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Javier E

Donald Trump will win in a landslide. *The mind behind 'Dilbert' explains why. - The Wa... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...nd-behind-dilbert-explains-why

landslide demagogue campaign psychology TOK election 2016

shared by Javier E on 01 Jun 16 - No Cached
  • What the Bay Area-based cartoonist recognizes, he says, is the careful art behind Trump’s rhetorical techniques.
  • Adams believes Trump will win because he’s “a master persuader.”
  • His stated credentials in this arena, says Adams — who holds an MBA from UC Berkeley — largely involve being a certified hypnotist and, as a writer and business author, an eternal student in the techniques of persuasive rhetoric.
  • ...18 more annotations...
  • “The most important thing when you study hypnosis is that you learn that humans are irrational,
  • what Trump is doing? He is acknowledging the suffering of some, Adams says, and then appealing emotionally to that.
  • 2. Knowing that people are irrational, Trump aims to appeal on an emotional level.
  • Having nothing to lose essentially then increases his chance of winning, because it opens up his field of rhetorical play.
  • Within that context, here is what Candidate Trump is doing to win campaign hearts and minds
  • 1. Trump knows people are basically irrational.
  • he bolsters that approach, Adams says, by “exploiting the business model” like an entrepreneur. In this model, which “the news industry doesn’t have the ability to change … the media doesn’t really have the option of ignoring the most interesting story,” says Adams, contending that Trump “can always be the most interesting story if he has nothing to fear and nothing to lose.”
  • “The evidence is that Trump completely ignores reality and rational thinking in favor of emotional appeal,” Adams writes. “Sure, much of what Trump says makes sense to his supporters, but I assure you that is coincidence. Trump says whatever gets him the result he wants. He understands humans as 90-percent irrational and acts accordingly.”
  • 3. By running on emotion, facts don’t matter.
  • “There are plenty of important facts Trump does not know. But the reason he doesn’t know those facts is – in part – because he knows facts don’t matter. They never have and they never will. So he ignores them.
  • 4. If facts don’t matter, you can’t really be “wrong.”
  • “If you understand persuasion, Trump is pitch-perfect most of the time. He ignores unnecessary rational thought and objective data and incessantly hammers on what matters (emotions).”
  • “Did Trump’s involvement in the birther thing confuse you?” Adams goes on to ask. “Were you wondering how Trump could believe Obama was not a citizen? The answer is that Trump never believed anything about Obama’s place of birth. The facts were irrelevant, so he ignored them while finding a place in the hearts of conservatives.
  • 5. With fewer facts in play, it’s easier to bend reality.
  • Among the persuasive techniques that Trump uses to help bend reality, Adams says, are repetition of phrases; “thinking past the sale” so the initial part of his premise is stated as a given; and knowing the appeal of the simplest answer, which relates to the concept of Occam’s razor.
  • 6. To bend reality, Trump is a master of identity politics — and identity is the strongest persuader.
  • “The best Trump linguistic kill shots,” Adams writes,”have the following qualities: 1. Fresh word that is not generally used in politics; 2. Relates to the physicality of the subject (so you are always reminded).”
  • : “Identity is always the strongest level of persuasion. The only way to beat it is with dirty tricks or a stronger identity play. … [And] Trump is well on his way to owning the identities of American, Alpha Males, and Women Who Like Alpha Males. Clinton is well on her way to owning the identities of angry women, beta males, immigrants, and disenfranchised minorities.
anonymous

Opinion | Trump May Start a Social Network. Here's My Advice. - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-social-network.html

shared by anonymous on 28 Mar 21 - No Cached
  • Trump May Start a Social Network. Here’s My Advice.
  • Recast your past failures as successes, engage in meaningless optics, and other tips from the Silicon Valley playbook.
  • So Donald Trump wants to start a social network and become a tech mogul?
  • ...26 more annotations...
  • I am an expert in all things digital, and I’m willing to help.
  • Tech is hard stuff, and new ventures should be attempted with extreme care, especially by those whose history of entrepreneurship is littered with the carcasses of, say, Trump Steaks.
  • Or Trump Water. Or Trump University. Or Trump magazine. Or Trump Casinos. Or Trump Mortgages. Or Trump Airlines. Or Trump Vodka. Or the Trump pandemic response. Or, of course, the 2020 Trump presidential campaign.
  • So, Mr. Trump, here’s my advice.
  • I advise you to embrace your myriad failures as if they’re your best friends.
  • Even if “fail” and “don’t work” are the same thing, in tech these are seen as a badge of honor rather than as a sign that you are terrible at executing a business plan and engage in only meaningless optics.
  • Engage in meaningless optics.
  • uckily, this fits right in your wheelhouse — a talent that you have displayed in spades since the beginnings of your career.
  • “genius is 1 percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration.” I might rephrase that for your entry into tech by saying, genius is 1 percent instigation and 99 percent perfidy.
  • Instigation and perfidy, in fact, make the perfect formula for a modern-day social network, so you are already well on your way, given your skill set.
  • Crazy ALL-CAP declarations designed to foment anger? Check.
  • Baseless conspiracies? Check
  • Incessant lies? Check.
  • Self-aggrandizing though badly spelled streams that actually reveal a profound lack of self-esteem? Check.
  • Link-baiting hateful memes? Double check.
  • Inciting violence over election fraud with both explicit and cryptic messages to your base, in order to get them to think they should attack the Capitol, like, for real? Checkmate
  • hate-tweet at you, and, of course, all the fake media
  • You didn’t start the fire — well, maybe you did — but you definitely need to keep stoking it.
  • A social network requires a lot of it, including servers, apps and content moderation tools. You’ll need a whole army of geeks whom you’ll have to pay real money.
  • As for your future competitors … Twitter has seen its shares rise sharply since it tossed you off for life.
  • You still might get a reprieve over at Facebook, where an oversight board is contemplating your fate. We’ll see what the chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, decides after the board makes a ruling.
  • Keep in mind, Mr. Zuckerberg really is the most powerful man in the world; that was even the case when you were in the Oval Office.
  • And while he once bear-hugged your administration, he is now sidling up to President Biden.
  • Avoid MeinSpace and InstaGraft, for obvious reasons. The narcissist in you might go for The_Donald, which you might now be able to use, since Reddit banned the 800,000-member forum with that name for violating its rules against harassment, hate speech, content manipulation and more.
  • (Sounds like just the kind of folks you like and who like you.)
  • Trumpets are brash and loud, and they’re often badly played and tinny. Right on brand, I’d say.
huffem4

