Tag: Trump

How bullies “joke”

Keilar and Murtaugh
From https://www.cnn.com/videos/politics/2020/06/22/keilar-murtaugh-rally-coronavirus-joke-vpx.cnn

On Sunday, June 21, Brianna Keilar interviewed Tim Murtaugh (Director of Communications for Trump’s 2020 election) about Trump’s speech at the disastrous Tulsa rally. She showed a clip of Trump talking about COVID testing, during which he says, “Here’s the bad part. When you do testing to that extent, you’re going to find more people, you’ll find more cases. So, I said to my people slow the testing down, please.” Here’s the exchange between Keilar and Murtaugh about that clip:

KEILAR: Is that true, he’s asked for the testing to be slowed down?

MURTAUGH: No, it’s not. As a matter of fact, the United States leads the world in testing. We’ve tested more than 25 million Americans —

(CROSSTALK)

KEILAR: So, why is he saying that then?

MURTAUGH: I understand there’s not a lot of a sense of humor at CNN. He was joking. When you expand testing, you will naturally detect the number of cases. That’s the very point he was making. I’m not surprised you’re unable or unwilling to understand the president has a tongue-in-cheek remark there. But that was the point he’s making.

KEILAR: I mean, Tim, 120,000 Americans dead. I do not think that is funny. Do you?

MURTAUGH: He was trying to illustrate the point that when you expand testing —

(CROSSTALK)

KEILAR: You said it’s a joke?

MURTAUGH: — in fact, leading the world. You can often use ironic humor —

(CROSSTALK)

KEILAR: Is it funny, Tim?

MURTAUGH: He was trying to use —

KEILAR: Dead Americans? Unemployed Americans? Is that funny to you?
MURTAUGH: You can ask it 100 different ways. But the point the president was making —

KEILAR: And you won’t answer it. And there’s a reason why.

MURTAUGH: I am answering it. The president was illustrating the point that American testing has expanded to such lengths that we are now detecting more positive cases.

It stands to reason — it stands to reason we will have more positive cases when you do more testing. That’s just a fact.

KEILAR: You are aware that that hospitalization numbers disprove what you are saying. That testing does not solely account for the numbers we’re seeing, including Florida, a state you just held up as a model, which is certainly is not.

It is not funny that Americans are dying. It’s not funny that they’re unemployed.”

This interaction is painfully familiar to anyone who has tried to have a useful conversation (or set a boundary) with a bully. Bullies deliberately hurt a victim, in front of an audience of supporters and enablers, and then escalate the pain by simultaneously acknowledging and denying the deliberate injury. The cruelty is the point; it is the pleasure.

One of the ways that bullies simultaneously deny, acknowledge, and intensify the pain is through saying, “It’s just a joke, and you can’t take a joke.” While acknowledging that you’ve been hurt, and that they know it, they’re saying that they have no intention of apologizing for or even avoiding future instances of the injury. It’s a dominance move—the cruelty is the point. And it isn’t that they don’t care about feelings, or are particularly (or even any) good at taking a joke. Think about how thin-skinned Trump is, or how badly (and often violently) bullies respond when the joke is on them. It’s “Fuck your feelings.”

Murtaugh was claiming that Trump was “just” joking about reducing COVID testing. And Murtaugh got aggressive about it, saying that he wouldn’t expect that CNN would be able to see the joke, being humorless.

This is a talking point on the right (the Proud Boys, neo-Nazis, and white supremacists especially like it): that “liberals” are humorless scolds. (It’s a very gendered insult.) Bullies want to be able to hurt others, without any accountability, and shifting the issue to “liberals”‘ lack of humor is a way they think they evade accountability. It often works.

As an aside, I’ll say that I think it’s possible to make jokes about awful subjects—that kind of dark humor is sometimes the only way to keep from crying. But Murtaugh had blocked himself off from that route of defense by having accused CNN of being humorless. Someone engaged in dark humor doesn’t think the situation is humorous; it’s bleak, and dark humor is an admission of just how grim it is.

Keilar responded by naming what he was doing: “I mean, Tim, 120,000 Americans dead. I do not think that is funny. Do you?”

And he fell apart, unable to answer her question. He had tried to make the issue her lack of sense of humor, and she threw it right back at him, drawing attention to the implication: that dead and dying Americans is something people should find humorous. He deflated like a tired balloon.

“He was joking” was how the White House and Trump campaign tried to spin Trump’s statement that he would order a reduction in testing just to make the numbers go down (since the rising numbers make Trump look bad). Trump, however, betrayed them all, saying, “I don’t kid.”

And, in fact, the Trump Administration ended funding for COVID testing in five states. So, Trump wasn’t kidding, and his Administration is reducing testing. Or it isn’t. Some representatives of the Trump Administration are claiming this reduction of funding will not reduce testing (as are many Trump apologists).

So what is going on? They’re contradicting each other. Either Trump was kidding, and he was lying (or forgetting?) when he said he doesn’t kid, or else he wasn’t kidding, and he’s incompetent as a President, unable to get his Administration to do what he has “ordered.” Either way, that isn’t particularly funny.

But what is funny is what happened to Murtaugh. He and other Trump apologists had, again, been left hanging in the breeze, trying to deflect attention away from the chaos of the Trump Administration, and instead ended up looking like lying fools serving a chaotic and impulsive Trump. Joke’s on them.

I said dark humor is sometimes necessary.


The one rhetoric to rule them all

books about demagoguery

When people think about rhetorical effectiveness, we imagine ourselves as the audience, and so we tend to universalize from our experience. If it appeals to us, we call it “effective,” as though our judgment is the only one that matters. And we condemn anyone who uses a strategy that doesn’t appeal to us as engaging in “ineffective” rhetoric.

But we really disagree.

Liberals (people who want progressive change, but gradually, and from within existing political, ideological, and media systems) get really uncomfortable with conflict, violations of civility, negative campaigns, what they perceive as “personal attacks.” They turn away from that; they advocate “positive” rhetorical strategies, that find common ground, humanize the opposition, and avoid calling anyone racism.

Some leftists (call them social democrats) think in terms of policies, and so they think that we need to keep the message on policy issues. In my experience, they tend to be more tolerant of conflict than liberals, as long as it’s conflict about policies. (I put myself in this category.) Some leftists (call them heirs to the Enlightenment) believe that they are advocating the right policies, and so we need to slam the opposition (which is anyone who has an even mildly different from them) and hold out for the right policies, refusing any kind of compromise. They advocate finding a political figure who refuses to compromise and promoting that figure.

