Trump's Tactics - We've Seen this Story Before

Sensing something was amiss with my party in 2010, I decided to run for a seat on our county GOP central committee, hoping to restore some sanity. I ran and won - only to learn just how off the rails the party really was - and how determined many seemed to be to take it even further to the edges of extreme.

I watched candidates seeking endorsements shouted down as they tried to provide thoughtful explanations of their views on capital punishment. I saw conservative Christians sharing photos of their AR-15s the way some share photos of their grandchildren. I was personally attacked online for taking one member to task for referring to Muslims as “ragheads.” I was swarmed by an angry online mob when I simply cautioned against letting hatred overwhelm reason (I was effectively told that we are right to hate). Likewise, I was castigated for defending our “corrupt government” when all I did was use actual government data to refute wildly inaccurate claims regarding congressional benefits. I was criticized for my use of “artful facts.”

These weren’t the railings of some crazy old uncle, deep into his bourbon, parroting what he’d heard on the extreme end of conservative media, but elected GOP officials and local party leaders tasked with selecting and endorsing candidates for local, state and federal offices, and their followers. Their craziness today would be our government’s craziness tomorrow. The anger, the disinterest in thoughtful debate and the complete disregard for facts left me so concerned that as my term came to a close in 2014, I outlined a novel where a media mogul, a business titan and a demagogue exploit that anger to foment a civil war fought by anti-government militia members backed by hard-right Christians, the NRA and Tea Party activists seeking to “take our country back.”

I meant it as a cautionary tale.

Meanwhile, in April that same year, during an online discussion on how demagogues rise, I wrote of how the Hitlers of the world “latch onto real or perceived hardships, find a scapegoat to blame them on, draw an ‘us vs. them’ battle line, then look for an opportunity to justify conflict to vanquish the enemy to the benefit of the ‘righteous’. Be ever vigilant for parallels.”




Hitler references always risk labels of hyperbole. Still, if there are circumstances where a Hitler can so seduce a nation, then certainly a demagogue presenting a seemingly less dangerous face could do the same. Given what I'd witnessed within GOP circles, vigilance seemed warranted.

For one, we should never kid ourselves that Americans are somehow congenitally immune to the hate that makes the siren call of demagogues so seductive. One need only study the history of tacitly-sanctioned, mob-rule lynchings in the south to come to such a conclusion. The idea that “it can’t happen here” had already been proven to be false.

Of greater and more immediate concern was the level of vitriol that had become commonplace in conservative circles, driven by a conservative media that had found a profitable business model in dismissing rational debate in favor of stirred grievances that fed the irrationality displayed by my local GOP. Those grievances took on, among others, Muslims, immigrants and the United States government itself, with Tea Party activists sporting Gadsden “Don’t Tread On Me” flags railing against a government perceived as corrupt and overbearing. Christians came to believe they were being persecuted, while NRA fund-raising letters warned of “jack-booted government thugs” coming to take away our guns.

A nation that had proven it was not immune to ethnic hatred was simmering in an angry witch’s brew, stirred by a coven filled with names like Limbaugh, Hannity, Coulter and LaPierre. The aggrieved were being fed an endless supply of scapegoats. All that was missing was a demagogue to exploit the “us versus them” narrative.

Enter Donald Trump, descended from Trump Tower in 2015 to announce his candidacy for the U.S. presidency, making his now famous declaration, “When Mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best. They’re not sending you. They’re not sending you. They’re sending people that have lots of problems, and they’re bringing those problems with us [sic]. They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists...”

There it was - us versus them - in a single sentence: “They” are not sending “you.”

At that point, exactly 300 words into his candidacy, I was sure he had permanently and irrevocably disqualified himself as a candidate for the presidency. He was drawing straight from the playbook used by demagogues across the ages, trading on public fears for political gain. Surely, despite what I’d witnessed inside the GOP, we would see through his naked appeal to the worst in us.

What I did not know, however - what none of us knew at the time - was that the year before, just as I was posting my 2014 call for vigilance, Christopher Wylie of Cambridge Analytica was being introduced to “Steve from America.” Steve was Steve Bannon, and over the next year he would work with Cambridge Analytica to test market phrases like “deep state,” “drain the swamp” and “build the wall” to determine their effectiveness, and more importantly, identify the characteristics of Facebook users with whom those phrases resonated.

But it went further. As reported by Wylie in his whistleblowing book, “Mindf*ck,” Bannon and Cambridge Analytica began testing Facebook messages to determine just how deep racial animosity ran and how far people could be pushed. Questions asking whether blacks were capable of succeeding in America without the help of whites, or whether they were genetically predetermined to fail, were posted to gauge underlying racial attitudes. Bannon believed that political correctness and the civil rights movement had limited “free thinking” in America and sought to expose what he considered the hidden truths about race. He believed those truths were not pretty. Facebook users did not fail Steve Bannon.

