There’s a post here about Trump’s recently departed top advisor, an interesting guy with Nixon’s face supposedly tattooed across his back.
I’ve seen video of him, and he has the wide-eye’d, amped up, tic-ish neurological quality I would associate with someone utterly brilliant on one area, and possibly batshit crazy everywhere else.
The article is ho hum, but comment #8, reprinted below, from Anitius Severinus Boethius (who runs www.wilsonharpbooks.com), is a brilliant insight into how Trump may be operating.
This is hilarious! I knew it when I heard about it this weekend and this article confirms it. Trump and Stone are BFFs. I would be surprised if Stone doesn’t do Trump’s hair while Trump eats a stick of frozen cookie dough at sleepovers.
Trump and Stone have a history of these hissy fits with each other, but I would bet my last dollar that they still communicate two or three times a day.
Stone says he has been approached by other campaigns, but he won’t work for them. Of course he won’t, he’s too busy running Trump’s shadow campaign.
Oh, and he’s been approached by more than two or three other campaigns, I bet. And they are now scared spitless that he will name them as examples of the two or three that contacted him. It will make them seem weak and desperate to jump to a former Trump advisor.
And that is the brilliance of this move. If you want to talk to Trump, but you don’t want to be seen talking to Trump, you talk to Stone. But then you put yourself in Trump’s pocket, because talking with Stone means you have to give him all your secrets and hope he won’t find a way to use them as leverage against you. And who is the one who controls all of the levers that Stone sets up? Trump.
That is Trump’s big secret in business and his big plan in this campaign: leverage. If you have it, and know how to use it, you can be like Archimedes and move the world.
Fox News is the perfect example of leverage. After the debate, Trump went to his numbers guys and told them he wanted the ratings number for the debate. He wasn’t really upset or angry at Megyn Kelly, nor at Fox News. Hey, it’s only business. But he needed leverage. When the ratings numbers came in, he sent them to Roger Ailes.
“What do you think of that? I brought in half of those numbers and you know it!” Then he decided to go all nuts about how unfair Fox News was to him. Ailes knew that Trump brought in the huge numbers, but now a lot of advertisers for Fox News were calling Ailes in and saying “Hey, the guy who drew in the biggest numbers of any debate is talking like he won’t come back! We want those numbers for our commercials, so you do what it takes to make sure he will be back!”
Ailes has to contact Trump and ask him to come back on, which Trump then announces to the world. Trump wins.
It is an interesting take on how Trump may view these things, and how brilliantly he plays this all as a game.
I’ve long thought Trump’s rhetorical style revolving around hyperbole was an intellectual application of the cognitive concept that exposure to an extreme idea will move the public’s judgment of truth toward that idea, even if they don’t accept the idea itself.
Thus when Trump comes out and says Megyn Kelly is a total idiot, total loser, she was completely unfair, and she is a terrible journalist, Trump does it because he is talking to the masses, and trying to mechanically mold their opinion as far toward his own beliefs as possible, as opposed to honestly debating an individual one on one, where such hyperbole could undermine credibility and diminish your ability to convince another.
As an example with Kelly, maybe everyone of the lemmings doesn’t buy into all of that fully. However in their minds, they add those assessments into the library of Megyn Kelly assessments they have heard, and without thinking about it, the crowd’s opinion of her average rating lowers more than it would have if Trump had merely said she was a mediocre intellect, a little bit of a loser, she was a little unfair, or she was a mediocre journalist.
I don’t even begin to suspect Trump of being a psychopath. He’s a normal, and probably very good, likable man. But when dealing with the mob of imbeciles, he has an amazing ability to compartmentalize his real beliefs, away from the words and phrasing he uses mechanically to make the crowd adopt and exhibit his exact beliefs.
It is so amazing it speaks to a massive intellectual understanding of how to override his own natural emotional urges (such as to honestly verbalize his own accurate perception of reality), to execute verbal behaviors that make others adopt his opinions (such as verbalizing a grossly exaggerated caricature of his beliefs designed to make the crowd, after processing it and averaging it with the opinions of his enemies, exhibit his real belief).
As an example, suppose Trump thought I was sub-par in ability, power, and intellect, and everyone was saying I was average in ability, power, and intellect. If he argued that I was sub-par, it would only lower the public’s view of me a little. Most say I’m average, and Trump says I’m just below average. By contrast, if he argued that I was a total idiot, total loser, and totally impotent, it would, after being trumpeted by the media, take me down in the public’s estimation far more.
Trump is a genius, so I am still not sure he really intends to be President, which seems a bit of a step down for him, and probably a considerable pain in the ass compared to his normal politician-free life. It would not surprise me to find out he is playing a game, with a second act that will shock us. I’m just hoping that second act will help the nation find its way back to its K-roots.
But if he is honestly going to run, his brilliant ability to see every political interaction as an opportunity for leverage, and his understanding of how to effortlessly make the public adopt his exact view of reality means he may actually be able to do things in government nobody has done before. Since his goal appears to be saving the nation, it very possible he may just be able to pull that off.
No wonder the Cuckservatives are terrified.
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