One of the reasons we find ourselves in the current situation where Trump has demanded an FBI probe into who stopped the escalator on his way to give a speech to the UN General Assembly is because people who knew better voted for him anyway. If "Escalatorgate" wasn't bad enough, Trump gave one of the most meandering, fact-challenged speeches in UN history. Not even Hugo Chavez sounded more bonkers when he called George Bush "the devil" in his infamous 2006 speech to the UN. Although former Venezuelan Pres. Chavez wasn't far off.
Why voters in "America" keep making the same mistake over and over again is a real mystery? Bush was bad enough. He drug the US into two wars over 9/11 and left the country in economic shambles with the worst recession since the mid 1970s. You'd think Americans would never vote Republican again after that but they gave Obama all of two years before voting in a Republican House of Representatives in 2010. They turned a massive electoral defeat in 2008 into a rallying cry that they dubbed "The Tea Party."
At its center was a "pledge," if you could call it that, to return to conservative norms and do away with all the frivolous spending in Washington that had led to what was then a $10 trillion national debt. Seems so quaint now. Rather than challenging these assumptions, voters accepted them at face value and essentially blocked Obama from taking any further legislative action for the remainder of his two terms of office. The Republican House voted no less than 60 times to end "Obamacare" over the next 6 years. Fortunately, the Senate was still in Democratic hands for most of that time so that his signature health care program stood. While the Affordable Care Act didn't significantly add to the national debt, conservative outlets continued to make the case that it did, making all sorts of wild projections, and so Americans repeated the mistake of electing a conservative president who vowed to rein in all these unnecessary expenditures and "Make America Great Again."
No talk of the massive cost of those two wars, an estimated $6 trillion, and how the Obama administration spent most of its tenure trying to get out from under them. Or, the massive tax breaks the Bush administration had passed that added approximately $3 trillion to the national debt. Nope, conservatives blamed Obama, who had actually reduced the annual deficit during his two terms of office, starting with a staggering $1.4 trillion left over from the Bush administration to $590 billion when he left office in January, 2017.
However, on a subjective level Americans have long sided with conservatives even if the numbers simply don't add up. This is largely because they don't make the effort to look. It's all there, tabulated by the Congressional Budget Office and other non-partisan agencies like Mercatus Center, probably using CBO numbers. It took me all of two seconds to type in "Obama annunal deficits," but Google understood what I was asking for and called up a list of results. I took the first one but I scrolled down to double check the numbers and they hold up. Yet, for many people this is a waste of time. They will simply take what their favored news source hands them and make their decisions accordingly. So, we got stuck with Trump in 2016.
Everyone knows what an emotional rollercoaster ride we were all forced to live through, conservative, moderate and liberal alike. Everyone saw the insurrection that took place on January 6, 2021, when Trump refused to recognize the election results that saw him "fired" from the White House. However, being conservative by nature, Americans once again made a Teutonic effort to unsee what they just saw and re-elected Trump in 2024, giving him a whopping 49.8% of the vote, where he had only received 46.1 and 46.8% the previous two elections. Many thought he could never get past 47% but he proved us wrong.
We were told of all the "hidden Trump supporters" as if they came out of the woodwork like a bunch of cockroaches in these elections to defy electoral polls. Even in 2020, he gained a staggering 12 million votes in a losing effort. If it wasn't for the historic nature of the turnout, Biden would have lost. This despite Trump horribly guiding us through a pandemic and making a mockery of American foreign policy with his "American First" mantra. Trump had alienated us from our traditional allies and embraced dictatorial leaders like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un, promising peace yet repeatedly threatening countries that stood in America's way.
Who are these deluded voters, the so-called "undecided" who in any one election can turn the results one way or the other? Rick Perlstein tried to answer that question, although not very effectively. He did raise a salient point in that we shouldn't look at an election objectively, but rather subjectively in how a message is able to reach an audience despite its glaring falsehoods. Perlstein used Trump's "Iron Dome" as an example. He said it was the dumbest idea since Reagan's "Star Wars" but no matter, it effectively played into Americans' security fears, and so people voted for Trump anyway.
You could say this about virtually all the policies Trump presented on the campaign trail. None of them added up but Americans were willing to look the other way, more concerned with egg prices and the high cost of gas at the pump, even if those prices had been significantly reduced since 2022 when the media first recognized the spike in inflation. For the better part of two years that's all we heard about, even though inflation had dropped from its peak of 9% in June, 2022, to 3% in Biden's final month in office. It seems Americans are able to register when things get bad but aren't able to gauge when things improve. Gas at the pump averaged $4.93 per gallon in June, 2022, and $3.08 when Trump took office in January, 2025. That's a very significant drop but still all we heard was bellyaching and how Trump would make things better. Gas price currently sits at $3.13. Again, it is easy to look these things up. You just scroll over the graph to read the prices.
Why we refuse to do so is The $64,000 question? We can do it on our own. We don't have to rely on the CNN "data guru" but can go to Google or whatever search engine we prefer and look the numbers up ourselves. It's not that hard. Unfortunately, we don't teach critical thinking anymore, even at its most basic level, and so we are doomed to populist rhetoric, unwilling or unable to make simple inquiries.
Oliver Sacks had an interesting case study years ago. He heard a roar of laughter from the aphasia ward of a psychiatric hospital and went to see what was going on. Patients were laughing at a speech Reagan was giving on the television in the recreation room. They may not have been fully able to comprehend what he was saying but they were beside themselves with mirth over his tone of voice. This they could understand and found his speech hilarious. Conversely, there was an elderly woman with tonal agnosia (another word for tone deaf) and she also found the President's speech absurd. In her case it was because what he said was so poorly stated that it made little sense to her.
However, most of us draw conclusions from a person's tone of voice and I guess for many Americans Trump literally sounded better than Harris. It didn't matter whether his voice was too strident or if none of what he said made sense. He projected a more authoritarian tone of voice and sadly it seems many people are fine with that.
It's kind of like training dogs. If you speak kindly and gently to them, they generally don't do what you ask, but if you take on a more stentorian tone they are more likely to respond. Treats help but the tone of voice is important, especially if you want them to stop barking. Trump is apparently very good at that.
He tried to adopt that tone of voice in his speech to the UN General Assembly but it seemed that country delegations were either too smart or suffering from aphasia or tonal agnosia to respond. They mostly sat in stunned disbelief at the nonsense he was spouting from the lectern, although DW correspondent Matt Pearson subscribed it to his threatening body language. I think it was more a case of what can we do about it? We are stuck with this guy for the next three-and-a-half years so we appease him by not making fun of him in public. Well, almost. Welcome back, Jimmy.
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