The Power of Positive Thinking: Too Much and Never Enough - The Bulwark - 1 views

thebulwark.com/king-too-much-and-never-enough

psychological COVID-19 current events

shared by huffem4 on 27 Aug 20 - No Cached
  • Peale was exceptional for cutting the flock some spiritual slack, encouraging them to look for the sunny side and conquer their inferiority complexes. In his world, you can have the economic gains minus the guilt, which seems perfectly suited to the American sensibility.
  • The book sold millions of copies and was eventually translated into more than 40 languages, and Peale, from his pulpit at Marble Collegiate Church in Manhattan, became central to the spiritual life of the family of Fred Trump Sr., his wife, Mary, and the four Trump children, including the future president.
  • it was also well suited to justifying and exacerbating the pathologies of the Trump family and businesses
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Mary Trump (the president’s niece who also happens to have a Ph.D. in psychology) paints a portrait of Fred Trump Sr. as a sociopath, utterly uninterested in entering into the moral, emotional, and psychological world of his family or its members. In keeping with Peale’s teaching, he would no more hear about his wife’s or children’s problems than he would accept a failed business deal
  • Fred would just say, “Everything’s great, right Toots?” refusing to acknowledge, much less accommodate, her illness. 
  • Fred Jr. was then further abused, repeatedly denied authority, second-guessed at every turn, and blamed for every problem, setback, and failure in a perverse tag-team between Fred Sr. and Donald. The abuse fed his alcoholism, which, in the family’s Peale-informed understanding, was not a disease requiring treatment but the result of Fred Jr.’s negative thinking
  • Peale wanted people to be hopeful, kind, and optimistic, and to become “people persons.” The Trump family heard the positive thinking, personal empowerment parts, which integrated easily with its win-at-all-cost ideology, but they, or at least Donald, missed the bits about seeking counsel from others and living a life of dependence upon God.
  • These are the problem-solving strategies that Donald Trump brought to his marriages, six corporate bankruptcies, presidential campaign, and now, what increasingly appears to be a failed presidency.
  • The consistent element in each of these has been to deny negative realities and keep moving. The casinos, the airline, the football league, Trump Vodka, Trump Steaks, Trump University . . . all bear the same markings of hyper optimism and overpromise/underdeliver salesmanship
  • Trump’s just doing what he’s always done: conquering the challenge by blinding himself to it, just the way Reverend Peale taught him and his father insisted upon. 
  • My AEI colleague, Brad Wilcox, documented that men who identified as “evangelical” but infrequently attend church were more likely to engage in domestic violence than evangelicals who regularly attended church, mainline Protestants and those who never attend church. Wilcox believes this results from a kind of doctrinal cherry-picking—big on authority, sovereignty, and power but closed to other-directed teachings like altruism and self-sacrifice. Weak attachment to religious faith tends to put some of the worst behaviors on steroids.  
  • Fred Jr.’s deepening alcoholism only elicited increasing abuse from his father and brother seemingly under the theory that if they were hard enough on him he would turn around. Even in his final crisis, afflicted by fatal, alcohol-induced cardiac problems, no member of the family went with him to the hospital (Donald Trump went to a movie instead). Dying, it appears, is the result of late-stage negative thought.
  • “prosperity gospel” (a belief popularized by televangelists that God intends Christians to be healthy and wealthy)
  • The purpose of these psychological and spiritual practices is to free individuals from self-doubt and feelings of inferiority and help them to become the people God truly intends them to be: happy, wealthy, popular, and professionally successful.
  • Now we have Trump COVID-19 and it’s following the same pattern. The virus is “very well under control” and “going to fade away.”
johnsonel7

Expect Trump to fight as if his life depends on it (Opinion) - CNN - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

trump perception reality language

shared by johnsonel7 on 24 Oct 19 - No Cached
  • Over the decades, Trump constructed and then inhabited a public persona that is powerful but unnatural. As a businessman and TV personality, Trump was, perhaps, the greatest illusionist of our time. He has repeated, ad nauseum, his unverified claims of wealth, sexual magnetism, and brilliance -- a "very stable genius" -- in an effort to produce the image of a great man.
  • But the theatrical dynamic of the Trump presidency was threatened every time real life collided with Trump's cartoon. His failures have often come at moments when he should be guided by a moral compass. But no one who is so devoted to a false persona could possess this kind of ethical reflex
  • Then, on Monday, Trump seemed to yet again try and regain his power by implying the Ukraine scandal couldn't be significant because it revolved around a "perfect" letter he wrote to Zelensky. It's the sort of distortion of the facts one would expect from a man whose comforting false reality is falling apart. As analysts have pointed out, Trump's contact with Zelensky involved not a letter, but a telephone call which was far from perfect. Indeed it was only "perfect" if one was looking for an example of a president abusing his office.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The Russian connection echoes a long-running theme of the Trump presidency, which has cast doubt on his ability to lead the nation -- from Trump's criticism of the NATO alliance to his request for Russia to be admitted to the G7 economic summit countries, to his withdrawal of American troops from Syria. Indeed, last week Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi noted that "all roads lead" to Russian President Vladimir Putin.
  • When we hear the gears of the Trump machine grind and see the decorative pieces of chrome loosen and fall, we are witnessing the results of a confrontation between reality and fantasy. This observation doesn't diminish the power of Trump's marketing method. It does, however, suggest its limits.
mcginnisca

Donald Trump Just Called for Ending All Muslim Immigration to the US | VICE | United St... - 0 views

www.vice.com/...muslim-immigration-to-us-vgtrn

donald trump muslim immigration united states language anchoring heuristics bias logic probability

shared by mcginnisca on 09 Dec 15 - No Cached
  • Monday afternoon, the Trump campaign issued a press release that, amid an increasingly Islamophobic climate in the US and abroad, called for a blanket ban on any Muslim immigration—a position so starkly bigoted that the two-paragraph statement went viral on Twitter in a matter of moments. (Some users even questioned whether it was real, but it's as real as everything in this universe.)
  • "Donald J. Trump is calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the United States until our country's representatives can figure out what is going on," the release begins, leaving it unclear what exactly Trump thinks could possibly be "going on." An infiltration of the country by ISIS that the candidate has alluded to? A hostile population of American-born Muslims?
  • Trump goes on to discuss the "hatred" Muslims apparently have for Americans, or America, or something. "Where this hatred comes from and why we will have to determine," Trump says in the statement. "Until we are able to determine and understand this problem and the dangerous threat it poses, our country cannot be the victims of horrendous attacks by people that believe only in Jihad, and have no sense of reason or respect for human life." How the government could "determine" the source of this alleged hatred isn't explained, nor does Trump address how he or anyone else might put a stop to it.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • The release cites a poll from something called the Center for Security Policy that claims 25 percent of Muslims surveyed said they were OK with violence against Americans and 51 percent "agreed that Muslims in America should have the choice of being governed according to Shariah." Those numbers sound too awful to be true, and there's evidence that they aren't—Georgetown's Bridge Initiative, which studies Islamophobia in America, has called the poll into question and noted that the CSP's founder Frank Gaffney once accused General David Petraeus, of all people, of "submission" to Islamic law.
  • the latest CNN poll had put The Donald in the lead in Iowa, a key early voting state, though another poll that used different sampling techniques showed Cruz ahead of Trump.
Javier E

