Trump’s convention speech was "a tidal wave of tall tales, false claims and revisionist history," as the Washington Post's fact-checker notes and E.J. Dionne quotes, delivered in a droning way that put viewers to sleep or drove them away. But when compressed into 3.5 minutes, as CNN's Daniel Dale has done, it's engrossing. As a bonus, during the last minute of Dale's machine-gun retelling, Anderson Cooper does a superb job of suppressing his laughter.
Little wonder, then, that the speech consumed 71 minutes. Unless Trump had spoken like the old Fed Ex guy or Daniel Dale, it was rhetorically impossible to pack that many lies into a less-than-one-hour speech.
Dionne adds that "seemingly sober commentary about how 'effective' Trump’s attacks are plays down a core truth: He lies, and lies, and lies again." It's true there's been less commentary about the effectiveness of Trump's lying in this election cycle. In 2015 and 2016 it was stunning news worthy of tomes of analysis, since never before had a presidential candidate and nominee lied so prolifically — and nakedly. Now it's just assumed that whenever Trump opens his mouth, a lie will gush out. How effective can that be?
Aside from his changing yet increasingly monotonous attacks, if Trump has any one strength in a voter's mind, it is indeed, and falsely, his "strength" — that is, his "I alone can fix it" garbage, in which masses of sympathetic voters don't appear to realize he's had years to "fix" whatever, and things are only worse. Loads of short-term memory-loss cases are needed to form an entire bloc of voters under the impression that Trump, in 2021, would be a first-term president.
And some people have so much lie fatigue they don't care anymore about the lying.
Posted by: Anne J | August 30, 2020 at 09:32 AM
Question: are we in the middle of an unofficially declared civil war now?
Posted by: Anne J | August 30, 2020 at 10:26 AM