I could go on. There are lots of other positions conventionally categorized as “leftist” that I’m not talking about. My point isn’t to create an exhaustive taxonomy of “the left,” but to show that people who have a very similar end in terms of policy agenda have very different standards about “effective” rhetoric.

I also think every one of these positions (and a bunch of the ones I’m not listing) is valid. There are times when finding common ground, kindness, and listening is a wonderful approach. Projects like Hands Across the Hills and Divided We Fall are tremendously valuable. But even they show that this deeper and more charitable understanding of people who disagree with us doesn’t generally lead to changing positions on policy issues.

What’s a little misleading about the three examples above is that I’ve only used positions for which there is a match between the rhetorical and political preferences, and that isn’t always the case. (There are people who are deeply committed to the kind of policy agenda often called “far left” and the civility model of rhetoric, for instance.). Sticking with examples where the rhetoric and politics match just makes the topic easier to discuss.

Speaking of which, as I keep saying, I think the whole tendency to reduce our complicated policy and ideological options to left v. right (whether a binary or continuum) is gerfucked. But, because it is the way we talk about politics in the US, that false binary is hard to avoid (much like trying to talk about racism in the US without talking about white v. black).

The media is committed to the left/right binary because it enables the horse race frame, which people mistake as “neutral.” It’s also simply easier. Reporting that relies on analyses of policy agenda is slower, takes more expertise, and requires a deeper understanding of history and politics than journalism majors provide. The left/right binary makes marketing more straightforward, and it’s more profitable. It’s easier to get a loyal audience for a network or outlet (and advertisers like loyal audiences) by appealing to us v. them (right v. left), and generating outrage about Them. Outrage is good for the bottom line.

Paradoxically, living within an informational enclave enables people who are in fact highly factional in our beliefs and behavior to imagine ourselves to be independent thinkers. A person who watches Fox all the time might take pride in their not always agreeing with what they see; sometimes they side with Wall Street Journal (or they brag that they never watch Fox, and get all their information from The Blaze). Or, we might say that Rachel Maddow is too extreme (or not extreme enough), and we’re independent thinkers because we don’t agree with everything in The Nation.

If we accept the false binary (or continuum) then we’re likely to essentialize the opposition (attributing the same beliefs and motives to everyone who disagrees). And that brings us back to the point of this post (you thought I’d lost it): we shouldn’t assume that all audiences are the same. In addition to the fact that we might have wildly different goals in a disagreement (discussed elsewhere), even if we’re talking about trying to persuade someone to agree on a specific policy, the kind of strategy we most prefer might not be the one most effective with them.

Right now, I’m seeing a lot of critics of Trump who are arguing with each other about the best way to try to persuade his supporters to stop supporting him, or at least hold him accountable. There are people who argue we should let the little stuff (his tendency to drink water with two hands) go, and focus on his corruption of democratic institutions (such as reframing SCOTUS decisions in terms of support for him personally, his demands for loyalty), or on his policies. I don’t think we have to choose one.

Some of his supporters are Followers, and, as I’ve argued elsewhere, rational discourse is not the way to persuade them to change their support. Their support doesn’t have a rational basis. Some of his supporters are strategic—they loathe him personally, and are very worried about his policies, but they believe that Joe Biden wants to turn the US into the USSR (except with more homosexuality), and so they sincerely believe they have no choice. I think that’s a position that’s open to persuasion, but it involves persuading them first that they need to get a broader range of sources of information, and that means trying to do something about inoculation. There are people who argue that there is no difference between Biden and Trump, so there’s no point in voting (a stance that benefits Trump more than it does Biden). A fair number of those people are trolls, but not all. I haven’t found that they’re open to rational argumentation, but maybe I haven’t found the right strategies.

People have different reasons for supporting Trump, and are different in terms of what rhetorical strategies will be effective for them. The search for the one rhetoric to rule them all is fruitless.


Trump was wrong to advocate hydroxychloroquine

Five men falsely accused and imprisoned
Image from https://www.history.com/topics/1980s/central-park-five

Trump advocated using hydroxychloroquine; a lot of studies said it was unsafe. Now, because two of the studies that said it was unsafe have been questioned on the grounds of the motives of the people engaged in the study, many people are saying that Trump was right after all, and that shows that people who criticized Trump were wrong. I’ll begin by saying that I think it’s possible that hydroxychloroquine is a good choice in treating COVID—studies are all over the place, and I don’t have the expertise to assess treatment choices. But, even if all the experts and researchers end up deciding that it is a good treatment, Trump was wrong to advocate it. Because he doesn’t have the expertise to make that kind of recommendation.

The episode got polarized and factionalized quickly, and in a way that epitomizes most of what’s wrong with current American public discourse. For supporters of Trump, if it turns out that hydroxychloroquine is a valid treatment, then that would be proof that his critics are factional, and their criticism of him is irrational.

First, notice that that’s projection. That defense of Trump, that reframing of a question about whether it was a responsible thing for a President to say into a referendum on whether supporters or critics of Trump are entirely right—that is factionalism. (I’m not saying that they’re the only ones who factionalize everything; as I said, this situation is typical of American public discourse.) And the argument about whether it’s responsible for a popular President with no scientific or medical expertise to give medical advice is that it’s irrational for him to be making medical recommendations.

Second, if it turns out to have been a good recommendation, that doesn’t confirm that Trump was right to make it because he could have been wrong. Part of what is at stake in this disagreement is about how knowledge works. This is hard to explain, but what I mean is that, for some people, the world is a stable place that can be known, directly, by anyone with good judgment. A person with good judgment can, with no training or expertise, look at any situation and see the truth. That fantasy of judgment that transcends fields is often called “universal genius,” and it’s an important part of the myth of charismatic leadership.

For followers who are in a “charismatic leadership” relationship with Trump, the issue of hydroxychloroquine is a referendum on whether Trump has that “universal genius”—for them, if it turns out that it is a good treatment, then that is proof that is a person with that kind of untrained and yet universally valid insight.

Except it isn’t a referendum on whether he has universal genius. Because if it turns out to be an unwise treatment, his followers won’t abandon that belief and his insight. He’s already been wrong about lots of things, including whether hydroxychloroquine has harmful side effects. One of the more important midjudgments on his part, particularly relevant right now, was his calling for the execution of five innocent men. So, Trump doesn’t have universal genius (no one does), but that isn’t really my point. The important point is that, for people who believe in “universal genius” or information-free insight, it is a belief that can be proven, but not disproven.

It’s irrational.