Should we even go there? Historians on comparing fascism to Trumpism | US news | The Gu... - 0 views

www.theguardian.com/...nald-trump-historians-trumpism

fascism hitler resistance democracy

shared by Javier E on 03 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • “What are the necessary social and psychological conditions that allow populists of Hitler’s ilk to gain a mass following and attain power?”
  • “There are certain traits you can recognize that Hitler and Trump have in common,” Ullrich says. “I would say the egomania, the total egocentricity of both men, and the inclination to mix lies and truth – that was very characteristic of Hitler.”
  • Like Trump, “Hitler exploited peoples’ feelings of resentment towards the ruling elite.” He also said he would make Germany great again. Ullrich also notes both men’s talent at playing the media, making use of new technology and their propensity for stage effects.
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  • “I think the differences are still greater than the similarities,” he says. “Hitler was not only more intelligent, but craftier. He was not just a powerful orator, but a talented actor who succeeded in winning over various social milieus. So not just the economically threatened lower middle classes which Trump targeted, but also the upper middle classes. Hitler had many supporters in the German aristocracy.”
  • Trump was also democratically elected, while Hitler never had a majority vote. “He was appointed by the president of the German Reich.” Then there’s the fact that Trump does not lead a party “which is unconditionally committed to him”.
  • “A further obvious difference is that Trump doesn’t have a private militia, as Hitler did with the SA, which he used in his first months after coming to power to settle scores with his opponents, like the Communists and Social Democrats. You can’t possibly imagine something similar with Trump – that he’ll be locking Democrats up into concentration camps
  • “Finally, the American constitution is based on a system of checks and balances. It remains to be seen how far Congress will really limit Trump or if, as is feared, he can override it. It was different with Hitler, who, as we know, managed to eliminate all resistance in the shortest space of time and effectively establish himself as an all-powerful dictator. Within a few months, there was effectively no longer any opposition.”
  • “Hitler profited from the fact that his opponents always underestimated him,” Ullrich explains. “His conservative allies in government assumed they could tame or ‘civilise’ him – that once he became chancellor he’d become vernünftig (meaning sensible, reasonable). Very quickly it became clear that was an illusion.”
  • “There were many situations where he could have been stopped. For example in 1923 after the failed Munich putsch – if he’d served his full prison sentence of several years, he wouldn’t have made a political comeback. Instead, he only spent a few months behind bars, [having been released after political pressure] and could rebuild his movement.”
  • The western powers made the same mistake with their appeasement politics, indecision and indulgence. “In the 1930s Hitler strengthened, rather than weakened, his aggressive intentions,” Ullrich says. “So you could learn from this that you have to react faster and much more vigorously than was the case at the time.”
  • llrich also contends that if Hindenburg, the president of the Reich, had allowed Chancellor Brüning, of the Centre party, to remain chancellor to the end of 1934, rather than responding to pressure from conservatives to dismiss him in 1932, “then the peak of the economic crisis would have passed and it would have been very questionable whether Hitler could still have come to power”.
  • At the same time, Hitler’s ascent was no mere fluke. “There were powerful forces in the big industries, but also in the landowning class and the armed forces, which approved of a fascist solution to the crisis.”
  • If fascism “now just means aggressive nationalism, racism, patriarchy and authoritarianism, then maybe it is back on the agenda,” Bosworth continues. But today’s context is fundamentally different
  • Today’s “alt-right” agitators “live in a neoliberal global order where the slogan, ‘all for the market, nothing outside the market, no one against the market’ is far more unquestionably accepted than the old fascist slogan of ‘all for the state, nothing outside the state, no one against the state’”.
  • “What is that if it’s not racially authoritarian?” asks Schama. “If you want to call it fascist, fine. I don’t really care if it’s called that or not. It’s authoritarian, you know, ferociously authoritarian.”
  • Schama also points to deeply worrying messaging, such as “the parallel universe of lies which are habitual, massive, cumulative”; the criminalization of political opponents; the threat to change the libel laws against the press and the demonization of different racial and ethnic groups, going as far as proposing a Muslim registry.
  • Schama is clear: Trump is obviously not Hitler. “But, you know, if you like, he’s an entertainment fascist, which may be less sinister but is actually in the end more dangerous. If you’re not looking for jackboots and swastikas – although swastikas are indeed appearing – there’s a kind of laundry list of things which are truly sinister and authoritarian and not business as usual.”
  • Don’t ignore what people vote fo
  • f you’re of German heritage, it’s hard to understand how so many people could have bought Mein Kampf and gone on to vote for Hitler. Maybe no one really read it, or got beyond the first few pages of bluster, or took antisemitism seriously, you tell yourself. “Or they liked what he said,
  • “I think one of the mistakes this time around would be not to think that the people who voted for Trump were serious. They may have been serious for different reasons, but it would be a big mistake not to try and figure out what their reasons were.
  • Hitler presented himself as a “messiah” offering the public “salvation”, Ullrich points out. With austerity and hostility to the EU and to immigrants riding high, there is fertile ground for European populists next year to seduce with equally simplistic, sweeping “solutions”.
  • The problem, in Mazower’s view, is that establishment politicians currently have no response
  • “The Gestapo was piddling compared with the size and reach of surveillance equipment and operations today,
  • “Very belatedly, everyone is waking up to the fact that there was a general assumption that no government in the west would fall into the wrong hands, that it was safe to acquiesce in this huge expansion of surveillance capabilities, and the debate wasn’t as vigorous as it could have been.”
  • “Now, there is a lot of discussion about allowing this kind of surveillance apparatus in the wrong hands,” he adds. “And we’ve woken up to this a bit late in the day.”
  • Ullrich calls crises, “the elixir of rightwing populists”, and urges that politicians “do everything they can to correct the inequalities and social injustice which have arisen in the course of extreme financial capitalism in western countries”
  • Jane Caplan, a history professor at Oxford University who has written about Trump and fascism, highlights the want of “dissenting voices against marketisation and neoliberalism
  • The failure to resist the incursion of the market as the only criterion for political utility, or economic utility, has been pretty comprehensive.
  • Paranoia, bullying and intimidation are a hallmark of authoritarian regimes. They are also alive and well in our culture today, where online trolls, violent thugs at rallies, threats of expensive libel action and of course terrorist acts are equally effective in getting individuals and the press to self-censor.
sissij

