Thread by @jenmercieca

I’m watching the Trump MTP interview online. His first answer about why he wants to run for president is fascist. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Humiliation, invasion, corruption, violence. I alone can fix it. 🥺

Asked about his "retribution" plan he claims that the January 6th domestic terrorists are political prisoners.

You can't let Trump talk on tv and also fact check him or reign in his lies and distortions. His whole "reality" is layers upon layers of lies. It's honestly a waste of time.

He lives in a very dark fantasy world. So does the whole rightwing media audience. It's a real shame.

As an interviewer you try to get Trump to specifically answer a question, but he tells 20 lies in the process and you can't stop each of those 20 lies--esp if you focus on the one question you're trying to get an answer. (it's called a "gish gallop" by old timey propaganda folks)

He's trying to sound reasonable in vocal tone while saying insane things. It's a confusing mismatch.

I'm not sure who the audience is for this interview. I assume MTP viewers are high information voters. Highly engaged/high information voters in the reality based community would see through his lies. Low information voters wouldn't know better, but they're not watching this.

Fascism throughout the interview. He calls himself a hero, a martyr. Everything is corrupt, according to him. He is the only truthteller, according to him, the only one who has common sense & wants what is good for the nation.

Consuming fascist propaganda like this makes you even more vulnerable to fascist propaganda. It is engineered/designed to create the conditions under which fascism flourishes. You cannot put Trump on tv without normalizing fascism in America.

ad hominem, tu quoque, conspiracy, lies, false accusations of corruption, attacking the interviewer, frame warfare--every response he gives is an evasion. He will never answer your questions to your satisfaction. You cannot hold him accountable. You just can't.

Trump using anchoring (they like me, we're the same) to talk about his relationship with fascist leaders while also claiming that he wants peace is the kind of rhetorical trick that confuses the brain and makes it difficult to understand what he actually believes.

Whew. He ends the way he started with a fascist "I alone can fix it" appeal.

What happened in this interview was not persuasion, it was propaganda. Using propaganda instead of persuasion is a sign of fascism. Fascism is for losers because if they had good arguments they would make them. They don't, so they do what Trump did here. What a loser.