“Universal genius” is supported, I’m saying, through a form of “survivorship bias”—a cognitive bias in which only the survivors are noticed. It happens in popular advice on success and business a lot. An article might look at “what the richest people know about success” or “how the most successful people manage their time.” Looking at what the successful people—the survivors—have in common doesn’t mean we can infer what caused them to be successful; they might simply have been lucky. Nassim Taleb has a nice analogy for this kind of bias. If a thousand people play Russian roulette, some (very small) number of people will manage to pull the trigger five times without harm. Interviewing those people to see what strategy they shared will not get us good information about how to win at Russian roulette.

If we only look at the time that a person happened to be right, then we can believe that a person has this extraordinary insight. And that’s what happens with arguments about police violence.

I was very puzzled after the Trayvon Martin murder because defenders of the killing said it was a justified shooting, since Trayvon Martin had texts describing himself as “gangsta”—a fact that George Zimmerman didn’t know. I kept trying to point out to people that playing a tough guy in texts does not carry the death penalty, and Zimmerman didn’t know any of that anyway, so Zimmerman’s shooting was racially motivated and reckless at best. He had no evidence for shooting Martin. Eventually, I came to understand that they saw the information about Martin that Zimmerman didn’t have as proof that Martin was a bad person, and they believed that George Zimmerman saw the signs. Zimmerman, they believed, had made an information-free judgment because of a kind of “bad guy” detector—an ability to read the signs of badness.

If pundits and reporters can turn up negative information about the victim—information the shooter didn’t have—then a lot of people will perceive the shooting as oddly retroactively justified. If the victim can be framed as a bad person, then they “deserved” getting shot, a desert that the shooter magically perceived via signs (rather than evidence).

This, like the issue of Trump and hydroxychloroquine, is a belief that can be proven, but not disproven. People who want to justify police violence look for information that the victim was a bad person and therefore deserved it, information that the police officer didn’t have at the time. And information about crimes that don’t have the death penalty attached. The officer, they believe, saw the signs.

The signs aren’t universally valid—that Zimmerman has a more problematic record than Martin isn’t retroactively proof that Zimmerman was the bad guy. The signs only point one way.

There isn’t “universal genius.” There isn’t information-free extraordinary insight. There is, however, confirmation bias.






On being nice to Trump supporters

people arguing
From the cover of Wayne Booth’s _Modern Dogma-

Cicero, in De Inventione, said that, if you are presenting an argument with which your audience already agrees, you land your thesis in the introduction. If you are arguing for something your audience disagrees, you delay your thesis. Oddly enough, as I’ve taught a lot of workshops across the disciplines for scholarly writing, I’ve found that Cicero is right. When people are making an argument their audience doesn’t want to hear, they delay their thesis, even in scholarly arguments (they have a partition instead, or sometimes a false thesis).

I have always required that my students write to a reasonable and informed opposition, and that means delaying their thesis, delaying their claims till after they’ve given evidence, beginning by fairly representing the opposition, getting evidence from sources their opposition would consider reliable, giving a lot of evidence, and explaining it well. I don’t have those requirements because I think this is what all teachers should teach–we shouldn’t. Since student writing requires announcing a thesis, giving minimal explanation, starting paragraphs with main claims, and various other non-persuasive strategies, it is responsible for people teaching the genre of college writing to teach students how to do that. I’m describing that pedagogy because I want it clear that I understand the value of reaching out to an audience and trying to find common ground.

The hope of rhetoric is that we can avoid violence by talking.

We use violence when we believe that we are in a world of existential threat, when we believe that the out-group is engaging in actions that might exterminate us. Sometimes that belief is an accurate assessment of our situation—Native Americans through the entire nineteenth century, Jews in Nazi Germany, free African Americans in the antebellum era, powerful African Americans in most of the nineteenth and twentieth century, Armenians in Turkey, and so on. Whether violence or non-violence is the most strategic choice for the people being threatened with extermination is an interesting argument. For me, whether third-party groups should use violence to stop the extermination is not an interesting argument. The answer is yes.

Sometimes the rhetoric of in-group extermination is simultaneously right and irrational. Antebellum white supremacists correctly understood that abolition would mean that their political monopoly would end were African Americans allowed to vote. Their sense of existential threat was the consequence of so closely and irrationally identifying with white supremacy–with believing that losing that system was essentially extermination. It wasn’t; it was just losing the monopoly of power. Racist demagoguery enabled them to persuade themselves that, because they were threatened with extermination, they were not held by any bounds of ethics, Christianity, legality.

That’s how demagoguery about existential threat works, and that’s what it’s intended to do. It’s designed to get people to overcome normal notions that we should follow the law, be fair to others, listen to others, treat children well, be compassionate, behave according to the ethical requirements of the religion we claim to follow, and so on by saying that, while we are totally ethical people, right now we have to set all that aside–because we’re faced with extermination. When, actually, we’re just faced with losing privilege. That connection is sheer demagoguery.

Republicans now correctly understand that allowing everyone to vote would end their political monopoly. White evangelicals correctly realized that they were losing the political power they had with Bush and Reagan. Coal miners are faced with a world that doesn’t need a lot of people to have that job. Racists, homophobes, and bigots of various kinds are being told they need to STFU. None of these groups are faced with being actually exterminated, but they are faced with their political power being lessened. And too many people in those groups listen to media that has taken the Two-Minute Hate to 24/7 demagoguery about existential threat.

Trump supporters have spent years drinking deep from the Flavor-Aid of the pro-GOP Outrage Machine, and so they believe a lot of things. They believe they’re the real victims here, that the media is against them, that white people are about to be persecuted, that there is no legitimate criticism of their position, that libruls have nothing but contempt for them and think they’re racist,that they are so threatened with extermination that anything done on their behalf is justified.

And here I have to stop and say that authoritarians (regardless of where they are on the political spectrum, and authoritarians are all over the place, but at any given time they tend to congregate on a few spots) misunderstand the concept of analogy. If, for instance, I say that supporters of Hitler reasoned the same way that squirrel haters are now reasoning, I am not saying that they are the same people (or dogs) in every way. I am not making an identity argument; I am making an argument about reasoning.

But, all over the political spectrum, people who are, actually, reasoning the way that people who supported the Nazis reasoned, are outraged at the comparison. It isn’t a comparison about identity; it’s a comparison about methods of reasoning.

