Trump's Trolls

A recent article in the Atlantic about Trump adviser Stephen Miller has forced me to re-examine his tactics as a politician. Because for certain, though 45 seems to beclown himself at every turn, Donald Trump (or at least the people who advise him) is an extraordinarily canny media manipulator. It's time to gird our egos against the fact that Donald Trump, and the people behind him, are not stupid. They may even be smarter than we are, and they are definitely winning. His rudeness is a ruse, and we are being played by assholes mistaken for morons.

When he was in high school, Stephen Miller was running for student government and asked his fellow students: "Am I the only one who is sick and tired of being told to pick up my trash when we have plenty of janitors who are paid to do it for us?" John Oliver ran a clip of this on his show, to jeers from his audience and a punchline comparing Miller to a minion. It may seem as though Oliver got one up on him, only if you discount that this is exactly the reaction Miller wanted. He admitted as much in his Atlantic interview. By responding with smug outrage, his fellow students--and John Oliver, and those of us who laughed with him--are following a script Stephen Miller himself has spent years writing.

Those of us with a moral centre have a hard time accepting this. We've been taught that nice guys win. That disrespect is intolerable. Faced with a person who does not want to be liked, we convince ourselves that they do really care what they think, and are just socially incompetent. In this way we can feel superior to the Stephen Millers and Donald Trumps of the world, consoling ourselves with the belief that they must be stupid.

Donald Trump won the election, despite a host of outrages that I'm sure I don't need to remind you of here, and his base continues to support him through scandal after scandal. Your liberal tears are not Republican Kryptonite. If they were, Trump and his cronies would not be harvesting them so diligently. And they are harvesting them. None of this is accidental.

Consider the G7 which ran June 8-9 this year (the precise dates are actually important). The summit was played in the media as a disaster for President Trump. And though it was certainly a disaster for America's standing in the free world, there is no reason to believe it played out any way other than how Trump and co. intended.

The G7 is not a surprise, impromptu gathering. These summits happen annually and their dates and locations are agreed upon far in advance. Meaning Trump's decision on June 1st to not exempt key allies from steel and aluminum tariffs barely a week before the summit was an engineered insult, and not merely a buffoon falling ass-backwards into international outrage. So agrees Bruce Heyman, the former U.S. ambassador to Canada. Appearing on The Agenda With Steve Paikin he said:

"Of course a lot of the allies were shocked over this, but said of course we're going to have to respond and retaliate. And the White House sat there and pretended to be shocked by that. I think it was...it had to be anticipated."

Heyman goes further, regarding Trump's incediary tweet after the Prime Minister politely reaffirmed that he would retaliate with tariffs, he adds --"[He] could have just come out and said 'Thank You' to everyone for coming, and I think that they would have sent that tweet out and been upset because I think it was staged."

Trump showed up to the summit late and made it his first priority to ask that Russia be readmitted to the "G8", knowing full well there was no way that request would be granted. The G8 became the G7 when Russia invaded Crimea. Putin has not returned the disputed territory, and in the mean time has been interfering in elections, shooting down passenger jets and poisoning people on British soil. We know this. It's time to recognize that Trump also knows this, and begin by asking ourselves what he has to gain from it.

Trump adviser David Navarro more or less admitted the G7 fiasco was a calculated show of strength to impress the leader of North Korea, though Donald Trump also never shies away from a chance to appear under attack by a biased media, who seemed to take the bait and accept that Trump really is dumb enough to expect the G7 to forsake their own trade interests and forgive Russia just because he asked.

The latest "scandal" just wrapped up on the border: 2,300 children separated from their parents and caged in facilities which include an abandoned WalMart, sleeping on the floor under thermal blankets, all for the crime of fleeing a home country torn apart by war and gang violence.

Cable news airwaves filled up with heartrending footage of children in cages. The U.N. Human Rights Council condemned it (the U.S. responded by withdrawing, claiming that in doing so they were defending Israel).  It was a public relations nightmare. A humanitarian disgrace.

And also the best thing that's happened to the Trump camp all year.

It's difficult to imagine how a democratically elected person could benefit from such callous, cruel behaviour out in the open. But lets give it a shot: Trump has made so many false statements, it gets hard to distinguish the truly dangerous from the merely annoying  or silly (especially when so many people are determined to have a laugh at his supposed stupidity). But this one is important:

Serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California - so why isn't the media reporting on this? Serious bias - big problem!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 28, 2016

There is no evidence to support his claim that millions of people are voting illegally. And yet in the dark recesses of the internet, the belief sunk its claws into a substantial slice of the voting public, so much so that CNN was able to find so called "normal" Americans who believed it when they did a round table discussion with Trump voters.

He went on:

Serious voter fraud in Virginia, New Hampshire and California - so why isn't the media reporting on this? Serious bias - big problem!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 28, 2016

Through this humanitarian nightmare, American T.V.s are now covered in images of illegal immigrants. News anchors urgently emphasize the staggering number of children being held: after only six weeks of enforcing their "zero tolerance" policy, more than two thousand children have been separated from their parents. Democratic lawmakers make a show of trying to gain access to the facilities holding them only to be turned away. Recall that another of Donald Trump's favorite tropes is the idea that Democrats are soft on immigration because they want the illegals to vote for them (in the millions, or so he would have you believe).

One needn't seek out shady Facebook links anymore. The "proof" is broadcast twenty four hours a day by the most trusted name in news. 2,000 children, they say. Well there must be at least 10,000 adults, one might reason. And in only six weeks! Cable news and Liberal outrage have brought scores of illegal immigrants to the forefront of America's mind, lending credence to the premise of Trump's falsehoods: We are flooded with illegals. The Democrats and the media reveal that their true allegiance lies exactly where Trump voters always guessed it did.

Sure, they don't want to see children suffer. Trump said so himself when he made a show of signing an executive order meant to end this nightmare. He claims credit for cleaning up a mess he created, then blamed on Democrats. The real coup is that for the last two weeks the White House has watched their supposed enemies fill the airwaves with "proof" that illegals are, in fact, flooding the country. And that the Democrats do, in fact, feel more kinship to them than "real" Americans.

Are we to keep believing that Trump and his trolls are actually morons, who lucked into this, and every other victory they've had? That one can actually blunder into the White House?

No reasonable person can deny that the Trump administration engineers outrage as a prop. His top adviser admitted as much in his Atlantic profile. Its time to think seriously about what they're gaining from it. It may be hard to accept that you could be outmatched by someone so wholly repugnant, and yet every day it seems clearer that we are all reading from a script written in his hand.

What is there to do then? Should we not stand up to cruelty? Should we keep silent as he alienates allies and cozies up to dictators? Turn a blind eye to racism? Sexism? Corrption?

I don't know. A person this anti-social is hard to outplay because they are willing to do things that decent people wouldn't do. At the very least we would do well to distinguish between scandals generated by Trump himself (i.e. the G7), which can be shown time and time again to be stunts, and the scandals unearthed by other people (i.e. Stormy Daniels, The Trump Foundation, The Steele Dossier). It's hard to say "Don't feed the trolls" when they have 2,300 children in captivity, plus  the nuclear codes and control of your economy. An amendment, then: Don't feed the troll what its asking for.