I saw an article on Vox a couple weeks ago while I was traveling out of the country, and it really gave me a new perspective on Trump’s communication style and the bewilderment many people feel when they try to pin him down on his lies and mis-statements. I strongly urge everyone to read it in full. www.vox.com/...
The authors of the article say that any attempts to get Trump to own up to his statements and remain consistent in his beliefs are futile – they call it a category error. Trump does not have any firm beliefs and only says what he needs to say in order to acquire and maintain dominance – to win the moment.
I used to work with a guy who was like this. We called him Mr. Five Minutes. Anything that happened five minutes ago was forgotten and anything that would happen after the next five minutes was irrelevant – he existed in a moving five minute window and did or said whatever he needed to get himself through those five minutes.
The authors say it much better:
In every human social interaction, there are two kinds of communication going on. There are the words themselves, with their shared meanings. And there are the countless signals and cues being exchanged — tone, expression, body language, and bearing — about social dynamics and hierarchy.
Every interaction is both an exchange of semantic information and a dance of social positioning, even those, as in science or academia, that strive to be purely the former.
To all appearances, Trump is engaged solely in the latter form of communication, and only in a narrow way: He treats all social interactions as zero-sum games establishing dominance and submission.
Normal people speak in order to communicate something — to speak their beliefs, to agree or disagree, to scold their children, but Trump has no core beliefs – his social interactions are solely performed to dominate and win the moment. That’s why he can say he never directed people to view a sex tape, even though the evidence is easily obtained that he did indeed, issue such a statement. Or he can claim that he never supported the Iraq war in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary.
When Trump is confronted with evidence of his lies, he doesn’t try to reconcile the two statements; he either doubles down or he comes up with another outrageous statement. Media can’t keep up, and in a situation like a debate where Trump is given space to speak for at least 45 minutes, the number of lies and mis-characterizations are so numerous that the media just gives up and tries to draw false equivalences.
He can only process accusations — of dishonesty, of cruelty — as social gambits, not as factual claims. To him, the demand that he apologize or admit error is nothing more than a dominance play. Apologizing is losing.
The authors break out communications into two groups – semantic communication – the actual words – and the non-verbal signals. Good liars have enough control they can align their words with their body language, but at the end of the day, they are aware they are lying. Bad liars of course will give away the lie through their non-verbal signals – an eye tic, inability to make eye contact, involuntary movements. But Trump is in another category altogether. He doesn’t use words to express his beliefs, but instead to manage the moment and establish his superiority.
But Trump simply doesn’t view what he’s engaged in as an exercise in articulating and defending beliefs about factual states of affairs. He is as blind to that function of communication as human eyes are to infrared light.
What he’s doing is trying to establish dominance — to win, in his words. That’s what he uses words for. That’s how he sees every interaction in which he is involved. He is attuned only to what the words are doing, whether they are winning or losing, not to what they mean.
I think this is why the media and Trump’s opponents have been so flummoxed. They are using tools and techniques that apply to normal human conversations, but what Trump is doing is altogether different and standard tools and techniques will not work.
The article talks about how this perspective explains how Trump can do so well in front of audiences. He finds the right word strings to get approval, and once he finds what his audience wants, he escalates to continue that approval. It doesn’t matter what he or his audience says, like “Lock her up”. All that matters is the cheering of the crowd.
I think what the Clinton campaign has been doing is brilliant. Whether or not they are aware of Trump’s communication methods, they are attacking vulnerabilities that have nothing to do with the lies and mis-statements. Instead, they are going after Trump’s thin skin, saying he is unfit, a bad businessman, a loser. That loser tag is the one that will hurt him the most – someone who uses communication and demeanor to build up his image as a winner. The loser tag is unacceptable to Trump, and that’s where he’s most vulnerable.
To him, they [speeches, etc.] are displays, projections, word strings useful for establishing dominance and tribal solidarity in particular contexts. They are utterly immaterial to what he might actually do in office, when dominance might require different word strings.
And that is the scariest thing about him. Leaders who lie at least have real beliefs that can be uncovered and used to predict their behavior. People who simply do not have beliefs as such are impossible to predict and easy to manipulate.
Again, I urge everyone to read the whole article. It was written almost two weeks ago, and a lot has happened since. But since I first read the article, I have been able to process Trump’s behavior and understand the very real danger he poses to the United States.