We aren’t in a crisis of facts. Everyone has facts. We’re in a crisis of meta-cognition. We have a President who is severely cognitively impaired and obviously declining rapidly, fires people who disagree with him, can’t make a coherent argument for his policies, doesn’t argue from a consistent set of principles. Trump supporters can find ways to support him, but none of those ways fit all the other ways, let alone are ways that explain their opposition to out-group members. The debacle about ingesting disinfectants is just the latest.

We are at a point when the defenses of Trump are that he doesn’t have the skills to be President–he is thin-skinned (he was so obsessed with impeachment that he couldn’t pay attention to anything else), lies all the time (his height, weight, the number of people at his inauguration, whether he was talking to Birx), forces other people to lie on his behalf (such as Trump supporters lying that he was so obsessed with impeachment he couldn’t do anything else, although he also said that wasn’t true), refuses to listen to anyone (which his supporters defend by blaming the disloyal people), gives briefings when he doesn’t actually know what he’s talking about (every briefing), and often says things that aren’t what he meant (every defense of Trump).

What I’m saying is that Trump supporters grant all the criticisms of Trump–their argument is that he’s incompetent.

But their defenses of him show something about them–that they can’t put forward a rational defense of him. I mean “rational” in the way that theorists of argumentation use the term. They can’t put forward an argument for Trump without violating most of rules of rational-critical argumentation. (And, I’d love to be proven wrong on this, so if any Trump supporters want to show me an argument for him that follows that rules, I’d love to see it.)

In other words, support for Trump isn’t about any kind of rational support for his enhancing democratic deliberation, nor even his trying to ground his political decisions and rhetoric in a coherent ideology, but a “fuck libruls, we’re winning” rabid tribal loyalty that eats its own premises.

Trump happens to be the most obvious example right now, but, again, all over the political spectrum are people who can’t defend their positions in a coherent and consistent way. They can defend their positions—but by giving evidence that relies on a major premise they don’t believe, engaging in kettle logic, or whaddaboutism.

If we’re paying attention to Cicero, then we should find common ground with them, be fair to their representation of their own argument, and delay our theses. And, as I said, I think that is great advice.

But it isn’t useful advice when we’re arguing with people who, as soon as they sense you are going to criticize them, refuse to listen because they think they know what you are going to argue, and they know they shouldn’t listen. People well-trained in what the rhetoric scholars Chaim Perelman and Lucie Olbrecths-Tyteca called “philosophical paired terms” just assume that, if you’re saying Trump isn’t the best, then you are part of the ruling elite–just as Stalinists used to say that Trotsky must be a capitalist, since he criticized Stalin; Nazis said that anyone who criticized Hitler must be a Jew; anyone who opposed McCarthy was a communist; slavers said that anyone who criticized slavery must want a race war. If you aren’t with us, you are against us.

In the 1830s, the major critics of slavery were predominantly Quakers and free African Americans who described slavery accurately, but that (accurate, it should be emphasized) description hurt the feelings of slavers.

Slavers and pro-slavery rhetors said that any criticism of slavery was an incitement to slave rebellion. Much like pro-Trump rhetoric that inadvertently gives away the game–their argument is that he doesn’t have the skillset to be a good President–this rhetoric gave away that slaves hated being slaves, and that the actual conditions of slavery were indefensible.

Many people tone-policed the anti-slavery rhetors (to the extent of having a gag rule in Congress, which is pretty amazing if you think about it). Oddly enough, some anti-slavery rhetors said that these (accurate) descriptions of individual slavers beating and raping slaves were inflammatory, and so some of them tried to write conciliatory anti-slavery tracts. They were accused of fomenting slave rebellion.

Individuals can be persuaded to change their ways on the basis of individual interactions, and there are a lot of anecdotes saying that can work. That’s how individuals leave cults, for instance. But conciliatory rhetoric to groups of people who are drinking deep from a propaganda well is a waste of time.

If you have a personal connection to someone who is a Trump supporter, then building on that personal connection might work, but it’s worth noting that the notion of being able to change people is why people stay in abusive relationships.

But, when we’re talking about relative strangers–the strange world of social media interlocutors–then I don’t think engaging the claims is as useful as pointing out the inability to follow the basic rules of rational-critical argumentation. When people are fanatically committed to an ideology that is internally incoherent and incapable of defended in rational-critical argumentation—and that’s where support of Trump is now—no level of “let’s be inviting to them” will persuade them. It’s worth the time to be precise in our criticisms of their position, but not because being precise will be more or less rhetorically effective. It’s worth the time to be right.

People in rhetoric need to understand that some people are engaged in good faith argumentation, and some aren’t, and we behave toward them differently.

It is impossible to defend Trump through rational-critical argumentation.

Shaming Trump supporters on that point is a good rhetorical strategy. Whether you do that through conciliation with individuals or through generally pointing it out is an audience choice.







How persuasion happens

train wreck

Some time in the 1980s, my father said that he had always been opposed to the Vietnam War. My brother asked, appropriately enough, “Then who the hell was that man in our house in the 60s?”

That story is a little gem of how persuasion happens, and how people deny it.

I have a friend who was raised in a fundagelical world, who has changed zir mind on the question of religion, and who cites various studies to say that people aren’t persuaded by studies. That’s interesting.

For reasons I can’t explain, far too much research about persuasion involves giving people who are strongly committed to a point of view new information and then concluding that they’re idiots for not changing their minds. They would be idiots for changing their mind because they’re given new information while in a lab. They would be idiots for changing their mind because they get one source that tells them that they’re wrong.

We change our minds, but, at least on big issues, it happens slowly, due to a lot of factors, and we often don’t notice because we forget what we once believed.

Many years ago, I started asking students about times they had changed their minds. Slightly fewer many years ago, I stopped asking because I got the same answers over and over. And what my students told me was much like what books like Leaving the Fold, books by and about people who have left cults, changed their minds about Hell or creationism, and various friends said. They rarely described an instance when they changed their mind on an important issue because they were given one fact or one argument. Often, they dug in under those circumstances—temporarily.

But we do change our minds, and there are lots of ways that happens, and the best of them are about a long, slow process of recognition that a belief is unsustainable.[1] Rob Schenck’s Costly Grace reads much like memoirs of people who left cults, or who changed their minds about evolution or Hell. They heard the counterarguments for years, and dismissed them for years, but, at some point, maintaining faith in creationism, the cult, the leader of the cult, just took too much work.

But why that moment? I think that people change their minds in different ways partially because our commitments come from different passions.

In another post I wrote about how some people are Followers. They want to be part of a group that is winning all the time (or, paradoxically, that is victimized). They will stop being part of that group when it fails to satisfy that need for totalized belonging, or when they can no longer maintain the narrative that their group is pounding on Goliath. At that point, they’ll suddenly forget that they were ever part of the group (or claim that, in their hearts, they always dissented, something Arendt noted about many Germans after Hitler was defeated).

