I’m in rarely travelled territory. I’m watching the Virtual Town Hall with President Trump on the Fox News Channel. If you’re going to write about what’s going on, sometimes you have to do a little dirty work, so here I am.
The first thing I noticed about the format was they have staged it at the Lincoln Memorial. Not sure that was the greatest idea, as the comparison is quite jarring, and I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the effect they were going for. It seems to invite the question, how did we get here from there? The other staging gaff was how they were seated. The President sat on stage left removed from the hosts by at least fifteen feet. We all understand that and applaud the effort, but the two hosts were relatively close to each other though probably six feet apart, but the stage picture made it look like they needed to be isolated from him, which was really quite hilarious.
The first red flag that went up for me is the questions from Fox’s audience were pre-recorded video questions from around the country that had been sent in. This certainly allowed for the posibility of cherry picking some tasty morsels for the President and for ignoring others that might not be as flattering. To their credit that would not be the case.
But it wouldn’t matter a bit. Questions asked were not questions answered, as he would almost instantly veer away and make some unconnected answer. One teacher, though fawning over the job that he was doing, had a problem with style. She asked why he never answered the questions that are asked him and why was he so rude. Couldn’t he raise the level of his discourse? His response was the media was mean so he had to be meaner or they would think he was a punk. Then he went on some incredible eruption of words that somehow included Space Force in his answer to the question of why doesn’t he answer questions.
It wasn’t that the two hosts for the evening, Bret Baier and Martha MacCallum, didn’t ask challenging questions. At times they did, but the answer provided was most often the final word on the matter. The initial tone of a question might be challenging, even potentially hostile, but it would prove to be a paper tiger, as any inanity that was returned would be found sufficient.
I’m not going to do a blow by blow of this event because it was a rehash of his greatest hits, things we have simply become accustomed to him repeating. If you follow this stuff as closely as I do the repetition seems absurd, a gong that never ends. But this is the very genius of what he’s doing. It’s the point. What gets repeated can be repeated by others. Some actors learn lines by rote through repetition. Trump’s followers do the same. They learn their lines and they repeat them. Occaisionally a new mantra is introduced, a new sound to memorize. But the basics need to be reinforced and they are. Here are some recognizable examples.
When he is asked about our current testing capabilties and our current testing needs that are not being met, he will refer us back to ventilators and how we now have more than we need. Democratic governors are never satisfied, they always want something, and this is the next thing they are using to try to make the President look bad. The fact is the Administration has to be pushed to do anything at all. They resisted helping relieve the critical shortage in ventilators for weeks before being shamed into it by the press. So, lack of testing = look at all the ventilators.
When asked about how this emergency was ignored and then minimized through the month of February, the response goes to the ban on flights from China on the 31st of January. If he didn’t shut down China millions of Americans would have died. He did it earlier than anyone. We acted faster than anyone. But we didn’t. Almost two dozen other countries restricted travel before or on the same day as the United States, though among the G20 states only a couple were as quick as the U.S. to impose a flight ban, so since the others were essentially shit-hole countries they didn’t count. Then 40,000 people came home from China subsequent to the ban. At a Feb. 5 congressional hearing, Associate Professor at Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security Jennifer Nuzzo testified to the relative ineffectiveness of travel bans as security against a pandemic, and Ron Klain, Ebola czar for the successful effort against that threat by the Obama administration, reiterated her sentiments and called the move a “travel Band-Aid”. So, lack of leadership throughout February = ban on flights from China.
The next bit of Kryptonite for the President is nearly universal. It can be wielded against nearly all comers, a ubiquitous weapon against any perceived slight. The economy! Unemployment numbers were at historic lows, stock market at historic highs, the country had never seen an economy so good, it was the greatest economy in the history of the world, and He had built it. Stay with Him and He will build it again, and only He can do it. No one else could, and the Democrats just want to come in and tax you. He was going to lower them even more!
As a result of the tax cuts that saw more than 80% of their benefits going to the 1% the United States revenue plummetted and the debt exploded, pushing our deficit to over a trillion dollars a year. Wages were completely stagnant as they have been for the better part of 40 years, so the big benefit this economy was providing working people was the ease of finding that second or third job that would allow you to afford your substandard housing. In the meanwhile Wall Street was on fire. Trump’s pals were beholden to him for creating a toxic environment for the country that allowed them to thrive. The working people had seen no benefit at all. In fact, the twin fetish to lowering taxes on the rich had the very same effects of benefitting them to the detriment of the average citizen. Deregulation. The myriad protections that had been in place for decades, like emmisions standards on factories and the dumping of industrial waste into water supplies, were being reduced or completely eliminated to benefit giant corporations, recreating the toxic environment of the early 70s that started the movement to save the planet. The first Earth Day was in April of 1970. Trump was seeing to it that it had never happened. So, any perceived slight = The Greatest Economy.
These three responses are assured at every public utterance by the President. Jot them down, look for them. They are consistent responses to questions that do not go away because they have never been answered. None of the canned parries actually address the questions asked. They are open field evasive manuevers that dodge the questions in real time, but they serve a second and perhaps more important purpose. They are linguistic training sessions for the faithful.
Keep it simple. Identify enemies. Villify them unmercifully. Take sole credit. Make it simpler still. Distill it down to a few simple and repeatable precepts, and then practice, practice, practice. As Lombardi said, the plays are great but it all comes down to execution, and execution is born from repetition. Know what to do, how to do it, and then execute.
That is the basic game plan. At the Lincoln Memorial, Trump distilled what had caught on and made him President: immigration, taxes and the military. Keep it simple, keep the answers simpler and repeat it continuously. It will then be repeated ad nauseum by the sector of the press sympathetic to the Administration and then by the loyal masses yearning to be free.
These three answers represent a droning to those of us who identify them as deliberate avoidances, but he repeats them because they work. Most of the public doesn’t watch much of this stuff. What seems like an unforgivable betrayal of the American people to me seems like liberal whining by a snowflake to others. The simple answers are so much easier to wrap your head around, so much easier to repeat.
These are truly consistent responses to these question. What other segue’s can you identify? Are there more that are just as consistent?
There won’t be too many. KISS principle, Keep It Simple Stupid. Not too much to memorize, just a few easy responses. They will handle almost anything that comes your way.
Ok, boys! Run it again!