There is a pro-Trump website telling Trump supporters “how to win an argument with your liberal relatives.” One of the main arguments for Trump was (and is) that he would get the best people to work for and with him. So, this is the argument that the best people make for Trump, or, in other words, the best argument for Trump. Does this “best arguments for Trump” webpage have good arguments?
Someone making a rational argument
- makes claims supported with good evidence, and so presents sources for claims;
- can identify the conditions under which they would change their mind;
- has claims that are logically connected, avoids fallacies, and applies standards across groups (so, for instance, if you want to say that you are appalled at feeding squirrels, you are just as appalled at in-group squirrel-feeding as you are at out-group squirrel-feeding);
- engages the best out-group arguments, or, engaging a specific set of claims that aren’t good arguments, then at least the out-group claims are being presented accurately.
Engaging in rational argumentation isn’t very hard, and it’s easy to do if you’ve actually got a good argument. Rational argumentation isn’t about what claims you make, and whether they seem true to people who already agree, nor whether people making the claims think they’re unemotional. Rational argumentation involves a fairly low bar; it’s just the list above. And that list isn’t controversial.
If you take it out the realm of politics (where people are especially tribal), then it’s clear that “rational argumentation” is actually “sensible ways to think about conflict.” Imagine that you have a boss who says that you should be fired because reasons. You’d be outraged (justifiably) if your boss couldn’t cite sources, was just operating from in-group bias, unfairly represented what you’d said, and wasn’t listening. That’s a shitty boss. And it’s reasonable for you to ask that your boss make a decision about firing you rationally.
That’s a shitty boss because it’s a person who is making decisions badly. And we’ve all had that boss. What would it be like if we extrapolated from that shitty boss, who made decisions badly, to our own tendency to make decisions badly? What if we’re all the shitty boss?
But back to the Trump page—does it present good arguments? It fails every one of the criteria for rational argumentation.
For instance, it not only fails to link to sources to support its claims but it never links to an opposition.
Why not? Why not link to data that would support the claims it’s making? Why not link to the opposition with their, supposedly, terrible arguments? Well, perhaps because it can’t because then it would be clear how false the page’s claims are. Take one example. On two of the links, the claim is that “the 2020 Democrats are the ones who want to strip you of your private, employer-provided health insurance!” (“Trump approach”) That’s a lie in two different ways. First, some of the main candidates argue for something, single-payer health care, that might cause people to choose not to get health insurance from their employment, but instead from the government-based insurance—that’s what the pro-Trump healthcare page goes on to argue. So, the Dems don’t “want” to strip people of their private insurance—some Dem candidates want to give people a choice. (Sanders is the only one who has unequivocally said he would get rid of private insurance, not something, by the way, that a President can do without Congress.) If, as the pro-Trump page claims, so many people leave private insurance that the rates become unmanageable that would be because the government-funded insurance program is better than the private. In other words, this argument is an admission that the current system is inadequate.
Second, many Democratic candidates have not endorsed any such plan, so the claim that “the Dems” are advocating it is simply a lie. If what you’re saying is true, you don’t have to lie.
There is only one place that the site gives a link—to Biden saying that he insisted that a Ukrainian prosecutor get fired. The page admits that this claim has been debunked, but without any explanation or argument¬, insists it’s true. That isn’t an argument: that’s just direct contradiction.
That argument about Biden and the Ukraine is fallacious in that it is tu quoque (or, “you did it too!”). Whether Biden asked that the Ukrainian prosecutor be fired in order to prevent an investigation of his son’s activities has no relevance to whether Trump told Ukraine that he would withhold foreign aid (which he did, in his version of the phone call). Whether Trump is now refusing to allow people to testify in a trial—that is, obstructing justice—has nothing to do with anything Biden did. Tu quoque is how little kids argue—when caught with a hand in the cookie jar, claiming that little Billy also stole cookies is irrelevant. You might both have stolen cookies. But that’s a fallacy that runs throughout the pages—Trump’s reducing environmental protections is good because China is bad. Trump’s healthcare plan is good because the Democrats’ is bad. They might both be bad.
The set of claims about Ukraine has another fallacy that runs throughout the site: it says that “under President Obama, Ukraine never received this kind of lethal military aid AT ALL. It is thanks to President Trump, that the Ukrainians are getting the aid in the first place.” That is an example of the fallacy of equivocation (also called the fallacy of ambiguity), of an argument that is technically correct, but deliberately misleading (much like Bill Clinton’s “it depends upon what is is”). It looks as though it’s saying that Ukraine never got military aid from Obama AT ALL, something that is false. Technically, it’s saying that Ukraine never got “this kind” or “the aid”—meaning the Javelin missiles. That’s technically true, just as it was technically true that Clinton was not, at the very moment, having sex with an intern. But it’s misleading.
It’s hard to argue with someone engaged in equivocation, since it necessitates getting into the technicalities—that’s why people who aren’t arguing in good faith (that is, whose minds are not open to persuasion) engage in it.
Another common strategy of this site is to give Trump credit for what Obama or other Presidents did. For instance, the page on the environment begins, “America’s environmental record is one of the strongest in the world and the U.S. has also been a world leader in reducing carbon emissions for over a decade. We have the cleanest air on record and remain a global leader for access to clean drinking water.” Notice that this claim is vague, and so hard to disprove (like an ad that says, “We have the best prices”—compared to whom?): what record? Not the world record. It’s seventh. It isn’t even clear to me that the US now has the cleanest air in its record. But we can’t know what the claim is because it gives no sources. Similarly, the claim that “President Trump has taken important steps to restore, preserve, and protect our land, air, and waters” is unsupported, unexplained, and unsourced.
To the extent that the air is cleaner, it’s because of what was done in the past, by other people, particularly Obama, but also the Congress that passed the Clean Air Act and the 1990 Amendments.
The final problem with the page that I’ll mention (I could go on) is one that contributes significantly to the demagoguery of the page (and it is demagoguery): the implication is that anyone who disagrees with Trump is a “liberal,” and that simply isn’t true. A large number of people who believe that Trump should be convicted are conservative.
In short, the page doesn’t engage in rational argumentation. It doesn’t even engage in argument. So, would someone following the script provided by this webpage win any argument with any “liberal”? No. Because they wouldn’t be arguing. They’d be making claims, claims that are sometimes false, often misleading, almost always unsourced, and always unsupported, but never argued.
A person who followed this script and claimed to have won the argument would be like someone who claimed to have won a chess game because they turned over the board and fed the pieces to the dog.
If Trump can’t be supported with rational argumentation, then maybe it isn’t rational to support him.