Some people are passionate about their ideology, and are relentless at proving everyone else wrong by showing, deductively, that those people are wrong. They do so by arguing from their own premises and then cherry-picking data to support that ideology. They deflect (generally through various attempts at stasis shift) if you point out that their beliefs are non-falsifiable. These are the people that Philip Tetlock described as hedgehogs. Not only are hedgehogs wrong a lot—they don’t do better than a monkey throwing darts—but they don’t remember being wrong because they misremember their original predictions. The consequence is that they can’t learn from their mistakes.

Some people have created a career or public identity about advocating a particular faction, ideology, product, and are passionate about defending every step into charlatanism they take in the course of defending that cult, faction, ideology. Interestingly enough, it’s often these people who do end up changing their minds, and what they describe is a kind of “straw that breaks the camel’s back” situation. People who leave cults often describe a sudden moment when they say, “I just can’t do this.” And then they see all the things that led up to that moment. A collection of memoirs of people who abandoned creationism has several that specifically mention discovering the large overlap in DNA between humans and primates as the data that pushed them over the edge. But, again, that data was the final push–it wasn’t the only one.

Some people are passionate about politics, and about various political goals (theocracy, democratic socialism, libertarianism, neoliberalism, anarchy, third-way neoliberalism, originalism) and are willing to compromise to achieve the goals of their political ideology. In my experience, people like this are relatively open to new information about means, and so they look as though they’re much more open to persuasion, but even they won’t abandon a long-time commitment because of one argument or one piece of data—they too shift position only after a lot of data.

At this point, I think that supporting Trump is in the first and third category. There is plenty of evidence that he is mentally unstable, thin-skinned, corrupt, unethical, vindictive, racist, authoritarian, dishonest, and even dangerous. There really isn’t a deductive argument to make for him, since he doesn’t have a consistent commitment to (or expression of) any economic, political, or judicial theory, and he certainly doesn’t have a principled commitment to any particular religious view. It’s all about what helps him in the moment, in terms of his ego and wealth. That’s why defenders of his keep getting their defenses entangled, and end up engaging in kettle logic. (I never borrowed your kettle, it had a whole in it when I borrowed it, and it was fine when I returned it.)

The consequence of Trump’s pure narcissism (and mental instability) and lack of principled commitment to any consistent ideology is that Trump regularly contradicts himself, as well as talking points his supporters have been loyally repeating, abandons policies they’ve been passionately advocating on his behalf, and leaves them defending statements that are nearly indefensible. What a lot of Trump critics might not realize is that Trump keeps leaving his loyal supporters looking stupid, fanatical, gullible, or some combination of all three. He isn’t even giving them good talking points, and many of the defenses and deflections are embarrassing.

For a long time, I was hesitant to shame them, since an important part of the pro-GOP rhetoric is that “libruls” look down on regular people like them. I was worried that expressing contempt for the embarrassingly bad (internally contradictory, incoherent, counterfactual, revisionist) talking points would reinforce that talking point. And I think that’s a judgment that people have to make on an individual basis, to the extent that they are talking about Trump with people they know well—should they avoid coming across as contemptuous?

But for strangers, I think that shaming can work because it brings to the forefront that Trump is setting his followers up to be embarrassed. That means he is, if not actually failing, at least not fully succeeding at what a leader is supposed to do for his followers. The whole point in being a loyal follower is that the leader rewards that loyalty. The follower gets honor and success by proxy, by being a member of a group that is crushing it. That success by proxy comes from Trump’s continual success, his stigginit to the libs, and his giving them rhetorical tactics that will make “libs” look dumb. Instead, he’s making them look dumb. So, pointing out that their loyal repetition of pro-Trump talking points is making them look foolish is putting more straw on that camel’s back.

Supporting Trump, I’m saying, is at this point largely a question of loyalty. Pointing out that their loyalty is neither returned nor rewarded is the strategy that I think will eventually work. But it will take a lot of repetition.



[1] Conversions to cults, otoh, involve a sudden embrace of this cult’s narrative, one that erases all ambiguity and uncertainty.

Abolitionist conspiracies, leftists as the “ruling class,” and the pleasure of implausible scapegoating

In the mid-1830s, the British writer Harriet Martineau visited the United States, and she found many slavers who were up in arms about the American Abolition Society having “flooded” the South with an anti-slavery pamphlet. She asked whether any of them had actually seen the pamphlet, and was met with outrage—how could she doubt the word of gentlemen? A lot of people didn’t doubt the word of those “gentlemen,” and the myth of the 1835 massive pamphlet mailing remains in history books (Fanatical Schemes, see especially 149-150, and Gentlemen of Property and Standing). It never happened. Martineau had already met with the people who had sent pamphlets to one post office, and who had agreed to send no more, so she suspected (correctly) that it hadn’t. She didn’t tell the slavers they were wrong, but she did ask what evidence they had, and their “evidence” was that their personal certainty, and the certainty of reliable people, all grounded in what their media said.

This mythical event was brought up in the next Congress, and people acted on the basis of a thing that never happened. The antebellum era had a lot of instances of that kind of thing—the fabricated Murrell conspiracy, various non-existent abolitionist plots, Catholic conspiracies against democracy.

People believed those myths for two reasons (which might actually be one): those myths were repeated endlessly by in-group (us) media, and those myths fit the overall narrative of that in-group media.[1] That overall narrative was one common to cultures of demagoguery: yes, we have a lot of problems, and it might look as though those problems are the consequence of slavery. But they aren’t! All of those problems are caused by the actions of Them.

Slavery had an almost endless number of ethical, practical, and rhetorical contradictions. People who claimed to be Christian rejected and deflected Jesus’ very clear commandment to “do unto others as you would have do unto you” (all cultures of demagoguery fail that test); they ignored, denied, and deflected very clear rules in Scripture about how to treat slaves; they reframed the very clear instructions about caring for the poor and weak as the need to enslave them. In short, Scripture is pretty clear: do unto others as you would have done unto you, take care of the poor and marginal. The problem for people who want to enslave, exterminate, or oppress others and yet want to see themselves as Christian is always how do we reconcile the cognitive dissonance?

We reconcile that cognitive dissonance through myths. And, oddly enough, the people who are now rationalizing a system that grinds the faces of the poor engage in the same non-falsifiable and extraordinarily self-serving myth in which slavers engaged: that people who are oppressed deserve their oppression.

