Political Theatre category archive
Twits on Twitter, the Art of the Con Dept. 0
George Lakoff and Gil Duran consider Donald Trump’s tactical twits. They suggest that he uses twitter to control the discourse and distract the polity. Here’s one of their points:
Trump isn’t a genius. He’s a super salesman, and has been for most of his life.
Now he’s president, and our gullibility to his antics threatens our democracy. That’s because Trump often uses social media to distract from what he’s actually doing, like dismantling our government and robbing the working class to pay off the rich. He often uses his tweet tantrums to “step on” big developments in the Russia investigation, creating a bigger story (“nuclear button!”) to distract attention.
Undiscovered Country 0
Will Bunch decides to cover the uncovered–non-Trump voters. He explains his reasoning:
Follow the link for his findings.
Step One. Step Two. Ste . . . 0
Elie Mystal offers a formula for analyzing the Trump administration’s legal maneuvers.
Dialectic 0
Jay Bookman identifies the tragic and dangerous internal contraction of Trumpery. A snippet:
A Trumpled Christmas 0
Thom runs down some of the actions of the Trump administration while you were celebrating the holidays.
A Toxic Environment 0
Warning: Language
“So Much Winning . . . .” 0
Josh Marshall announces the winners of The 2017 Golden Dukes awards.
The Six Styles of Trump 0
Continuing in a numerical vein, I commend Steve Yetiv’s enumeration of six perspectives on Donald Trump to your attention. Here’s a couple:
Loopy Trump: This perspective offers a different story. It is about Trump’s mentality. It asks us to see Trump as both insecure and overconfident (“I know more about ISIS than the generals do”), narcissistic (“I alone can fix it”), hyper-sensitive (tit-for-tat Twitter fights), sometimes crazy, and prone to ego-driven fiascos. His tweets and actions are more impetuous and infantile than strategic, suggesting that he may drag America down. . . .
Follow the link. Collect the complete set.
The Five Legs of a Trumpled Stool 0
Bobby Azarian analyzes the news and suggests five psychological traits that characterize Donald Trump’s core supporters.
Note that these are technical terms and may not necessarily mean what they would in normal parlance. For example, “relative deprivation” does not mean that some is deprived; rather, it means that he or she thinks he or she is deprived relative to some other group (say, for example, black folks or millennials, whatever they are).
Here’s the thumbnail; follow the link for a discussion of each one.
- 1. Authoritarian Personality Syndrome
- 2. Social dominance orientation
- 3. Prejudice
- 4. Intergroup contact
- 5. Relative deprivation