Trump: Strength in the Negative

A couple of weeks ago, Donald Trump told The Christian Broadcasting Network that Vladimir Putin wanted Hillary Clinton to win.  I have to say that I agree with him.  Rather, it is not so much that Putin wanted her to win, but that he did not anticipate her loss.  In that respect, he is a lot like me, the rest of the world, and most of all, Donald Trump himself.


To understand this we have to look at the world the way that Donald Trump and Putin see the world; in the negative.  Their power comes from two places.  First there is what they say has happened.  Appending reasons and explanations to things that have happened that either are not true or could not be proven is the source of their influence.  In this respect, time is their friend.  President Obama is a secret Muslim?  He was not born in this country?  No, he is not and yes he was.  Still enough time has passed that he can say that he never said that or that Hillary Clinton started the rumors or whatever without ever taking responsibility for what part he has had in it.  As a function of time if he waits long enough or talks long enough, whatever he says is true or at least cannot be proven wrong especially to anyone who does not want to believe he is wrong.

Second, there is the more powerful aspect of what he says will happen.  Here, their power is in the ability to say things could have happened or would have happened if they were in charge.  This is the more powerful aspect of their influence yet it is the finest line they can walk.  During the campaign, Trump painted a picture of chaos and the apocalypse if Hillary Clinton won and people were willing to believe it.  He walked a fine line of having people scared enough to believe these things would happen yet not so much that they would actually elect him to solve those problems if he was actually elected.

Vladimir Putin did have a hand in hacking the election and was going to try harder.  I have a theory and this is just a theory, that this was to be a dry run.  The 2016 election was supposed to just be a pass at hacking to find weaknesses in the system and harrow Hillary Clinton on her way to a narrow victory.  I think the real "attack" would have come in 2020 when Hillary Clinton, fresh off of three years of a hard first term would run for re-election against a more qualified Republican candidate than Trump.  Then would be the hardest hack plans aided by an internal ally, Donald Trump.

Somewhere, in an alternate universe, Donald Trump lost that election.  In that alternate universe he is happy as can be because he lives in the negative.  Imagine an existence where Donald Trump is doing what he has always wanted to do; be in the public eye and catering to a demographic that is his base now; the "deplorables" without the responsibility of having to actually do anything.

If Trump had lost right about now he would likely still be on a whirlwind tour throughout the U.S. speaking to packed stadiums full of hardcore right wingers who swear he DID win and that Hillary Clinton stole the election somehow.  "Rigged" would be on t-shirts all over the country.  Every thing that Hillary Clinton did as president would be parsed and debated through his twitter account and his emerging television station and that old standby, Fox News.  He could rant daily and talk about how she should be arrested and how she is an embarrassment to the U.S.  all day, every day, from the safety and comfort of one of his ever packed properties.

Trump has even been tweeting on a regular basis lately that Jeff Sessions should be investigating Hillary Clinton and that she has gotten away with something.

If anyone said anything about his shady business dealings, he could chalk it up to political retaliation and somehow it would be Hillary Clinton abusing her power.  He and Putin could hang out as much as they wanted and plan for 2020 with Jared Kushner, Paul Manafort, or whomever by the poolside.

In the alternate time line, Donald Trump is suing Hillary Clinton and the Clinton campaign, railing on President Obama and more, all because he can and it would build his ratings and his empire.

Instead, he won.  He is in an awkward position because now he has to make good on all the promises and we are seeing that he simply cannot do it.  He promised a better health plan that is not happening.  He promised a huge wall and while a wall is forthcoming, it is nowhere near what he promised.  He promised that ISIS would be ended in 30 days... nope.  He has been nothing but an embarrassment since day one and now he cannot work in the negative.  He can say that it is the media.  He can say it is the obstructionist Democrats, but it is not.  At a certain point, he is no longer going to be allowed to work in the negative and is going to have to own what says.

The irony is that now Hillary Clinton can now work in the negative.  That is not to say that she should "go low" but she, based on this relatively new way of looking at things, can make a good case for how things would be totally different if she had won.  There are debates about whether or not she made the right decisions while running and how those decisions led to her loss, but soon, those too will go away.  She is free to make speeches or not.  She is free to attack the Trump administration (goodness knows he is presenting a large enough target) and go hiking in the woods on the weekends.  She owes no one, anything.  The same is true for President Obama.  It must all be so liberating for them.  For Trump though?  Not so much.