This is an example of the just world model, the notion that bad things only happen to bad people, and that people who succeed earned that success, and that poor people are poor, not because of structural inequities, greed on the part of the wealthy, but because our system is too kind to the poor, making them choose to be poor.

From a Judeo-Christian perspective, the notion that we should be crueler to the poor in order to inspire them to be less poor requires a lot of intricate dancing in regard to Scriptural interpretation, with some ignoring or engaging in intricate explanations of anything Jesus said, in favor of open cherry-picking of the Hebrew Bible. It also requires a lot of intricate dancing in terms of data, with some serious cherry-picking. But, really, when people have decided that Jesus’ saying “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you” doesn’t actually mean, well, doing unto others as you would have them do unto you, they can swallow a camel.

And they swallow a camel by swallowing circular arguments. Given that people whom we oppress are inferior, we can conclude they are inferior. Given that people who are poor deserve being poor, we can conclude that they deserve to be poor. Given that POC should be treated differently, we can conclude that they are different. Given that only inferior races are enslaved, we can conclude that those races are inferior. Given that we need to believe that slaves are happy, slaves are happy.

There are similar myths now: the American military is unbeatable, the free market solves all problems, government does everything wrong, cutting taxes boosts the economy, if you have enough faith you will be healthy and wealthy. People who are or were deeply committed to those myths have (or had) to explain slave rebellions, military quagmires, famines, situations in which even libertarians want the government to intervene, such as the Tea Party political figures who were outraged with what Obama did in 2008, but are now voting for a bigger bailout.

Failure presents people, and a community, with an opportunity to reflect sensibly on what we’ve been doing and thinking. The collapse of a relationship, failing a test, getting fired–these are all opportunities for us to tell stories about ourselves in which we behave differently.

Or not.

I had a friend who kept getting dumped because, his girlfriends said, he was too critical. I tried to suggest that maybe he should be less critical, but he insisted women were wrong not to appreciate how he was trying to help them. I used to have friends who lost money on timeshares multiple times. Maria Konnikova’s fascinating The Confidence Game describes how con artists con the same people multiple times.

Instead of reconsidering our commitment to an ideology, narrative, or sense of ourselves (a path that would admitting to people we were wrong, losing face, reconsidering all sorts of beliefs and relationships) we have the option of treating this situation as an exception. And it’s an exception either because of a lack of will—so if we recommit to our problematic ideology with greater will, then it will work. In other words, instead of the failure of a policy or ideology being an indication we should reconsider it, the problem is that we didn’t beleeeeeve in it strongly enough, and the failure is proof that it was the right course of action all along.

(No matter how times I see people react that way—and it happens in all the communities I’ve studied that ended up in train wrecks—it surprises me.)

Recommitting with greater will is almost always paired with scapegoating some group. They are the reason that our flawless plan keeps failing. And because They are so cunning and nefarious, we are justified in more extreme measures.

Normally, we tell ourselves and anyone who will listen, we would be kind to slaves, take care of the poor, respect the law (and so on), but we are forced to be heartless and suspend laws by Them. And what continually surprises me about the effectiveness of this scapegoating is how completely implausible the scapegoats are. Slavers picked on abolitionists—who, at the time they started getting scapegoated, were a tiny group of mostly Quakers. Hardly very threatening, and extremely unlikely to be fomenting race war.

Mid-19th century fantasies of a Catholic conspiracy to overthrow the United States involved a highly improbable collaboration among Irish, Italian, and German Catholics (the Irish wouldn’t even let the Italians worship with them in New York, let alone share political power) led by the Hapsburg Emperor and the Pope.

The Nazi fantasy about Jews had them as both communists and capitalists, a neat trick, and was persuasive enough that people accused any critic of Nazism of being either a Jew or a stooge of the Jews. As the scholar of rhetoric Kenneth Burke pointed out, that there appears to be a contradiction was taken by true believers as proof of the cleverness of the Jews.

Rush Limbaugh scapegoats liberals, who are “the ruling class.” As with the scapegoating of abolitionists or Jews, this scapegoating is simultaneously an elaborate and contradictory narrative, in which government employees, university professors (especially in the humanities), and environmentalists (hardly people with a lot of economic or political power), funded by George Soros and Bill Gates, are more powerful than actual billionaires who are actually in political office.

That this narrative is implausible and incoherent—if libruls were that powerful, they wouldn’t be grading first-year composition papers—just shows the cleverness of the libruls (as the apparent impossibility of an effective conspiracy of abolitionists, Catholics, Jews was evidence of the brilliant plan). Libruls are like the evil villains in old movies, who, instead of just shooting the hero, create Rube Goldberg machines to kill the hero and his sidekick.

The inchoate nature of the conspiracy (what, exactly, is the goal of the librul conspiracy? To work in the Post Office? Surely clever people would come up with a better endgame than that) means that Limbaugh can’t be proven wrong, that anything and everything can be blamed on the ruling elite, and no evidence that the GOP is actually the problem needs to be considered.

The American Anti-Slavery Society never flooded slave states with pamphlets; the problems with slavery weren’t caused by abolitionists.

[1] “In-group” doesn’t mean the group that’s in power, but the group people are in.

Unification through a common enemy and a failure of leadership

Photo of Americans being sent to concentration camps
https://anchoreditions.com/blog/dorothea-lange-censored-photographs

A sociologist friend and I were talking about how deeply entrenched it is for people to think in terms of in- and out-groups (Us v. Them), and he joked that the only thing that could unite humanity was an attack from outer space. And there’s something to that—in rhetoric, it’s sometimes called “unification through a common enemy.” The rhetoric scholar Kenneth Burke, in 1939, published an article in which he pointed out that that was one of Hitler’s strategies for uniting Germans. It’s how a lot of families function—everyone is mad at each other until they can agree how much they hate Aunt Agnes. I’ve seen fractious departments unify against an upper administrator. Churchill unified a deeply divided country when its existence was threatened by Nazism—his speeches continually spoke to a common, shared identity, and a common effort (FDR was much the same).

Those four examples show that the impulses that cause us to unite in our shared division can range from the trivial (the family dislikes the aunt, the department dislikes the Dean) to somewhat more important (if the Aunt is trying to defraud the family or the dean is trying to defund the department) to the very existence being threatened (as in the case of the UK). But what of the missing fourth example—Germany?