Trump Is a Chinese Agent - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...trump-is-a-chinese-agent.html

new york times social media bias

shared by sissij on 29 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • The big story everyone is chasing is whether President Trump is a Russian stooge. Wrong. That’s all a smoke screen. Trump is actually a Chinese agent. He is clearly out to make China great again. Just look at the facts.
  • That’s called l-e-v-e-r-a-g-e, and Trump just threw it away … because he promised to in the campaign — without, I’d bet, ever reading TPP. What a chump! I can still hear the clinking of champagne glasses in Beijing.
  • O.K., Mr. President, let’s assume for a second that climate change is a hoax. Do you believe in math?
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • How can America be great if we don’t dominate the next great global industry — clean power?
  • Finally, Trump wants to slash the State Department and foreign aid budgets and make it harder for people to immigrate to America, particularly Muslims. This opens the way for China to expand its influence across the developing world and signals the smartest math and science students in the world to start their start-ups overseas and not in America.
  • sissij on 29 Mar 17
     
    After we watched about storytelling in politics today in TOK class, I think it is very interesting that people with good stories are often very popular. In entertainment industry, it is very common that the stars create stories intentionally to keep them hot and famous. Sometimes, they even create scandals and affairs to make their story interesting to the general population. I think the news are keep telling stories about Donald Trump, or Trump intentionally make himself a great story to be told. People that with different perspectives have different stories to tell about Trump. Trump is very "famous" in this sense. --Sissi (3/29/2017)
ilanaprincilus06

Trump has trashed America's most important alliance. The rift with Europe could take de... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

USA Trump Biden Europe

shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 16 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The presidency of Donald Trump has left such a wretched stench in Europe that it's hard to see how, even in four years, Joe Biden could possibly get America's most important alliance back on track.
  • Throughout Trump's term, Europeans have been walking a tightrope, trying to balance outright condemnation of the President's most destructive behavior with not alienating the leader of the Western world.
  • Trump went out of his way to "gradually undo a lot of what the EU was working towards on the world stage," pointing specifically to the Iran nuclear deal and the Paris climate accord.
  • ...13 more annotations...
  • "The European relationship has changed and will now be shrouded in skepticism,"
  • Trump's outward aggression affected all aspects of European life, be it trade, defense or even the emotional shared ideas and cultural ties.
  • All those things suddenly seem debased and of less value."
  • "When they did take big stances on things like China or Iran, they chose not to involve anyone, leaving Europeans scrambling for a response,"
  • But he might have to accept that America's role in these relationships has changed."
  • This has led to lots of countries having to think more seriously about their future with a less assertive US,"
  • "In some respects, it was a good thing Trump forced us to think more about diplomatic initiatives, NATO and withdrawal of US troops,"
  • A view many European officials share is that no matter how friendly Biden is, Trump happened once -- and could happen again.
  • In 2024, Ivanka Trump, Donald Trump Jr., Mike Pompeo, or any other of his allies could conceivably pick up the torch and win an election.
  • "We cannot afford to be naive. If you look at the number of votes that Trump got, he wields an influence on American voters.
  • This anti-global, 'America First' undercurrent in American politics is still very much alive and we have to hedge our bets,"
  • For the US, it's unclear whether being downgraded as a diplomatic force is something that its citizens, who've lived through four introspective years of "America First," will even care about.
  • Regardless, the Trump era has left Europeans with little choice but to wait and see how much of a priority Biden places on reclaiming America's place on the world stage.
katherineharron

Donald Trump's twisted definition of toughness - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 02 Jun 20 - No Cached
  • "Today, I have strongly recommended to every governor to deploy the National Guard in sufficient numbers that we dominate the streets," he said.
  • "One law and order, and that is what it is, one law. We have one, beautiful law," he said.
  • D.C. had no problems last night," Trump tweeted Tuesday morning. "Many arrests. Great job done by all. Overwhelming force. Domination. Likewise, Minneapolis was great (thank you President Trump!)."
  • ...10 more annotations...
  • The whole thing -- the speech punctuated with talk of "law and order" and the need to "dominate," the walk across ground that had been the site of protests moments before -- was orchestrated to push back against a story that had broken over the weekend: That amid the protests on Friday night outside the White House, Trump had been taken to the bunker under the White House for his protection.
  • The image of Trump cowering in a bunker while people take to the streets to protest the death of a(nother) unarmed black man immediately became fodder for Trump's two preferred mediums of communication: cable TV and Twitter. "Trump's Bunker" trended on Twitter. Cable TV repeatedly ran the story of a President being whisked away to safety.
  • On the campaign trail in 2016, Trump repeatedly defended the use of waterboarding and other methods of torture to get information out of enemy combatants. "Don't tell me it doesn't work — torture works,"
  • And the world is split between people willing to use their power over others and those too afraid to exert it.
  • Trump urged officers to treat arrested gang members rougher. He said this: "When you guys put somebody in the car and you're protecting their head, you know, the way you put their hand over? Like, don't hit their head, and they just killed somebody -- don't hit their head," Trump continued. "I said, you can take the hand away, OK?"
  • Throw them out into the cold," Trump famously/infamously said of protesters at a rally in Burlington, Vermont, in January 2016. "Don't give them their coats. No coats! Confiscate their coats."
  • Get tough Democrat Mayors and Governors," Trump urged in response to the protests. "These people are ANARCHISTS. Call in our National Guard NOW. The World is watching and laughing at you and Sleepy Joe. Is this what America wants? NO!!!"
  • There is nothing Trump cares more about -- and, of course, fears more -- than being perceived as weak and being mocked and laughed at for it. He is willing to say and do absolutely anything to keep from being put in that situation. So when he was being mocked for retreating to the White House bunker, his response was immediate: I'll show them. ... I'll walk right across the ground they were protesting on!
  • oughness is not always about exerting your dominance because you can. True strength is rooted in the actions you don't take, the ability to understand that brute force should be your last resort, not your first instinct.
  • But it's especially true for a President of the United States faced with protests on American streets driven by the death of yet another black man at the hands of the police. Truly tough people, truly strong people -- they don't need to show and tell everyone how strong and tough they are. It's in their restraint, in their understanding that might doesn't make right that their true strength shines through.Donald Trump doesn't know that.
Javier E