In this time line Trump and Putin are under tremendous scrutiny.  They are the ones being watched and investigated, as well as their family and their businesses.  Rachel Maddow and MSNBC now have higher ratings than FOX.

I am going to keep writing about this phenomenon in hopes of gaining a deeper understanding of it and what is happening to our country.  We are seeing that people are leaving things at the water's edge when maybe we should be taking a deeper dive.

Follow on Twitter at @writlargepdcst

Mike Flynn as FBI Director. Who is the joke really on?

I am going to be teaching a class on Politics and Media this summer at a university in D.C. and I thought I would talk a little about it here.

So I posted a little piece, out of anger, posing that Mike Flynn had been chosen to replace James Comey as director of the FBI.  I thought it was funny.  Many other people thought it was funny.  Many people did not find it all amusing.
As quickly as a half an hour after posting, it had nearly 1000 page views and people had begun to sound off in the comments section (and still are).

 The breakdown was pretty much as follows...
About 70 percent thought it was funny and took it as the joke that it was.  About 10 percent did not think it was funny at all.  What about the other 20 percent?

That 20 percent explains a lot about who we are as a country.  Most of the time this blog serves as a place where I and others can voice my opinions on politics and elaborate with just a little depth.  This one time, when I had an idea, born of frustration, I wrote something that I thought would be funny and lighten the mood about Comey being fired.

Several people sounded off with the comment that it was not "productive".  I beg to differ. Some read it and thought it was just not funny, but as I said, about 20 percent wondered whether or not it was real and began to go off on other tangents.  Within that 20 percent were people who did not read the comments above theirs and did not read the blog post itself.

Trump has often said that even if Putin interfered with the election (he did) it did not change a single vote.  With an off hand joke, about 20 minutes of thought and writing, I was able to untintentionally get about 3000 people to think differently about something and essentially fool them with a free account.  A few people said that is how they recognized it as a fake post was the fact that this is a blogspot account, not the fact that I said that Sean Spicer threw a smoke bomb after the press briefing and exited the briefing room via a cable in the ceiling.

Also wrapped up in that 20% were the Trump supporting trolls who enter these groups so that they can undermine them from within.  The post was used in some circles to show that we liberals were making stuff up despite, I say again, that it was obviously fake to anyone who took the time to read it.  To people who fell for it, I apologize but I also ask a very big "what if".

Some people say that Vladimir Putin is worth about 70 billion dollars and other reports estimate $200 billion.  So at a minimum, he is one of the richest people in the world if not the richest person in history.  So if a person could do something like this in a matter of minutes, what if a billionaire decided to engage in something of the sort full time?

Also something to consider is that this is a process that refines itself.  What worked, what did not work?  Many people recognized it as a joke right off the bat and pointed out the flaws.  First, that it was a blogspot post.  Easy fix, pay $20 for a web domain.  Done.  Second, the piece led with a comment that "Trump tweeted..." and many people noted that there was not a picture of the tweet and that there were too many characters in the comment.  Got me.  Third, was the fact It became apparent that too many people did not actually click on the post, they just read the headline and blurb beneath it.  In literature, it is called a narrative hook.  So, the takeaway is that if there is a good picture, a grabbing headline and a blurb beneath that is intriguing enough, the rest of the article is irrelevant for many.

In the coming days, if I can, I am going to post this piece in some right wing groups and see how it goes over.  The objective is the same, though.  How hard is it to fool someone?  How difficult is it to engage someone in a narrative that simply ramps up what they wanted to believe in the first place?  Cast your mind back to a year ago when people were saying that Hillary Clinton was on the verge of death and that in her spare time she was raping children in the basement of pizza shop that has no basement and wonder whether or not Putin's antics had an impact on the election.  Take a moment also to think about how easy it was and how much of that is on us.

There are two components at play, the trick and our willingness to be tricked.  I have written my opinion about injustices and the work we do in inner cities, immigration, etc. etc. etc. but by far the greatest response I have ever gotten is over a fake post.

