 20,055 “false or misleading claims” in 1267 days in office
• Forbes 5/5/20: Trump Is Lying More Than Ever: Just Look At The Data. 23.3 lies per day in 2020.
• The Lies of Donald Trump: A Taxonomy. James P. Pfiffner, George Mason University. 9/17/18. Four types of Trump’s lies: 1) trivial lies, 2) exaggerations and self aggrandizing lies; 3) lies to deceive the public; and 4) egregious lies. His lies [have]…corroded the premises of liberal democracy.

I had to draw the conclusion that Trump was not merely a whiz when it came to propaganda, lacking all qualms about lying and dehumanizing and pandering and all the rest, but that he was in some manner unclear to me a psychologically deeply disturbed person.

In the official psychobabblistic terminology of the psychological profession, he was “one sick puppy.”

No sane person behaves like this.

Next installment: Into the inner darkness: Dementia | Two