Covering politics in a "post-truth" America | Brookings Institution - 0 views

www.brookings.edu/...litics-in-a-post-truth-america

post-truth politics journalism media fake news crisis culture news trump

shared by Javier E on 10 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • The media scandal of 2016 isn’t so much about what reporters failed to tell the American public; it’s about what they did report on, and the fact that it didn’t seem to matter.
  • Facebook and Snapchat and the other social media sites should rightfully be doing a lot of soul-searching about their role as the most efficient distribution network for conspiracy theories, hatred, and outright falsehoods ever invented.
  • I’ve been obsessively looking back over our coverage, too, trying to figure out what we missed along the way to the upset of the century
  • ...28 more annotations...
  • (An early conclusion: while we were late to understand how angry white voters were, a perhaps even more serious lapse was in failing to recognize how many disaffected Democrats there were who would stay home rather than support their party’s flawed candidate.)
  • Stories that would have killed any other politician—truly worrisome revelations about everything from the federal taxes Trump dodged to the charitable donations he lied about, the women he insulted and allegedly assaulted, and the mob ties that have long dogged him—did not stop Trump from thriving in this election year
  • the Oxford Dictionaries announced that “post-truth” had been chosen as the 2016 word of the year, defining it as a condition “in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief.”
  • Meantime, Trump personally blacklisted news organizations like Politico and The Washington Post when they published articles he didn’t like during the campaign, has openly mused about rolling back press freedoms enshrined by the U.S. Supreme Court, and has now named Stephen Bannon, until recently the executive chairman of Breitbart—a right-wing fringe website with a penchant for conspiracy theories and anti-Semitic tropes—to serve as one of his top White House advisers.
  • none of this has any modern precedent. And what makes it unique has nothing to do with the outcome of the election. This time, the victor was a right-wing demagogue; next time, it may be a left-wing populist who learns the lessons of Trump’s win.
  • This is no mere academic argument. The election of 2016 showed us that Americans are increasingly choosing to live in a cloud of like-minded spin, surrounded by the partisan political hackery and fake news that poisons their Facebook feeds.
  • To help us understand it all, there were choices, but not that many: three TV networks that mattered, ABC, CBS, and NBC; two papers for serious journalism, The New York Times and The Washington Post; and two giant-circulation weekly newsmagazines, Time and Newsweek. That, plus whatever was your local daily newspaper, pretty much constituted the news.
  • Fake news is thriving In the final three months of the presidential campaign, the 20 top-performing fake election news stories generated more engagement on Facebook than the top stories from major news outlets such as The New York Times.
  • Eventually, I came to think of the major media outlets of that era as something very similar to the big suburban shopping malls we flocked to in the age of shoulder pads and supply-side economics: We could choose among Kmart and Macy’s and Saks Fifth Avenue as our budgets and tastes allowed, but in the end the media were all essentially department stores, selling us sports and stock tables and foreign news alongside our politics, whether we wanted them or not. It may not have been a monopoly, but it was something pretty close.
  • This was still journalism in the scarcity era, and it affected everything from what stories we wrote to how fast we could produce them. Presidents could launch global thermonuclear war with the Russians in a matter of minutes, but news from the American hinterlands often took weeks to reach their sleepy capital. Even information within that capital was virtually unobtainable without a major investment of time and effort. Want to know how much a campaign was raising and spending from the new special-interest PACs that had proliferated? Prepare to spend a day holed up at the Federal Election Commission’s headquarters down on E Street across from the hulking concrete FBI building, and be sure to bring a bunch of quarters for the copy machine.
  • I am writing this in the immediate, shocking aftermath of a 2016 presidential election in which the Pew Research Center found that a higher percentage of Americans got their information about the campaign from late-night TV comedy shows than from a national newspaper. Don Graham sold the Post three years ago and though its online audience has been skyrocketing with new investments from Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, it will never be what it was in the ‘80s. That same Pew survey reported that a mere 2 percent of Americans today turned to such newspapers as the “most helpful” guides to the presidential campaign.
  • In 2013, Mark Leibovich wrote a bestselling book called This Town about the party-hopping, lobbyist-enabling nexus between Washington journalists and the political world they cover. A key character was Politico’s Mike Allen, whose morning email newsletter “Playbook” had become a Washington ritual, offering all the news and tidbits a power player might want to read before breakfast—and Politico’s most successful ad franchise to boot. In many ways, even that world of just a few years ago now seems quaint: the notion that anyone could be a single, once-a-day town crier in This Town (or any other) has been utterly exploded by the move to Twitter, Facebook, and all the rest. We are living, as Mark put it to me recently, “in a 24-hour scrolling version of what ‘Playbook’ was.”
  • Whether it was Walter Cronkite or The New York Times, they preached journalistic “objectivity” and spoke with authority when they pronounced on the day’s developments—but not always with the depth and expertise that real competition or deep specialization might have provided. They were great—but they were generalists.
  • I remained convinced that reporting would hold its value, especially as our other advantages—like access to information and the expensive means to distribute it—dwindled. It was all well and good to root for your political team, but when it mattered to your business (or the country, for that matter), I reasoned, you wouldn’t want cheerleading but real reporting about real facts. Besides, the new tools might be coming at us with dizzying speed—remember when that radical new video app Meerkat was going to change absolutely everything about how we cover elections?—but we would still need reporters to find a way inside Washington’s closed doors and back rooms, to figure out what was happening when the cameras weren’t rolling.
  • And if the world was suffering from information overload—well, so much the better for us editors; we would be all the more needed to figure out what to listen to amid the noise.
  • Trump turned out to be more correct than we editors were: the more relevant point of the Access Hollywood tape was not about the censure Trump would now face but the political reality that he, like Bill Clinton, could survive this—or perhaps any scandal. Yes, we were wrong about the Access Hollywood tape, and so much else.
  • These days, Politico has a newsroom of 200-odd journalists, a glossy award-winning magazine, dozens of daily email newsletters, and 16 subscription policy verticals. It’s a major player in coverage not only of Capitol Hill but many other key parts of the capital, and some months during this election year we had well over 30 million unique visitors to our website, a far cry from the controlled congressional circulation of 35,000 that I remember Roll Call touting in our long-ago sales materials.
  • , we journalists were still able to cover the public theater of politics while spending more of our time, resources, and mental energy on really original reporting, on digging up stories you couldn’t read anywhere else. Between Trump’s long and checkered business past, his habit of serial lying, his voluminous and contradictory tweets, and his revision of even his own biography, there was lots to work with. No one can say that Trump was elected without the press telling us all about his checkered past.
  • politics was NEVER more choose-your-own-adventure than in 2016, when entire news ecosystems for partisans existed wholly outside the reach of those who at least aim for truth
  • Pew found that nearly 50 percent of self-described conservatives now rely on a single news source, Fox, for political information they trust.
  • As for the liberals, they trust only that they should never watch Fox, and have MSNBC and Media Matters and the remnants of the big boys to confirm their biases.
  • And then there are the conspiracy-peddling Breitbarts and the overtly fake-news outlets of this overwhelming new world; untethered from even the pretense of fact-based reporting, their version of the campaign got more traffic on Facebook in the race’s final weeks than all the traditional news outlets combined.
  • When we assigned a team of reporters at Politico during the primary season to listen to every single word of Trump’s speeches, we found that he offered a lie, half-truth, or outright exaggeration approximately once every five minutes—for an entire week. And it didn’t hinder him in the least from winning the Republican presidential nomination.
  • when we repeated the exercise this fall, in the midst of the general election campaign, Trump had progressed to fibs of various magnitudes just about once every three minutes!
  • By the time Trump in September issued his half-hearted disavowal of the Obama “birther” whopper he had done so much to create and perpetuate, one national survey found that only 1 in 4 Republicans was sure that Obama was born in the U.S., and various polls found that somewhere between a quarter and a half of Republicans believed he’s Muslim. So not only did Trump think he was entitled to his own facts, so did his supporters. It didn’t stop them at all from voting for him.
  • in part, it’s not just because they disagree with the facts as reporters have presented them but because there’s so damn many reporters, and from such a wide array of outlets, that it’s often impossible to evaluate their standards and practices, biases and preconceptions. Even we journalists are increasingly overwhelmed.
  • So much terrific reporting and writing and digging over the years and … Trump? What happened to consequences? Reporting that matters? Sunlight, they used to tell us, was the best disinfectant for what ails our politics.
  • 2016 suggests a different outcome: We’ve achieved a lot more transparency in today’s Washington—without the accountability that was supposed to come with it.
adonahue011