Elijah Montgomery

We tweet at WritLarge
Contact at 9of9productions@gmail.com

Hillary Wins! (conspiracy theory #2) ...This was never supposed to happen.

I think that Putin was the only person more surprised that Donald Trump won than Donald Trump himself.  In retrospect, it seems rather obvious that Trump was woefully unprepared to become President of the United States and if Hillary Clinton had won, he would have been a lot happier.

From the moment Trump took office he seemed surprised to be there.  During the campaign, he had made vague campaign promises about destroying ISIS in 30 days, repealing and replacing Obamacare, bringing back jobs in a horrible economy, and building a great big wall to keep out the Mexicans who are killing us and taking our jobs.  Now that he is in office, he has to live up to those promises or take another route; tell you whose fault it is that he cannot (because it is definitely not his).

I contend that he was never supposed to be there.  It was not what he or Putin wanted.  Do I believe that Putin and the Russians messed with the election?  Yes.  Do I believe that Trump had something to do with it?  Yes and no.

Given Trumps strengths, his best position is to be the guy standing at the podium telling you what is wrong.  He is a mouthpiece.  I suspect that Putin wanted to mes with America and the election and the best way to do that would be to have someone to harangue Hillary Clinton for the duration of the campaign.  Still, I think he wanted her to win and expected she would so that she would be under the microscope for the next four or more years, as Trump is now.

Putin has far more to gain if Hillary wins than having Trump in office, especially with a majority in the House of Representatives and the Senate.  If Hillary had won, right about now, she would be sitting in front of Congress defending every action she has ever taken.  Bill Clinton would be accused of something new.  There would be talk of independent counsels and impeachment and blocking Supreme Court nominees and more.  There is talk about those things now, the only difference is those accusations are being leveled by Democrats.

Trump would have benefited far more if she had won also.  Imagine Trump in Trump tower tweeting about how horrible a job she is doing and IF he was president, everything would be great right about now and everyone would have a pony.  He would be launching a new TV station designed specifically to target the left without actually saying it and essentially becoming FOX 2.0.  He would be free to move about the country, play golf, make deals and suck up all the goodness that comes from saying you could do a better job without ever getting the chance to do it. No one would be asking for his tax returns or phone records.  Trump thrives in the "IF".  Trump was expecting to lose.

There is more value in insinuation and innuendo than there is in proof these days.  Before the election even happened, he was talking about rigging.  Imagine if he had lost.  Every five minutes he would be in tweeting about how "Crooked Hillary" had worked to steal the election.  Look at the troll reaction when Bernie Sanders lost the primary to Hillary.  Retribution was immediate and constant.  In many circles it goes on to this day with people taking any chance to bash Hillary for "stealing the primary".

We are finding out more and more every day about links to Russia but the trail seems to go cold after the election and we are given to wonder how the social media campaign would have changed if she had won.  Was there a larger campaign in place to further tear at her administration?  It would have been a lot easier because no one would be looking at that actual perpetrators as much.  Attempts by President Hillary Clinton to point at the Trump campaign and the Russians would have been dismissed as her trying to cover her tracks and deflect from her "failing presidency".  Trump would have made deal after deal and more and more money.

People keep using the analogy of a dog chasing a car and not knowing what to do when he catches it.  It is apt but I think it goes deeper than that.  Much like that dog, the thrill for the Right and for Trump is in the chase.  It is the exercise that comes from running.  It is the intimidation that others see from a ferocious dog chasing anything.

Putin has no intention of blackmailing President Trump.  He can't, really.  There would be too many people looking and watching a president. He wanted to blackmail and own Trump the private citizen.  Trump the private citizen is where the money and the power are.  He wanted someone powerful in the U.S. not to have power, but to erode and undermine that power over time using a television station, a social media network, and a voice from within the U.S.

The problem was that Putin was too good at it and though the idea was to get as close as possible without actually winning.  He was looking at the same polls we were.  He was listening to the same people we were; people who insisted they were independent and undecided, but not.  Instead he ended up winning and now, shutting down all of those avenues that were constructed to bash Hillary for four years, are leaving a trail.  And speaking of trails, Hillary is probably out hiking right now as the Trump administration collapses.