Guest post: Stories are what they have instead of thinking
Originally a comment by Steven on But every dot was connected.
Stories are what they have instead of thinking.
There are, perhaps, two fundamental ways that humans understand things
– tell me a story
– show me a picture
Republicans have always communicated in stories. Stories are accessible, and relatable, and compelling; far more so than, say, policy proposals or white papers. This is one reason that Republicans keep getting the votes of people whose interests they oppose: they tell them stories that they want to hear.
Even more powerful than stories are keywords or tropes: short phrases or words that have come to stand for a whole story. Willie Horton. There’s a bear in the woods. They’re eating the dogs.
One advantage of speaking in tropes is that they serve as dog whistles: they give the speaker plausible deniability if they later want to disavow the substance of the story.
An even bigger advantage is that the use of keywords validates the story. When a single word or phrase evokes a whole story, the listener tends to accept that story uncritically–after all, it’s a story that they already knew. (If they didn’t already know the story then the keyword wouldn’t mean anything to them.)
The Republicans’ problem is that–for whatever reason–they aren’t getting much traction with their stories right now. Back in the day, people really were afraid of communist subversion, but no one is taking the Haitians-eating-dogs thing seriously. Even the boy who was killed by an unlicensed immigrant driver is seen as a tragedy, not the vanguard of an invasion.
Trump’s problem is that he can not, in fact, connect the dots any more. Through some combination of indiscipline, desperation, and dementia, his parole has fallen below the minimum threshold necessary to generate the keywords and sequence the stories. Even his supporters are sitting there and thinking, WTF? Or just getting bored and leaving. (Boredom being a sure sign that Trump is no longer evoking interesting stories in their minds.)
It can’t help that nearly every story Trump tells features a compulsory digression (dot? blotch? stain?) where he goes on about how much smarter, or more popular, or more hard done by, he is than anyone else in the history of the United States, if not the world. He’s just not capable of not doing that. The farther he wanders, the less likely he’s going to be able to return to the path leading toward whatever point he was trying to make, assuming there was any point to begin with.
I can’t decide if his mind operates like a bloodhound too easily thrown off the scent to actually ever find the original target of his tracking attempt, or a hamster stuck in its wheel, condemned forever more to return again and again to the same tales of self-puffery and self pity, rather than going anywhere useful or informative.
How people can stand listening to him for any length of time is beyond me. I know people watch demolition derbies and professional wrestling, and there was once a fad where steam locomotives were crashed into each other for public entertainment, but “Donald Trump, Human Train Wreck,” just doesn’t seem like payoff enough to endure having to listen to his stream of Id. At least the trains used in the staged wrecks were uncrewed; the wreck that Trump is hurtling towards has upwards of 300,000,000 passengers on board. I’m guessing it’s a lot less “entertaining” to be a passenger on that ride than a spectator.