Sir Chanticleer schreef op 10 januari 2019 17:29:
Teri Kanefield:
"When you argue with Trumpsters and use the truth as a weapon, it doesn’t really faze them.
They’re holding onto something they think is more important than literal truth."
Zie ook: Why Trump’s Supporters Will Believe Any Lie He Tells
From Kavanaugh to Khashoggi, they are immune to the truth.
President Donald Trump has been bending and breaking laws all of his life. Michael Cohen, his longtime personal lawyer, stated under oath that Trump directed him to violate federal campaign finance law; the state of New York has evidence that Trump and his family have been cheating on their taxes for years; the Trump family’s “persistently illegal conduct” and “repeated and willful self-dealing transactions” have led the New York attorney general to file a lawsuit against the Trump Foundation. The list goes on.
Trump is open about his disdain for law. In April, he told an audience in Michigan that “our laws are so corrupt and stupid.”
Trump is also clear about why he is breaking these laws. The entire point of Trump’s campaign to “Make America Great Again” is to lead us back to a time before the civil rights movement, before laws against insider trading, before the New Deal and federal agencies that regulate the commerce of plutocrats. This was an era of white male supremacy. The rich paid no income taxes and there was no minimum wage, so the wealthy lived like royalty. His thinking is akin to the way past activists viewed sit-down strikes. Like these past civil dissenters, Trump views himself as breaking the laws that he doesn’t believe should exist, which includes most of the laws and regulations put in place since the 1930s.
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Robert O. Paxton, in his classic work The Anatomy of Fascism, defines a cult of leadership as one in which the followers believe the leader’s instincts are better than the logic used by elites. The followers are willing to give up their individuality and freedom in exchange for the leader’s “protection.” And what is Trump protecting his followers from? Scholars Karen Stenner and Jonathan Haidt offer an explanation. In their essay “Authoritarianism Is Not a Momentary Madness but an Eternal Dynamic Within Liberal Democracies,” Stenner and Haidt describe the psychology behind the fervor of the embrace of authoritarians. A certain percentage of the population has “bias against different others” including racial and other minority out-groups. The authoritarian leader stokes their fears, creating a normative threat. These people then turn to the leader as something of a savior. The leader embraces the mythic destiny of the nation. He doesn’t follow laws. He is the law.
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Scholars Oliver Hahl, Minjae Kim, and Ezra W. Zickerman Sivan, in “The Authentic Appeal of the Lying Demagogue,” explain that those who want to destroy the “political establishment” willingly embrace a liar because they understand that the lies themselves serve a destructive purpose. The people who want to destroy the political establishment today are those who are threatened by growing diversity. Trump’s lies work toward that end.
slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/10/t...