How Joe Biden was Donald Trump's kryptonite - CNNPolitics - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

psychology brain science technology education bias social media research

shared by adonahue011 on 17 Jan 21 - No Cached
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 17 Jan 21
       
      This is very interesting to me because I think much of Donald Trumps campaigns have been about manipulation.
  • Some of the lowest points for Trump over the last two years revolved around Biden.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 17 Jan 21
       
      Offending an ego, how that connects to our brain and us being sensitive beings.
  • Biden had merely announced he was running for president earlier that year.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • What perhaps Trump didn't realize was that he was playing right into Biden's hands. His efforts seem to prove an important point for Biden
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 17 Jan 21
       
      Many times Trump did not even notice he was in many ways helping Biden, intuitively.
  • Democrats got the message Trump was sending and nominated Biden.
  • Trump was impeached a second time after an insurrection that he incited last week over outrage of the 2020 election results.
  • During the transition period, Biden has been actively planning his presidency and not spending too much time publicly worrying about Trump's false claims of voter fraud.
  • Trump it seems, couldn't stand not to be the center of attention, which is unusual for an outgoing president.
    • adonahue011
      adonahue011 on 17 Jan 21
       
      What does this say about his mental state?
  • Trump got about 70% of the news mentions.
  • The end result of all of this is that Biden goes into his administration this week with the vast majority of voters approving of Biden's handling of the transition.
  • Trump's political career seemed to be impermeable. That was until Trump ran into President-elect Joe Biden.
  • Biden proved to be Trump's kryptonite and helped himself tremendously by doing something very simple: allowing Trump to be Trump.
sissij

Lessons from Playing Golf with Trump - The New Yorker - 1 views

www.newyorker.com/...s-from-playing-golf-with-trump

new yorker social media bias

shared by sissij on 15 Jan 17 - No Cached
  • “I will buy one only if it has the potential to be the best. I’m not interested in having a nine.”
  • A friend asked me later whether Trump wasn’t “in on the joke” of his public persona, and I said that, as far as I could tell, the Trump we were used to seeing on television was the honest-to-god authentic Trump: a ten-year-old boy who, for unknown reasons, had been given a real airplane and a billion dollars. In other words, a fun guy to hang around with.
  • He was upset that I hadn’t written that he’d shot 71—a very good golf score, one stroke under par.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • He complained to me that golf publications never rank his courses high enough, because the people who do the rating hold a grudge against him, but he also said that he never allows raters to play his courses, because they would just get in the way of the members.
  • He wanted the number, and the fact that I hadn’t published the number proved that I was just like all the other biased reporters, who, because we’re all part of the anti-Trump media conspiracy, never give him as much credit as he deserves for being awesome.
  • In Trump’s own mind, I suspect, he really did shoot 71 that day, if not (by now) 69. Trump’s world is a parallel universe in which truth takes many forms, none of them necessarily based on reality.
  • sissij on 15 Jan 17
     
    I think this article has a very interesting interpretation on Trump's personalities and behaviors. Something we think is absurd might be totally normal in other people's perspective. For example, in this article, the author states that Trump values social status and potential profit more than the real person or the real thing. It shows how people see this world differently and this affects how they make their moves and decisions. I think the overwhelming critics on Trump is partly because we don't understand Trump and don't even try to understand and accept him. He is an anomaly. Also, I think everybody observe the universe through their unique senses and perception, so we cannot tell whose reality is truer than others. Condemning others' reality won't bring us a good negotiation. --Sissi (1/14/2017)
Javier E

The post-truth world of the Trump administration is scarier than you think - The Washin... - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...6-b994-f45a208f7a73_story.html

post-truth illogic facts demagogue

shared by Javier E on 03 Dec 16 - No Cached
  • it’s time to cross another bridge — into a world without facts. Or, more precisely, where facts do not matter a whit.
  • “There’s no such thing, unfortunately, anymore, of facts,” she declared on “The Diane Rehm Show”
  • Hughes, a frequent surrogate for President-elect Donald Trump and a paid commentator for CNN during the campaign, kept on defending that assertion at length
  • ...8 more annotations...
  • What matters now, Hughes argued, is not whether his fraud claim is true. No, what matters is who believes it.
  • “You guys took everything that Donald Trump said so literally,” said Lewandowski, who was another ill-advised CNN hire. “The American people didn’t. They understood it. They understood that sometimes — when you have a conversation with people, whether it’s around the dinner table or at a bar — you’re going to say things, and sometimes you don’t have all the facts to back it up.”
  • two other Trump surrogates echoed this sentiment.
  • Ousted Trump campaign manager Corey Lewandowski, speaking during an election post-mortem at Harvard University’s Shorenstein Center on Media, Politics and Public Policy, blamed journalists for — yes — believing what his candidate said.
  • “Mr. Trump’s tweet, amongst a certain crowd, a large — a large part of the population, are truth. When he says that millions of people illegally voted, he has some — in his — amongst him and his supporters, and people believe they have facts to back that up. Those that do not like Mr. Trump, they say that those are lies, and there’s no facts to back it up.”
  • but Trump is not a guy at a bar; he was the Republican nominee for president of the United States and will pretty soon be the leader of the free world
  • When CNN’s Jake Tapper asked Trump senior adviser Kellyanne Conway about the same election-fraud claim discussed above — specifically, whether disseminating misinformation was “presidential”
  • “He’s the president-elect, so that’s presidential behavior,” Conway said, using mind-bending pseudo-logic
kortanekev

