So, in the first post I mainly focused on the geography of Trump’s campaign and how that turned the tides of mainly Democratic states to his side. The previous one was based on the electoral college which everyone was complaining about immediately after the election. Now for this post, there’s a little homework required: watching about 3 minutes of a John Oliver video to help introduce my point for this blog.
Hopefully it starts around 6:15 but if not that’s where we’re heading with this.
So as John Oliver points out, since Trump has been elected, a lot of news surrounding the (many) controversies has been discussed about, with the simple phrase of “what about” added on branching us to a completely different topic. Now, like Oliver said in the clip, it’s not really a “new” revelation that this is a way to divert attention, we see it all the time. When we try to bring up gun control, there’s always the “What about if someone had a gun during the shooting?” or “What about knives, those are dangerous yet we don’t ban those?” And this type of discussion is in no way only seen from the right side, topics like abortion also have it in their discussions: “What about rape victims, should they be allowed to get abortions?” And while ‘Whataboutism’ is a fun word to say, I decided to take this down a different road: and look at deflection.
These two topics technically go hand in hand together, but if I’m being 100% truthful and honest, it’s what Trump is the best at, so it’s worth looking at. Deflection is all about turning what you’ve been asked into a completely different conversation. In this case, the ‘what about’ is simply a bridge when being directly talked to. But, we don’t just get our news straight from the mouth of Trump. We get it from the tweets. I decided to go onto Trump’s twitter (his personal one not the official @POTUS since we all know the real news comes from his own twitter), scrolled all the way down to January 1st of this year, (this is the first tweet of the new year from him for reference https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/947802588174577664), and pressed Ctrl+F and typed in key words that he commonly uses for deflection purposes, and counted up how many times he uses them in a tweet, from January 1st to March 28th.
(*the Fox search includes hyperlinks with fox in them and the times he has specifically @ foxandfriends)
Those were my results, and while there is no time frame for how often these were spread out, it’s safe to assume some words like Hillary and Wrong were phased out of his Twitter Vocabulary early on. Words like Democrat makes sense to stay around, since he needs to call them out every time they block a policy of his, and Obama is fine considering the previous administration. What I found interesting was the word ‘Fake’. We’ve all been drowned in the amount of times we’ve had to talk about ‘fake news’ before, be it from other blogs or just in life, so details are being spared here. But, that just makes his tactic of deflection so much easier. As of me writing this, he has 49.6 Million followers on his personal account for Twitter, and we all know whenever something comes up his fingers go right to the phone for some nice 280 character action, so that’s about 50 million people getting updated from Trump. If he sees something he doesn’t like, say (insert news about one of probably a dozen controversies here) he just has to add the magic 4 letter f-word and millions will believe him.
This part is an aside that I found interesting while on his twitter feel free to skip.
So I saw that his personal account only had 24 liked posts. So me being curious I looked at them. His most recent liked post is from December 23, 2017 (https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/944667102312566784). Also interesting is that he has a liked post from his son on November 8th, 2016, then they go blank until Easter of last year. Just a fun fact that I thought was interesting since that’s probably the only time in my life I’ll look through his twitter.
Back on Track
So, wrapping us all the way back to 2016 when we thought Trump running for president was just a nice joke and there was no way he could win, there could be many arguments made on how exactly he won. I’m going to stick my proverbial foot and say he won because of his deflection abilities. Trump says ‘grab ’em by the pussy,’ yeah, but what about Hillary and the Democrats running Pizzagate, the underground sex trafficking business run out of a pizzeria. Trump won’t release his tax returns? Yeah, but what about Clinton’s e-mails? His own ploy of making his issues, some bad some harmless to be fair, seem either: On the same level as some mistakes, or less terrible, led him to effectively con-manning America. As much as Trump can be criticized for his actions, knowledge, whatever, it takes a hell of a man to make it seem like someone in politics for as long as Clinton was the worst options between her and a reality TV host.