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I don't want to get political here, but strictly speaking on communication, Donald Trump was one of the best political communicators in recent history for the i

I don't want to get political here, but strictly speaking on communication, Donald Trump was one of the best political communicators in recent history for the ideas he wanted to emphasize to a large audience. He kept his concepts very simple, he didn't use complex language that might confuse or alienate his audience, he used funny and memorable nicknames to keep your attention, he kept things visual with a lot of props and showmanship, and his key slogans like "build the wall" let people visualize any outcome they wanted. A bad communicator who tried to use nuance with the immigration stuff might have said something like "We're going to deploy a network of physical barriers in denser urban areas and utilize digital surveillance and personnel in more rural areas to reduce illegal immigration along the border." Technically more accurate, but that doesn't paint the same kind of mental picture that can easily be conveyed by "build the wall" in a speech or debate.

quacked 5y ago
I tend to ignore "official news" and got most of my Donald Trump speeches as highlights and clips filtered through my largely left-wing circle of friends and family. From what I saw, he was a complete buffoon. Then one day my fiancee's father was watching a long-form "debate" or something that included Trump. I was astonished at how personable and clear his communication style was, and understood why so many people were so taken by his campaign's ideas and rhetoric.
mcguire 5y ago
In other words, he didn't attempt nuance.
dane-pgp 5y ago
The fact that there was (and is) such a market for these over-simplified ideas, though, has implications beyond Trump himself. I can think of a few (not mutually exclusive) possibilities: * People have always wanted politics to be conveyed in this way, but previous politicians either didn't have the skills or the desire to pander to that style of messaging. * People's capacity for processing nuance has been saturated by all the complexity of modern life, or by our decreasing attention spans (which is perhaps caused by a culture of instant gratification and companies mass-producing engines which turn dopamine into ad revenue). * People still have capacity for nuance generally, but don't think it is worth investing that capacity on something like politics, either due to the feeling that current problems are too hard to solve, or that the system doesn't reflect their interests anyway. * Political polarization and the game theory of plurality voting means that politics has devolved into two tribes that see everything as a zero-sum game, so applying nuance is seen as a dangerous weakness. Personally I can't help thinking that the thesis of Future Shock[0] seems to match the reality around us quite well. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Shock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Shock
wly_cdgr 5y ago
No yeah, I agree. I was just joking around since DT is a master of large scale nuance-free communication

quacked 5y ago

I tend to ignore "official news" and got most of my Donald Trump speeches as highlights and clips filtered through my largely left-wing circle of friends and family. From what I saw, he was a complete buffoon. Then one day my fiancee's father was watching a long-form "debate" or something that included Trump. I was astonished at how personable and clear his communication style was, and understood why so many people were so taken by his campaign's ideas and rhetoric.

mcguire 5y ago

In other words, he didn't attempt nuance.

dane-pgp 5y ago

The fact that there was (and is) such a market for these over-simplified ideas, though, has implications beyond Trump himself. I can think of a few (not mutually exclusive) possibilities: * People have always wanted politics to be conveyed in this way, but previous politicians either didn't have the skills or the desire to pander to that style of messaging. * People's capacity for processing nuance has been saturated by all the complexity of modern life, or by our decreasing attention spans (which is perhaps caused by a culture of instant gratification and companies mass-producing engines which turn dopamine into ad revenue). * People still have capacity for nuance generally, but don't think it is worth investing that capacity on something like politics, either due to the feeling that current problems are too hard to solve, or that the system doesn't reflect their interests anyway. * Political polarization and the game theory of plurality voting means that politics has devolved into two tribes that see everything as a zero-sum game, so applying nuance is seen as a dangerous weakness. Personally I can't help thinking that the thesis of Future Shock[0] seems to match the reality around us quite well. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Shock https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Future_Shock

wly_cdgr 5y ago

No yeah, I agree. I was just joking around since DT is a master of large scale nuance-free communication