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One of the things that alienates educated Westerners from Trump is the way that he talks. He hardly ever talks in abstract terms. He doesn't qualify or hedge; everything is direct and concrete. Rather than say that he was on one of the later episodes of Oprah's show when they were coming to an end, he will say he was on the last episode. He won't just say that one of Lincoln's sons died, but instead he will name that son Tad. He's always including specific details that he misremembers or aren't all that important. He can't just say that people like Liz Cheney send people into warzones but will never face any real danger themselves, but rather he makes that idea concrete by describing [EDITED] her being pushed onto the frontlines to face death against an overwhelming force. One of the worst parts of his interview with Rogan was when he forgot the name of a boxer in his story. Usually, he would just throw in some name that sounded about right and run with it. However, this time, he didn't, and he tried to talk about "the guy" and the whole story fell to pieces in a mess of vague referents.
I think this is why Trump actually has a lot of cross-cultural appeal, because it's the educated Westerners who are strange. Most people aren't very good at thinking and talking in lawyerly abstractions, studiously avoiding any implication that might not hold up in court. For most of human history, people have used stories about specific people, in specific places, and about specific events to communicate general ideas about society, politics, morality, and even science. Most people aren't good at remembering abstract statements about general categories. However, give them a story fleshed out with questionable details, and they'll remember the gist even after they've forgotten most everything else. Educated Westerners are very good at communicating in abstractions, and they expect their audience to infer details from context. For many people, this kind of speaking might as well be in some kind of secret code language.
One of the most charismatic storytellers I know is an old Christian missionary women who would abhor the thought of voting for Trump, but she is very much like him in personality. She has made her entire life out of convincing people to fund her charitable missionary work. She has an incredible capacity to reach across national, ethnic, and cultural boundaries and communicate with so many different types of people, and she talks just like Trump. Her stories are all too good to be true, and that's because they're not, at least not literally. She didn't really escape from a country descending into civil war on the very last flight out of the airport. The miracles and coincidences in her stories were not really quite so serendipitous or unexpected as she makes them sound. She always embellishes with details that are often lazily misremembered or merged from other events. I don't think for a moment she is trying to be manipulative or deceitful, because she implicitly expects her audience to extract the general meaning from the particulars. The specific names, times, and places are used as placeholders, either approximately true or for illustrative purposes. She does not seem to know how to communicate in any other way.
What's interesting about Trump is that he can't turn this off either. He can't code switch between the two different ways of communicating, and it continually suprises him when he is misinterpreted. This is, I think, one of the reasons he comes across as stupid to educated Westerners, because to them this kind of communication is associated with stupid people. And they're not wrong--this is how stupid people communicate abstract ideas. However, not everyone who commicates like this is stupid, and perhaps most people in the world prefer this way.
I mean, she is literally financially incentivized to lie and embellish. I understand why you would give her the benefit of the doubt because you know her and you respect her motives. But a person like this is inherently impossible to fully trust, because one can never be sure which components of a statement she makes are true, embellished, misremembered, or outright intentionally fabricated. This might be an endearing personality type to have a conversation with, but can you understand why this is a very dangerous personality type to entrust with significant power?
Absolutely, but there are also failure modes to other ways of communicating. Almost all Western politicians are comfortable speaking in lawyerly abstractions, but do you trust them? No, you don't, but you're used to reverse-engineering their words, because you know the word game they're playing. If you're smart, then you can even beat them at this game by twisting their words back on them or holding them to an unintended meaning (e.g. malicious compliance). There is no doubt that Trump's communication style can be exploited to mislead people, but that does not make it unique. I think most ordinary people find Trump's style easier to "reverse-engineer", and so they perceive him as being less misleading than the politician who speaks in technically true abstractions.
Okay but if an average politician makes a specific claim, I can at least assess whether I find that claim persuasive. When they quote a figure at me, or speak about some specific action that was taken, I can easily cross-reference that information to discover the context of what’s being discussed; normal politicians rarely just make up figures, or say things happened when in fact they didn’t happen at all. They might not be giving me the whole story, but I can generally be confident that they’re not telling me a made-up story. At worst they are omitting important context and/or alternate interpretations of the facts they’re discussing. They’re not just making up names, dates, events, etc.
Trump, in contrast, sometimes speaks in such an elliptical and non-specific way that it can be impossible to determine what specific event he’s referring to, or what specific claim he’s actually making. The details he brings up might be half-remembered, or mistaken, or he might be conflating two different things. This is tolerable if it’s some personal anecdote, but if he’s discussing an important matter of political fact, it’s actually really important for him to get all the details right, so that his constituents know what he’s actually talking about. I would rather a politician tell me something true but incomplete/misleading, rather than tell me something false but directionally correct.
This strikes me as incredibly strange for anyone to believe.
What the 'Trump lies like a used car salesman, Democrats lie like lawyers' line is saying is something along the lines of this: who do you prefer, the guy who is trying to sell you a used car as new when there's bullet holes in the dash and bloodstains on the back seat? Or the guy who uses a technicality in court to screw you over? They are very different. The first graft is on you to recognize when the wool is being pulled over your eyes. The second is backed by the full force of an edifice and system of law that is impossible for any single person to challenge without prodigious resources.
When push comes to shove, I doubt that you would choose the first. If you were woken up in the middle of the night by a fire alarm, would you rather someone tell you 'it's a minor disturbance' or 'your sofa is on fire!' If politics matters at all, or if you buy that it's the continuation of war by other means, being directionally correct matters a hell of a lot more than you think it does.
What about a discussion with your boss?
"Are you guys going to fire me?"
"Uhhh nooooooooo."
vs.
"At the time of this meeting we do not plan to fire you anytime soon."
With the former I'm going to be aware and can plan accordingly, with the latter I might be fooled by any of the technicalities in that sentence or the more proficient lying.
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