Twelve & One-Half

THE TWELVE MOST IMPORTANT THINGS DONALD TRUMP HAS TAUGHT ME (Thing No. 12):

The dynamics of lying and public opinion.

There is a dynamic to the Big Lie that Donald Trump has used for years in his business and now uses in politics. It never bothers him to be caught in a lie. He doubles down, repeats it again and again, and turns the volume up.

It begins to sound normal to other people, at least it is no longer shocking. Then it begins to sound TRUE TO HIM. Now that he is telling the “truth”, he repeats it with more conviction and becomes more persuasive to those who have no firm roots in fact and reality, that is, the uneducated and uncritical.

Listen to his Sunday phone call to Georgia Secretary of State, Brad Raffensperger. The more he repeats the lies, the more convinced he becomes that they are true. You can hear his conviction growing as the call drones on.

Trump’s genius is that he probably came up with this formulation independently without ever reading the literature analyzing the propaganda techniques of 20th Century authoritarianism. He never reads anything.