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Trump had several things going for him: 1. He is independently wealthy, and has no public office experience whatsoever. Thus, the normal pressures that cause
by tmuir 10y ago
Trump had several things going for him:
1. He is independently wealthy, and has no public office experience whatsoever. Thus, the normal pressures that cause every other candidate to end their campaign when sufficient controversy arises had no effect on Trump. He had no political career or general reputation to ruin, and he has fuck you money.
2. Unlike Trump, countless other presidential candidates have ended their campaigns in controversy. Thus, there was a mountain of precedence to inform the media that the each week's controversy would be the one that ended his campaign. The result was that every media organization that reported on these events racked up a 13 month streak of being wrong. Its trivial to point this out as a witch hunt after enough time, and at the same time, conflate them with fake news.
3. No matter where you come down on his tactics, its fairly noncontroversial to say that Trump is a master of negotiation. As evidenced by his continually evolving policy prescriptions, he is adept at reading his audience (supporters and detractors), and putting forward messaging that both pleases his supporters, and displeases his detractors. This has multiple positive feedback effects because the pleased take pleasure in witnessing the displeasure of the displeased. The continued pleasure of the pleased is a source of continued displeasure for the displeased as well.
4. Trump makes a lot of obvious generalizations about the world at large: The media sensationalizes, terrorism is problematic, illegal immigration creates a glut of low wage workers, America was a great nation in the past, lobbyists have largely captured congress, the middle class is shrinking, etc. It's trivially simple to control for the variable of Trump, and observe that these phenomena all persist, and have for years. However, there is a psychological element to the consistency of being "right". If you are directly affected by a shrinking middle class, and have to compete with the glut of low wage workers, and see terrorism as a spontaneous event driven completely by religion, and see our government as a corrupt body that breaks everything it touches, you are highly predisposed to attribute unique wisdom to someone who is merely pointing out conventional wisdom. If you already view someone as an expert on subjects of interest to you, you are additionally predisposed to believe in their abilities to fix all of these ailments, without qualification, previous experience, or even the agreement of a single true expert in relevant fields.
- makomk 10y agoRegarding 2, the other advantage Trump had was that some of the big claims about him were plain and simply untrue. For example, the Slate story about his supposed secret communications channel with Russia - it was an outsourced bulk email provider for his hotels, every single piece of evidence was exactly what you'd expect from such a server, and a number of major news outlets had declined to run the story for that reason. But it just took one publication willing to ignore the issues and run it for the story to spread like wildfire on social media, just like fake news, even being repeated by Hillary Clinton's Twitter account which received a huge number of retweets for it. One of her staff members even attacked the FBI for not investigating it, and once the NYT revealed they had investigated and concluded it was a junk email server, her supporters took this as proof the FBI were conspiring with Trump. The comments section on any vaguely related article were filled with people insisting on this right up until the election. Think about that - we had a situation where people believed the FBI was conspiring with Russia and a presidential candidate because the FBI refused to see junk emails as proof of secret communications between the two. We're seeing something similar with the latest Trump story, which is also based on a document that's been doing the rounds in media circles for months but was too dubious to report[1], and is being widely and uncritically spread on social media by people who often openly don't care whether what they're claiming is true or not. [1] https://www.buzzfeed.com/kenbensinger/these-reports-allege-trump-has-deep-ties-to-russia https://www.buzzfeed.com/kenbensinger/these-reports-allege-t...
- seanmcdirmid 10y agoAs for 2, Trump grabbed controversy by the balls (erm, pussy) and kept on going (note: I'm just using presidential speech now). Most candidates drop out when those kind of scandals hit, trump just shrugged it off and pretended it didn't exist. We must see Obama's birth certificate but I can't show you my tax return. Sigh. As for 3, trump doesn't so much negotiate as he does scream at the top of his lungs until the opposition tires and leaves. As for 4, damn, I hope his naiveness is an intentional ploy or we are in trouble. Trump is the most unlikeable candidate we've had in my lifetime. Everyone else was just boringly nice in comparison.