“Us versus them” narratives followed, with falsely planted posts arguing that racial relations were a zero-sum game, where the more “they” take, the less “you” have, or “they” use political correctness, so “you” can not fight back. This work exploited findings in the field of neuroscience that such messages activate the same part of the brain associated with identity. Thus, attempts to criticize or contradict such hateful messages were seen as direct attacks on one’s own self, causing the effort to backfire. This is known as the Boomerang or Backfire Effect, where attempts to counter an argument actually work to reinforce the original message. Bannon had found a winning formula - a formula that relied upon the worst in human nature AND human psychology.

Before they were done, they’d created fake user groups, presented as organic but actually initiated at Bannon's direction, to organize real-world meetups in coffee shops and similar locales designed so that users were made to believe not only that they were not alone, but that there were far more who thought like them than there actually were. By creating that illusion, these outliers felt more at ease expressing their racial animosity publicly, drawing ever larger numbers into their circle. Once the dark side was released, it took on a life of its own. Eventually, the Boomerang Effect would have Republicans embracing the term "deplorables" and in turn, the alt-right, white supremacist xenophobes it was meant to describe, as kindred spirits. GOP voters who once found Donald Trump laughable or despicable as a candidate eventually became ardent defenders and supporters, not because he had changed, but because they had.

This is why, like any malignancy where it is difficult to separate good cells from bad, it becomes so difficult to separate disdain for the man from disrespect for his supporters. The truth is that like every nation that has fallen under the spell of a demagogue who uses hate and divisiveness to achieve power, good people at first laugh, then dismiss, and finally embrace the demagogue, as attacks on him are seen as attacks on them. And once again, us versus them narratives work their dark, biological magic.

This is how societies fall prey to charismatic demagogues. We have seen it before. In fact, the CEO of SCL, Cambridge Analytica’s parent company explicitly stated that the tactics of propagating ethnic hatred employed by Donald Trump were no different than those used by Adolph Hitler. Yes, the people who helped develop the tactics used by a future president of the United States made the direct comparison to those used in Nazi Germany. Whatever circumstances I’d observed that led me to warn of the rise of demagogues in 2014 had been identified - and weaponized - by Steve Bannon, later to be exploited by Donald Trump. But whereas I had hoped to use a cautionary tale to salve a festering wound, Steve Bannon sought to pick at the scabs. Donald Trump was his rusty scalpel. In Trump, Bannon found what he called “the perfect vessel.” Lenin’s “intelligentsia” became Trump’s deep state. Mussolini’s “drenare la palude” simply needed to be translated into English: "drain the swamp". And Hitler’s Lugenpresse (lying press) became the American president’s Fake News.

The Madness of Crowds

There is a nearly throwaway passage in the book, “The Warmth of Other Suns,” about the great migration of southern blacks out of the old south. A returning migrant visits a previously off-limits diner a few years after the end of Jim Crow and finds the experience so mundane that he wonders how such an ordinary act could have, just a few years earlier, generated enough anger and hatred that merely entering that same diner could have gotten him killed.

How, indeed.

But then we learn of the methodical exploitation of racial animosity by Steve Bannon and are reminded of our nation’s dark underbelly. We watch presidential rallies where foreigners are compared to deadly snakes, where facial expressions of supporters exhibit a mix of rage and glee, not unlike those in photos of lynch mobs of old, as chants of “Build that wall!”, “Lock her up!” and “Send them back!” echo and we’re reminded that it is a fairly straight and dangerous line from "Build that wall!" and "Send them back!" to “String them up!” And we realize, finally, that the ultimate manifestation of this anger never springs fully formed upon a society. It takes years of desensitization.

Years of being told not to trust the elites.

Years of being told not to trust the government.

Years of being told not to trust the press.

Years of being told they are not like us.

That they are bringing problems.

That the more they get, the less we have.

That they’re snakes and human scum.

That we are the righteous and they are the enemy.

That there’s only one who can fix it.

Us versus them.

This is what it looks like. This is what it always looks like. We are witnessing it now. How it will end, God only knows, but our nation has been manipulated and a party taken over. Taken over by a campaign that willfully sought to exploit hate and anger. Meanwhile, the foundations of our democracy - a free press, the rule of law, the separation of powers and faith in the loyal opposition - are being tested by a steady drip, drip, drip of acidic invective straight from the president's mouth.

Lincoln said at Gettysburg that the Civil War was testing whether a nation conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal could long survive. This president is testing that proposition again. We can let him point to a strong economy and fool ourselves into believing all is well, but like a shining flashlight corroded from the inside, we may learn too late that what makes America work - what has made it the ideal the rest of the world aspires to be - has been debased beyond redemption from within. And the blame will lie squarely upon the shoulders of those who chose to look the other way. That is how it always happens.

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