Trump's Lies vs. Your Brain - POLITICO Magazine - 0 views

www.politico.com/...-lies-liar-effect-brain-214658

trump politics language persuasion

shared by kortanekev on 29 Mar 17 - No Cached
  • Lying in politics transcends political party and era. It is, in some ways, an inherent part of the profession of politicking.
  • But Donald Trump is in a different category. The sheer frequency, spontaneity and seeming irrelevance of his lies have no precedent
  • Trump seems to lie for the pure joy of
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • Trump used the phrase “truthful hyperbole,” a term coined by his ghostwriter referring to the flagrant truth-stretching that Trump employed, over and over, to help close sales. Trump apparently loved the wording, and went on to adopt it as his own.
  • kortanekev on 29 Mar 17
     
    To what extent is as exaggerated form of the truth still truthful? Trump bases his language on "truthful hyperboles," but such a thing as a  truthful lie is a lie within itself... Trump is clearly a master of this misleading rhetoric, and it one of the main reasons we seem him where he is today.  (Evie Kortanek 3/29/17)
katherineharron

Trump pursues his political obsessions as stark 100,000 coronavirus deaths landmark loo... - 0 views

www.cnn.com/...index.html

shared by katherineharron on 26 May 20 - No Cached
  • Sometime in the next few days, the 100,000th American will succumb to Covid-19 in a pandemic that President Donald Trump once predicted would just "miraculously" disappear.
  • In his most politically significant maneuver, he heaped intense pressure on North Carolina's Democratic governor to permit a normal, crowded Republican National Convention, despite fears such a mass gathering could seed virus hot spots. Trump warned he could pull the huge money-earner out of Charlotte, which was picked to play host in August.
  • And he indulged his preoccupations on his tax returns, Hillary Clinton, Fox News, slanders against MSNBC host Joe Scarborough, the Russia investigation, Joe Biden's mental health, former Attorney General Jeff Sessions, mail-in voting in November and highlighted dangerous and unproven Covid-19 therapies promoted on conservative media he has tested himself.
  • ...11 more annotations...
  • "For as long as we have citizens willing to follow their example, to carry on their burden, to continue their legacy, then America's cause will never fail and American freedom will never, ever die."
  • But that doesn't mean it isn't jarring, as the most wrenching moment so far approaches in the nation's battle against a pandemic that while ebbing in terms of total deaths is trending up in 18 states, is steady in 22 and easing in 10 more. More than 98,000 people in the US have now died from the coronavirus and more than 1.6 million have been infected. More than 30 million Americans have lost their jobs and the unemployment rate is approaching Great Depression levels.
  • There was little evidence of a deeper meaning to his presidency at this stage than personal and political grievances.
  • No White House could have been fully prepared for the disaster and subsequent economic hollowing of this year's pandemic
  • Trump spent much of Memorial Day, fulminating against Cooper, complaining that the North Carolina governor was "unable to guarantee" the arena for the convention in August can be filled to capacity. The President is determined to deploy the full pageantry of convention season to portray a nation and economy in the full throes of what he calls a "transition to greatness."
  • Yet such a spectacle as the Republican convention seems utterly incongruous with real-world events. Sports teams that use such arenas are expecting to play without fans for at least months in a bio-secure environment. The prospect of thousands of delegates pouring into convention cities from all over the country, including coronavirus hotspots, is a huge headache for organizers.
  • "In other words, we would be spending millions of dollars building the Arena to a very high standard without even knowing if the Democrat Governor would allow the Republican Party to fully occupy the space."
  • It was not immediately clear whether Trump and the Republican National Committee are serious about pulling the convention from Charlotte.
  • Trump has used federal resources multiple times to fly to his resorts and golf courses. Trump's two rounds this weekend struck critics as inappropriate during a national crisis and on a weekend when American remembers its war dead.
  • "Nearly 100,000 lives have been lost, and tens of millions are out of work. Meanwhile, the president spent his day golfing," Biden wrote in a tweet accompanying an online ad Saturday.
  • Trump may not come under such criticism had he not been so dismissive of Obama's afternoons on the golf course -- and saying he wouldn't have time to play golf if he was elected president.
Javier E

Why Trump Supporters Aren't Backing Down - The Atlantic - 0 views

www.theatlantic.com/...670508

trump supporter mentality psychology bias

shared by Javier E on 14 Jul 22 - No Cached
  • Almost all of Trump’s supporters want to cast their gaze elsewhere—on some other issue, on some other hearing, on some other controversy. They’ll do anything to keep from having to confront the reality of what happened on January 6. What you’re very unlikely to see, except in the rarest of cases, is genuine self-reflection or soul-searching, regret or remorse, feelings of embarrassment and shame.
  • Trump supporters have spent much of the past half dozen years defending their man; their political and cultural identity has become fused with his. Some of them may have started out as lukewarm allies, but over time their support became less qualified and more enthusiastic. The unusual intensity of the Trump years increased their bond to him.
  • He was the captain of Team Red. In their minds, loyalty demanded they stick with him, acting as his shield one day, his sword the next.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • But something else, something even more powerful, was going on. Many Trump supporters grew to hate his critics even more than they came to love Trump. For them, Trump’s detractors were not just wrong but wicked, obsessed with getting Trump, and hell-bent on destroying America
  • For Trump supporters to admit that they were wrong about him—and especially to admit that Trump’s critics had been right about him—would blow their circuits. If they ever do turn on Trump, they will admit it only to themselves and maybe a few close intimates
  • asking Trump supporters to focus on his moral turpitude is like asking them to stare into the sun. They can do it for a split second, and then they have to look away. The Trump years have been all about looking away.
Javier E

