A reader of my June 28 blog asked just exactly how President
Trump’s Twitter comments are “playing”
the media and his opponents, as I suggested in that post. Those of you who have
read Scott Adam’s 2017 book Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts
Don’t Matter, or Robert Caldini’s 2007 book Influence: The Psychology of
Persuasion, or his 2017 book Pre-suasion: A Revolutionary Way to
Influence and Persuasion, already know the answer.
In essence Trump is making use of the very same automatic
human mental and emotional responses that canny advertisers and negotiators and
political spin doctors use; he is just unusually good at it. We all like to
think we are mostly rational, but it just isn’t so – we are all controlled more
by emotional cues and mental shortcuts. And these work even when we understand
them. As Scott Adams points out, we all know perfectly well that $9.99 is
really $10.00, and yet…… We all know perfectly well that the TV comedy we are watching
has a canned laugh track, and yet…..
The primary thing that his outrageous comments do is to take
the oxygen away from his opponents by dominating the media cycles, just as he
did in the primaries. When one of his outrageous twitter comments comes out the
media plays it up and it drowns out anything his opponents might have been saying
or proposing. A few in the media (but
probably not many) may understand what he is doing, but it doesn’t matter
because it all drives audience share and the media owners and the talking heads
love it – it helps their sales and their careers. And of course he gets
billions of dollars worth of free media coverage.
The second thing it does is establish the agenda. What people
focus on becomes at that moment the most important thing in their mind, a principle
advertisers understand well. So when he makes an outrageous twitter comment
that everyone talks about, that established where their focus is and makes that
topic, and him, of central importance in their minds. It also keeps the focus on him and away from
his opponents. There is an old actor’s saying ”I don’t care what they print about me so long as they spell my name
right”, or in another version “any
publicity is good publicity”. Both recognize that name recognition and
focus are the key in the long term – not content.
And then these statements on twitter or in interviews are
often clever examples of “framing” or “anchoring” – establishing associations,
even unconscious associations, that prepare the ground for later messages. It
sets us up for things like confirmation bias. If these are unfamiliar terms,
read the books listed above.
Finally it keeps the opposition on the back foot, always
sputtering ineffectually with outrage and moral indignation, and focused on virtue
signaling to their peers and herd reinforcement rather than on pragmatic
planning for regaining power.
And this all works. That’s why I say Trump is “playing” the
media and the opposition. And by the way, the media also use these techniques to
advance their own agendas; they just aren’t quite as good at it as he is.
None of this is particularly comforting. It’s not
comfortable to think we can be so easily manipulated, but we are, and it happens
to all of us every day. Why else do we buy so much stuff we really don’t need,
or believe politicians who make promises we know perfectly well they couldn’t
keep even if they intended to?
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