Germany is a strange case, because many Germans felt deeply threatened by various things— a world economic collapse that threatened large numbers of people with poverty and unemployment. Many Germans also felt threatened by the secularization of education, losses of privilege, modernization of various kinds, and their sense of group was esteem was threatened by the disastrous outcome of the Great War. But their existence wasn’t threatened; their prestige as a nation was, but not their existence as a nation.

But they became persuaded it was. The irony, of course, was that this belief in existential threat was a self-fulfilling prophecy. Germans, persuaded that the Reichstag Fire demonstrated an existential threat, put in power a leader and party that would, actually, lead to the extermination of Germany as a nation, and the extermination of between five and eight million Germans (with about 500,000 killed as part of the racial and political purification programs).

Athens, in the fifth century BCE, was facing an existential threat in the form of the Spartans. Instead of uniting as a city-state to fight that threat, they were more concerned with the existential threat to their faction, to the possibility that the other faction might exterminate them, and so focused their energy on exterminating the other. And they lost the war to Sparta.

What I’m saying is that the existential threat doesn’t have to be real for it to be really effective at unifying, and having a real existential threat doesn’t necessarily unify. What makes the difference is the rhetoric of the leadership.

Churchill and FDR responded to existential threat with a rhetoric that tried to unify the entire country, even the political parties that had recently been their worst critics. Both had opposition members in their cabinets. Both listened to people who disagreed (Kershaw’s Fateful Choices describes their decision-making processes, and how much they relied on thoughtful attention to the opposition, elegantly.) FDR and Churchill used the existential threat to transcend factionalism. Hitler and the demagogues of Athens manufactured or used the existential threat in order to amplify the factionalism, to equate opposition groups and critics with the external threat, and thereby enable elimination of fellow citizens. Instead of trying to unify a people, their goal was purification through extermination of the opposition.

In a way, COVID-19 is the external threat my sociologist friend joked about. It could be the moment of unification, a moment when we transcend factional disagreement in order to unify against this disease. It could be that moment if political leadership decides to make it that.

Promoting unity is hard, and nobody does it perfectly, but some do it better than others. FDR allowed a rhetoric of internal purification to lead to massive race-based imprisonment, and Churchill treated India as only sort of unified with the UK (enemy enough for mass starvation). But they were better than Hitler or the Athenian demagogues, and they resisted even more extreme forms of internal purification.

We’re in a culture of demagoguery, in which every issue is not just us v. them, but treated as a zero-sum war of existential threat between us and them. Someone saying “Happy Holidays” threatens Christians with extermination because it’s part of the “war on Christmas.” Requiring vaccines is a war on liberty. Trying to reduce poverty is a war. Treating every issue as a war means treating people who disagree with our policy agenda as traitors. That’s a bad idea.

We do have a common enemy in the form of COVID-19; we need a leadership that enables us to transcend our differences to work together. The last thing we need is a leader who exacerbates internal animosity, who openly tries to exterminate dissent, who has a fragile ego that has to be stroked, who refuses to listen to anyone who disagrees, and who is now openly toying with exterminating democracy itself. We need someone even better than FDR, not someone even worse than Cleon.

Bad math, belief, and half Nazis

The above are two very popular tweets (as you can see from the likes), and they rely on a way of thinking about political choices that is often popular. The argument is that you shouldn’t vote for this person because s/he is still in a category of evil people.

You see it all over the political spectrum (we need to stop talking about either a binary or single-line continuum of political positions—it’s false and damaging, and it fuels demagoguery). In 2016, there were informational enclaves that said that people should vote against HRC because she was a socialist, fascist, neoliberal, and therefore no different from Stalin, Hitler, Thatcher.

It’s a way of arguing that eats its own premises, and yet it’s so often persuasive. For instance, the argument that you shouldn’t vote for Biden because he’s half the nazi that Trump is has the major premise that you should never choose the thing that is twice as good.

Of course you should choose the thing that is twice as good. You should buy the car that is twice as good, rent the apartment that is twice as good, take the job that is twice as good. When we’re deciding about a car, apartment, or job, we can do that math, but, when it comes to politics, suddenly people can’t see that half a fascist is twice as good as a full fascist, let alone whether Biden is half a fascist.

So, why do people who can take an imperfect apartment that is twice as good as their other option, when it comes to politics, reject taking an option that is twice as good as the other?

There are a lot of reasons. Here, I want to mention two. First, politics is tied up with identity in a way that getting an apartment usually isn’t (although, people I’ve known for whom their apartment is closely attached to their identity have the same bad math—an apartment twice as good as the other is just as bad as the other); second, people who reason deductively often have false narratives about the past, or don’t care about what has happened. A politics of purity is often connected to a belief in belief.

The first move in that argument is to treat everyone who disagrees with us as in the Other category. There are good arguments that Trump is fairly high on the fascism scale (although with some important caveats, particularly about individualism), but Biden is not a fascist. He’s a third-way neoliberal. But, really, when people are making this kind of argument—HRC is basically Stalin, Sanders is Castro, HRC is Trump—they aren’t putting the argument forward as some kind of invitation to a nuanced discussion about political ideologies. It’s a hyperbolic appeal to purity politics.

Like all hyperbole, the main function of the claim is that it is a performance of in-group fanatical commitment, a demonstration of loyalty on the part of the speaker. The point is to demonstrate that they think in terms of us or them, and they are purely opposed to them.

That seems like a responsible political posture because, in cultures of demagoguery, there are a lot of people (who are bad at math) who decide that being purely committed to the in-group is the right course of action, regardless of whether that has ever worked in the past. They believe that we can succeed if we purely commit to a pure commitment to a pure in-group set of pure policies. That way of thinking about politics—the way to win in politics is to refuse to compromise—is all over the political spectrum.

And, I just want to emphasize: the math is bad. A half-nazi is actually better than a full nazi. A leader who would have done half what Hitler did would have been better than Hitler. Unless you are thinking in terms of purity, and so you don’t actually care about how many people are killed, in which case you’ve fallen into what George Orwell, the democratic socialist, called the fallacy of saying that half a loaf is the same as nothing at all. If you’re hungry, half a loaf is still half a loaf.

A friend once compared it to the trolley problem, in which a person refuses to pull the lever that involves being a participant in an action they really dislike in order to prevent a much worse outcome. I’m not a big fan of the trolley problem as an actual test of ethical judgment, but I think the metaphor is good—it’s a question of whether a person who refused to act (pull a lever that would cause one person to die rather than five) feels that this failure to act is more ethical than acting. When I talk to people who are in this kind of ethical dilemma, it’s clear that they are balking at that moment of their grabbing the lever—they want the trolley to shift tracks; they don’t want Trump to get reelected; they just don’t want to pull the lever.

