de

del

Eduardo del Buey
Photo: Reuters
La Jornada Maya

Tuesday, July 30, 2019

There is often a tendency to dismiss Donald Trump as a stupid person for his egregious and seemingly random statements and volatile personality.

It is a mistake, however, to conflate stupidity with malice and ignorance.

Donald Trump is not stupid.

He is malicious and ignorant.

And malice and ignorance bring their own cleverness when they are able to seduce a broad swathe of voters.

A few days ago Trump came out with a tweet in which he eviscerated four Democrat Representatives in Congress. All four are African-Americans, and all four are citizens of the United States – three of them born in the U.S., and the fourth a naturalized U.S. citizen.

Many pundits were aghast that he would not interrupt his audience when they yelled “send her back” at his one of his rallies based on the contents of his recent tweets.

Were these tweets a political mistake?

I believe not.

They were a brilliant and deliberate kick off to Trump’s 2020 electoral campaign.

With one tweet, he accomplished a number of objectives.

Firstly, he branded the Democratic Party as a party of the extreme left, leaving the center forced to either remain silent to avoid being tarried as radicals, or to defend these four representatives, and, thus, identify with them in the public eye. No matter what, Donald Trump appears to have now successfully branded the Democrats as the party of the radial left. Democrats will now have to waste valuable time and resources downplaying this perception at the expense of bringing their own policies and plans to the forefront of public debate during the upcoming campaign.

The spectacle of Democrat candidates at the first debates raising their hands in support to such divisive issues as free medical insurance for undocumented migrants and the forgiveness of student loans at taxpayer expense only serves to reinforce this accusation that the Democrats are divorced from the realistic needs or expectations of the majority of U.S. voters who are not interested in higher taxes or in subsidizing others. This could well set up the electoral campaign to be an “us” that espouses mainstream beliefs and values and a “them” who advocate radical departures from mainstream American political thinking.

Secondly, he deflected media interest from his alleged association with arrested pedophile Jeffrey Epstein by creating once again a narrative that he controls in order to remove the spotlight from this latest potential scandal. Diversion is his specialty and, once again, he successfully changed the conversation and controlled its flow.

Thirdly, in other instances, he also often purposely conflates loyalty to the United States as a country of institutions with loyalty to the President as a person. By creating a perception of “l’etat, c’est moi” (I am the state), Trump reinforces his vision of an imperial presidency and a society of “us and them” – the “us” who support Trump and therefore the United States, and the “them” who oppose Trump and, by implication, traditional American values. And Trump being the unquestionable and unaccountable leader.

Once again, the politics of division came into play and, like any effective populist Trump played this strategy to the hilt.

Once again, the mainstream media forgot about the twenty Democrat candidates and their vision for the future, and gave round the clock coverage to Trump and his antics. 24/7 coverage of Trump is always his objective, and Trump’s genius is to always achieve this goal whenever it suits his plans.

In 2015-16, mainstream media is calculated to have given Trump some $1.5 billion in free publicity by covering all of his antics at the expense of the Democrats. Once again, as the 2020 campaign begins, Trump is on his way to obtaining the same contribution or an even greater one as he brilliantly manipulates the media to do his bidding at the expense of his political opposition.

Is he brilliant? I believe that he is.

He makes ignorance appealing, and connects with a large un- or under-educated segment of the U.S. public who lack any sense of critical judgment. Those who are prone to believe in outlandish conspiracy theories or who hold suspect any expert whose level of knowledge or experience far outshines their own.

I always underscore to my students that it is important to speak the language of your target audience and to connect with them emotionally. I always cite U.S. poet Maya Angelou who once wrote that people will forget what you did, and what you said, but they will never forget how you made them feel.

And Donald Trump’s political brilliance is that he makes his audience feel.

He legitimizes their latent racism and basic hatred of the unknown or the different. Their fear of immigrants. Their fear of losing their cultural and linguistic identity. Their fear of losing their racial and cultural superiority.

He articulates their dreams and aspirations. A nostalgia for the U.S. of the past – white, Anglo-Saxon Protestant – in which everyone seemed to know their place, and these places were defined by the white majority.

As the U.S. rapidly approaches a time in its life cycle when whites will be a minority, the fear of this new reality is motivating many U.S. voters to seek solace in the past, and approve Trump’s rhetoric and policies designed to maintain their racial and cultural hegemony.

For these reasons, I continue to believe that Trump is a malevolent genius – malevolent because he is creating a basis for mass hatred and potential violence in an already violent and well-armed society. Violent because of the amount of latent and blatant hatred already present in the U.S. psyche, and armed because of the millions of weapons in the hands of many who hate.

Genius because he knows which psychological and rhetorical buttons to push to get his followers to unite behind his messages and react emotionally to them.

So next time someone dismisses Trump as stupid, remember that he will likely win again in 2020 due to the inability of Democrats to coalesce behind a credible leader with credible policies, and Trump’s own ability to capitalize on democrat weaknesses to his own advantage.

Malevolence is not stupid. It is inherently clever.

And Trump has been proving this since he initiated his first campaign.

Hence, the brilliance of Trump.

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