The Amazing Trump-Wingnut Policy Conveyor Belt - 0 views

talkingpointsmemo.com/...p-wingnut-policy-conveyor-belt

legitimacy discourse politics extremism radical candidate 2016

shared by Javier E on 21 Nov 15 - No Cached
  • Over the course of just a few days Donald Trump has gone from saying that we might have to close down mosques and create a Muslim registry to saying that not only will we do this but we have to do it and anything less is an utter capitulation.
  • In other words, rapidly evolving from refusing to rule out a draconian policy to affirmatively endorsing it to being its leading advocate.
  • With his Muslim ID card and database, Wednesday he said he wouldn't rule out creating such a system. By the end of the day he was telling NBC News he would "absolutely" create such a system.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • just as we saw in the summer with immigration writ large, the progression doesn't end with Trump. We've had three presidential elections since the 9/11 terror attacks and no presidential candidate has ever proposed shutting down mosques in the United States or creating a special registry and identification cards for Muslims living in the United States.
  • So yesterday Megyn Kelly asked Marco Rubio whether he'd shut down radical mosques like Trump. He tried to deflect the question by saying that it wasn't about mosques but closing down any facility that was promoting radicalism. In other words, Rubio, while clearly not eager to answer the question, pointedly refused to rule out following Trump's lead.
  • It is a very good example of how Trump is not only shaping the debate on the right but rapidly mainstreaming ideas that were as recently as a week ago considered entirely outside the realm of mainstream political discourse.
  • It's particularly effective with the less sophisticated and principled candidates like Rubio. Jeb Bush said flatly this morning that Trump's database proposal is "just wrong." But Ben Carson quickly took Trump's lead comparing Syrian refugees to "mad dogs." The difference is that Marco Rubio could very well be president in 18 months. Jeb Bush won't be.
  • this is no longer a matter of Trump yakking on about building a gilded 100-foot wall along the southern border and having Mexico agree to pay for it. Trump is now proposing things that sound like they put millions of American citizens and resident aliens on a road to something like the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.
Javier E

This is what happens when a stable genius leads a stupid country - The Washington Post - 0 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...8-8679-934a2b33be52_story.html

Knowledge stupid genius trump culture

shared by Javier E on 21 Nov 18 - No Cached
  • Trump knows “more about courts than any human being.” He knows “more about steelworkers than anybody.” He knows “more about ISIS than the generals do,” and “more about offense and defense than they will ever understand.” He knows “more about wedges than any human being that’s ever lived.” He even knows more about medicine than his doctor, dictating a doctor’s letter predicting he would be “the healthiest individual ever elected to the presidency.”
Javier E

History News Network | We Traded in One of the Most Self-Disciplined Presidents for the... - 1 views

historynewsnetwork.org/...166806

self-control trump psychology temperament

shared by Javier E on 30 Sep 17 - No Cached
  • How ironic it is then that President Obama, the bane of conservatives, possessed an abundance of self-discipline, and President Trump, who most conservatives (including Bennet) favored over Hilary Clinton, possesses almost none.
  • The ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle thought that political leaders should exercise practical wisdom (phronesis) or prudence. He considered temperance (i.e., moderation, self-restraint) and self-discipline two of the most important virtues required for such wisdom. He believed that the two virtues should help us regulate what he called “the appetitive faculty,” which deals with our emotions and desires
  • One of the twentieth-century’s most prominent commentators on political wisdom, Britain’s Isaiah Berlin (1909-1997), viewed temperance as an important political virtue, and he connected it to humility and tolerance—neither of which Trump displays. And in his “Two Concepts of Liberty,” Berlin wrote, “Freedom is self-mastery.”
  • ...12 more annotations...
  • Barry Schwartz and Kenneth Sharpe in their Practical Wisdom: The Right Way to Do the Right Thing (2010) state that such wisdom is greatly needed
  • The authors quote Aristotle and give the example of a man practicing practical wisdom and mention that “he had the self-control—the emotion-regulating skills—to choose rightly.”
  • Psychologist, futurist, and editor of The Wisdom Page Tom Lombardo also stresses the importance of temperance and self-control. In his new book on Future Consciousness
  • he includes a whole chapter (of 45 pages) on “Self-Control and Self-Responsibility.” In it he cites favorably two authors who claim that “most human problems are due to a lack of self-control.” He also states that “we cannot flourish without self-responsibility, self-control, and . . . . one of the most unethical forms of thinking and behavior in life . . . is to abdicate self-responsibility and self-control in ourselves.”
  • In Inside Obama’s Brain (2009), journalist Sasha Abramsky talked to over a hundred people who knew Obama and reported that “during the election campaign Obama almost never got upset, or panicked, by day-to-day shifts in momentum, by the ups and downs of opinion polls.” Almost a year into his presidency, Abramsky refered to the president as “a voice of moderation in a corrosively shrill, partisan political milieu.”
  • Up until the end of his presidency, Obama maintained his self-control and temperance. As a Huffington Post piece noted in 2016, he “has been the model of temperance in office on all fronts.”
  • Just as many individuals have commented on Obama’s self-discipline and temperance, so too have many remarked on Trump’s lack of these virtues
  • In May 2017, Brooks stated: “At base, Trump is an infantalist. There are three tasks that most mature adults have sort of figured out by the time they hit 25. Trump has mastered none of them. Immaturity is becoming the dominant note of his presidency, lack of self-control his leitmotif.”
  • Two months later, Douthat opined about Trump: “He is nonetheless clearly impaired, gravely deficient somewhere at the intersection of reason and judgment and conscience and self-control. . . . This president should not be the president, and the sooner he is not, the better.”
  • Karl Rove, a former senior adviser to President George W. Bush, insisted that Trump “lacks the focus or self-discipline to do the basic work required of a president.”
  • At about the same time former Republican senator Tom Coburn (R-OK) declared “The question is, does he have the self-discipline and some control over his ego to be able to say ‘I’m wrong’ every now and then? I haven’t seen that.
  • it is Trump’s narcissism and lack of humility that are his chief faults and hinder him most from being even a mediocre president.
ilanaprincilus06

Trump Impeached By House Over Capitol Insurrection : House Impeachment Vote: Live Updat... - 0 views

www.npr.org/...ng-insurrection-at-u-s-capitol

Trump Impeachment House of Representatives

shared by ilanaprincilus06 on 14 Jan 21 - No Cached
  • The House of Representatives voted Wednesday to impeach President Trump for "high crimes and misdemeanors" — specifically, for inciting an insurrection against the federal government at the U.S. Capitol.
  • Trump has now become the first U.S. president to be impeached twice.
  • Ten Republicans broke party ranks to vote in favor of impeachment
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • The House voted 232-197 to impeach Trump
  • "Today in a bipartisan way, the House demonstrated that no one is above the law, not even the president of the United States,"
  • If the Senate votes to convict Trump — an outcome that is far from certain — he likely would be barred from holding any federal office again.
  • "President Trump gravely endangered the security of the United States and its institutions of government, threatened the integrity of the democratic system, interfered with the peaceful transition of power, and imperiled a coequal branch of government
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