That was complicated, but all I’m saying is that it’s a question of whether people recognize sins of omission. They don’t object to Biden getting elected; they object to voting for him.

So, how has that worked out in the past? I can’t think of a time when refusing to vote because one candidate was half as bad as the other has worked to lead to a better political situation (but I’m open to persuasion on this), but I can think of a lot of times when it hasn’t. I’ll mention one. It happens to be a time that people could vote for half-nazis, and liberals tried to persuade voters to do exactly that.  

It’s important to remember that the Weimar Communists could have prevented Hitler from coming to power by being willing to form a coalition government, but they wouldn’t because, they said, every other political party (including the democratic socialists) were, basically, fascists.

I’m not saying that compromising principles is always a good choice; a lot of people made the mistake of thinking that they could work with Hitler, that they should stay in his administration (or on his military staff) so that they could try to control him or, at least, direct him toward better actions. They couldn’t. Within a couple of years of his being installed as Chancellor, all the people in his administration who were going to try to moderate him were either fired or radicalized. It took longer with the military, and in that case the people who tried to control him were fired, strategically complacent, or radicalized. But it was the same outcome. There was no working with Hitler—there was only working for him.

If we want to prevent another Hitler, then we have to vote against him.

Trump’s border rhetoric/policies and COVID-19

a small concrete ball with an entrance
A four-person bomb shelter in Munich

Right now, I’m seeing a lot of people say that the COVID-19 crisis proves that Trump was right in his controversial policies to shut down the borders. I’m seeing it in enough different places that it’s clearly become a talking point getting repeated as a truism in pro-Trump media and communities. It’s a really interesting argument because many people think it’s a clobber argument—one that should end the argument. But critics of Trump don’t find it all that persuasive. Why not?

There are a lot of reasons, including that some people won’t grant Trump credit for anything (just as there are Trump supporters who won’t acknowledge any criticism of him)—that’s just rabid factionalism.

Another reason has to do with how people think about politics (and lots of other things). Many people reason associatively. There’s a famous quiz for testing thinking processes that has questions like this:

There is a group of women, 30% of whom are librarians, and 70% of whom are nurses. Mary is one of those women, and she is 35. What are the chances that she is a librarian?

A. 10-40%
B. 40-60%
C. 60-80%
D. 80-100%

A fair number of people will pick 30%.

If the example is:

There is a group of women, 30% of whom are librarians, and 70% of whom are nurses. Mary is one of those women, and she is 35 and wears glasses. What are the chances that she is a librarian?

A. 10-40%
B. 40-60%
C. 60-80%
D. 80-100%

Under those circumstances, a fair number of people will pick a higher percentage, as though the added detail “wears glasses” changes the chances of her being a librarian. But, that detail doesn’t change the chances—there are, as far as I know, no studies showing that librarians are more likely to wear glasses than nurses. Wearing glasses is something we associate with librarians, largely because of movies and TV. It isn’t logically related, but associatively.

Another example of that kind of thinking is to ask one group of people how many calories a meal has, such as a meal consisting of 6 ounces of poached chicken breast and 1 cup of rice, and to ask another group of people about the calories of a meal consisting of 6 ounces of poached chicken breast, 1 cup of rice, and a salad (4 ounces mixed green lettuces, 3 cherry tomatoes, and 1 tablespoon oil and vinegar dressing). A lot of people will give the meal with the salad fewer calories than the one without. (Sometimes even the same people will give the meal with the salad fewer calories than the one without.)

Of course, the meal with the salad has more calories, but people think it doesn’t because salads are associated with healthy food, and healthy eating is associated with consuming fewer calories.

A few years ago, I had a funny conversation with someone about McDonald’s—they said that they got the fried chicken sandwiches rather than any of the hamburgers (even though they liked the hamburgers more) because it had fewer calories than any of the hamburgers. Actually, it doesn’t. Again, it’s a question of association—chicken is associated with healthy food, and so this person was simply assuming that chicken sandwiches had fewer calories. I had a similar conversation with someone who bragged that she didn’t let her children drink milk for health reasons; she gave them fruit juice instead.

I once lived somewhere that, several years before, had had a series of burglaries that took place in the middle of the day, while people were away at work. Several of the neighbors responded by leaving very bright outdoor lights on all night, and that’s an interesting response. It wasn’t going to make any difference as far as preventing the burglaries—they happened during the day. But daytime burglaries are burglaries, and they’re associated with danger. And leaving lights on during the night is associated with safety, with safety against a different kind of burglary, but one that’s still associated with daytime burglaries.

So, did the policy of leaving lights on protect those neighbors against the burglars who were active in the neighborhood? No, but it protected them against something, and so seemed like a good policy.

When we’re frightened, we have a tendency to believe that protecting our borders (physical, biological, ideological) is a good plan, simply because it’s associated with protection—regardless of whether that particular way of protecting our borders will actually prevent the outcome about which we’re frightened. We protect our house against one kind of burglary, but not the one actually threatening us.

Trump’s policies regarding “borders” has as much logical relevance to COVID-19 as leaving lights on all night had for daytime burglaries. Trump’s policies were (and are) about blocking land-based immigration from Mexico and any immigration (or travel) from various Muslim countries. He never did anything about Americans travelling to and from China, and that’s how we got COVID-19. As Jeff Goodell says, “In fact, the travel ban was a failure before it began. “You can’t hermetically seal the United States off from the rest of the world,” Rice says. For one thing, the ban only applied to Chinese citizens, not to Americans coming home from China or other international travelers, or to cargo that was coming into the U.S. from China.”

His rhetoric associated various Others as evil and dangerous, but never in a way that would have kept the US safe from this virus. And, despite what many people who are repeating the talking point about his policies being right seem to think, Trump got his way with his travel bans. They went into effect.

So, this talking point is simply saying that Trump was right to make Americans fearful about our borders, but he didn’t make Americans fearful about borders. He made Americans fearful about Mexicans and Muslims, and now he’s trying to make us fear the Chinese. Viruses don’t have a race, and they don’t see race. Building the wall wouldn’t have prevented COVID-19. His travel ban (which was instituted) didn’t prevent COVID-19. His second travel ban (about which he bragged) was ineffective.

That Trump’s rhetoric is a rhetoric of fear of Others, and that his policies are associated with that fear, doesn’t mean his policies were effective. That two (or more) things are associated in our minds is not actually proof that they are either causally or logically connected. They’re just associated in our mind, and sometimes someone’s rhetoric.