Opinion
By Tom Thorne
President Donald J. Trump’s populist message of Tweets releasing alleged policy statements, announcements of White House hirings and firings are wrapped inside lies and propaganda that has become so common that it now almost passes for normal. Trump uses social media as his press office. He needs no one but himself to do this work. White House media relations staff are sacrificial lambs for his media beat up.
Trump’s press officers live in a world where they rarely know what they can expect from Trump and certainly have brought the management of embarrassment in their job to a comedy of errors that offer late night talk shows lots of Trump fodder. They walk a fine line of denial, filling in innuendo that often drifts towards lying. Trump’s press office is largely a group that denies, clarifies or sets aside Trump Tweets with lame excuses for the president’s excesses.
Of course Trump’s contempt for the White House press corp and all media outlets is well known. They are, in his view, all providers of “false news” or they are biased and he makes it plain that his information spewing bypasses them and goes directly to the public or more to the point to his populist base.
By defying the norms of White House media relations, Trump creates a situation where only in depth journalism can hope to come close to dealing with where the White House is on any topic or issue. Hence books and longer analytical pieces are beginning to surface to get the low down on the Trump White House.
Trump Tweets, of course, always deny any journalistic attempts to analyze or uncover his daily announcements and motives. It’s all false news to Trump. False news stands in the way of Making America Great Again.
Congress seems content on the whole to pass without too much comment Trump’s Tweets. They poo poo sometimes but waffle a lot. Only when a senator or congressman plans not to run in the mid term elections do we see any response to the madness rampant in the White House. After all they are the swamp that Trump says he needs to drain. The swamp meme is Trump’s propaganda that blames Congress for not making America great again.
Trump of course is all propaganda and demagoguery. His approach is a mind tutored and shaped by the the worst excesses of the Information Age. Trump intrinsically and instinctually understands that today there is too much information. He uses new social short hand social media by making Tweetable points that his base can grasp. Then he flies at huge public expense to his base public rallies where it can be re-spewed in acid dollops of information that can be grasped as making America great again or slapping down those who don’t support this idea.
Trump is becoming a cultural meme that encodes a mindless set of behaviours that are unsupported and without facts so they can be grasped easily by the untutored minds like his own. In an Information Age where information creates knowledge complexity Trump breaks through with simplicity. Most of his Tweets end with Make America Great Again or versions on this theme.
Everything he touches by Tweet falls on this meme and it is rehashed in his public rallies so the practitioners of false news can cover his successes. Notice that Trump never fails. He just moves on focused on making America great again. Criticism no matter how detailed is scoffed off with hatred, riddle and contempt for those who don’t support his populist propaganda.
Mythical walls are being built, jobs are being taken back from China, taxes are being cut all in the name of Making America Great Again. Trade deals are bad (all of them) unless they make America great again. Worthy trading partners in NAFTA are suspect if they don’t ensure that America is made great again.
Actually Trump understands the meme. Keep it simple stupid. Tell the same story over and over again and it will stick with the base who got you to the White House. These are old techniques of advertising and political propaganda. They defy the nature of a complex post industrial information based society. they return us just in time to a simpler model by holding information and knowledge in contempt. In Trump’s retro world coal is OK and climate change is a myth.
That is why media organizations are false news. They are part of the post industrial information society that is destroying America in Trump’s view. Only by denying them can Trump make America great again which means returning to something that has disappeared. Jobs for example are fewer because of automation. To Donald Trump jobs were shipped to Mexico and China. That is unfair. That denies a great America.
Nostalgia for a simpler time is a powerful message that in an information society with endless internet, artificial intelligence and automated high technologies become a threat to jobs in America’s factories. Trump’s propaganda appeals to conservative minds of the lowest order. People who see science and technology as bad. People see ideas such as Darwin’s evolutionary ideas as going against God. Vice President Mike Pence is the leader of the Trump base. He is on record as saying that he will check the theory of evolution after he dies and gets to heaven.
So to make America great again we knock the environment, automation, trading partners, immigrants, refugees and Congressional leaders. Trump spins his simple message because he does not understand the nature of post industrial society. His term is a four year retro experience for a time that is gone. If we are fortunate the term will be truncated by impeachment but then we would get Mike Pence in the White House.
