Thread by @AlexandraErin

Hoo, I wish I had Greg Sargent's confidence that Trump's strategy of pushing completely contradictory messages would backfire on him.

I could see it happening since it needs to connect outside his base to work.

But. But. Caveat incoming.

https://twitter.com/Ibishblog/status/1235239920702111744

The thing that this election cycle has really clarified for me is that in this age of information, we are all adrift in a sea of that same information and not only can we not look at it all at once, we're not seeing everything that's in front of us.

I don't mean cherrypicking.

I've talked about this on here before when I talk about how we process (or don't, for some of us!) a face, or when you look at someone and your brain assigns them a gender: the human brain cannot process all of the sensory information coming in on a 1:1 basis. It can't.

At any given moment, none of us is seeing everything that we're SEEING. And some of what we're seeing isn't there. Our brain is making shortcuts and fudging things and filling in missing data to help us make sense of it.

It's how :) is a face. Not learned! Babies can see it.

(One reason why babies will make a beeline for electrical outlets. A grounded/three-prong outlet is an emoticon at baby eye level.)

When you remember a conversation, you're not remembering everything that was said like it's a transcript or a tape. You're remembering fragments and feelings and what you took away from it and when you actively "recall" your brain reconstructs the words from that.

And when your brain, with no conscious direction from you, is trying to make sense of what you see and hear and feel and remember, one of the things it's doing is checking stuff against what it expects to find.

What you hope. What you fear. What you care about.

So say Trump is floating two completely contradictory stories about Joe Biden -- one is that he's a stodgy, staid old crusty dean from a college sex movie who is out to help corporate America kill you for money and other is that he's a radical socialist, a Trojan Bernicrat...

...the people who are already inclined to think that one of those stories is true will ignore the other one as being obviously nonsense. They might not even consciously disregard it. It just won't *land*. It won't *stick*. It's noise, not signal.

There's a thing that gets cited a lot in literary SF/F circles, and sometimes wider writing circles, today called Sturgeon's Law. (Originally Revelation.)

"90% of everything is crap."

Basically everyone agrees with this.

But they're not all talking about the same 90%.

Possibly the least controversial thing you could say about politics is that there's a lot of bad takes out there and most of them aren't worth listening to.

Sturgeon's Revelation but make it political.

So, yeah. Even some of the people who realize Donald is selling two entirely different bills of sale will assume that the one that doesn't land with them is an attempt to trip up those other fools, over there.

https://twitter.com/HerHandsMyHands/status/1235315695723917314

I've made no secret of the fact that I think Donald's preferred match-up is to fight a badly weakened Biden who is being hindered by an angry progressive wing. But this also works if he's fighting Bernie who is hindered by a scared moderate center.

Either way the key point is that he's targeting different audiences with different stories for different effects.

One of the big mistakes I made in Year 1 of this was I thought that Trump's doubletalk schtick could not work outside the backrooms, out in the goldfish bowl.

He's got a lifetime of telling different groups of people completely different things to get them to give him what he wants and/or come together in exactly the way that he gets what he wants. He's good at it.

And it turns out it doesn't matter much if we can see him do it.

It's not nth dimensional chess. It's just straightforward crookedness. Right out in the open, and people fall for it because of the way our brains work, the way crowds work, and also because it's so crude and so brazen we're not even *looking* for a trick.

Vocabulary word for the day: The Kansas City Shuffle.

(Warning: TVTropes link. Potential timesuck imminent.)

tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.…

There's a whole subset of con games that only come into play when the mark knows they're dealing with a con artist. When you think you understand what the game is, you feel smart, and safe, and maybe you think you can beat it, or get in on it.

The Kansas City Shuffle is just the most iconic of that set. That article links to a couple others, The Con With The Con and the Violin Ploy.

(Like I said: TVTropes is a leading cause of wikiholes.)

One of Trump's favorite tools isn't exactly any of these, but the basic idea is, he capitalizes on the fact that he's an obvious snowjob artist coupled with the even more obvious fact that you are a clever individual of such perspicacity and discernment that you can't be the mark

For a lot of his followers, this is why they love him: oh, he's got all the people they hate fooled. He's a BS artist but he's *their* BS artist. They are on his side which means, they assume, he's on theirs.

But it works on his enemies, too.

Because if there's one thing we know, it's that we're too smart to fall for his tricks. Oh, those dopes over in the other political camp that is also against him? Those are exactly the kinds of credulous buffoons he can put one over one. They'll fall for it every time.

This is why every outrageous thing that Trump does that we care about is a real serious thing and every outrageous thing he does that we don't is a distraction from those serious things.

Oh, boy. People keep falling for the distractions. Fools, aren't they?

So Trump is out there painting two completely different portraits of Joe Biden. Utterly contradictory. Completely incompatible. Mutually exclusive. If one is true then the other one must be false.

And we, discerning individuals that we are, know which one is real. It's obvious.

Next link. This is from a D&D (3.5) webcomic called Order of the Stick. It's from the middle of a very lore-dense story arc, but in summary: the evil overlord personally leads a charge... from three directions at once. The heroes have to spot the real one.
giantitp.com/comics/oots042…

As the party rogue explains, it's a shell game: guess which of the three shells hides the pea to win. But the con here is not to fool you into picking the wrong one. The con is getting you to accept that there's a right one to pick. You lose by accepting the premise.

Ever seen the movie The Sting? If you have a library membership, check if your library has a Hoopla subscription. Online streaming service. I found it on there last year and rewatched it.

The key to a lot of cons is the mark thinks they're getting one over on someone.

Not going to spoil The Sting, but it's a classic example of it. Well worth a watch for anybody who likes heist-style movies. It's not exactly a heist but the same energy.

One last bit of media tie-in for this thread: the villain of the Discworld novel Going Postal (which you can absolutely read "out of order", it is its own story) is based off Donald Trump.

He's a corrupt businessman who literally dresses like a pirate. Plays it up.

The protagonist is a con man who sees right through him, and who is kind of amazed at how many people don't... except. That's what the pirate schtick is for. Everybody who sees him thinks they have seen through him, and oh. So that's all right, then.

Not going to spoil, but again, part of how the hero wins the climactic contest between them involves letting the villain think he's spotted the cheat and then going off and playing an entirely different game than the one he was cheating clumsily at.

The Kansas City Shuffle.

So at the final curtain, it doesn't matter how the villain foiled his cheating or that the villain is cheating or that the contest was completely mismatched. The villain was looking in the wrong place the whole time.

(There are two Kansas Cities, hence the trope name.)

Donald Trump wields the chaos of the information age to do this kind of thing at an industrial scale. Does it work on everybody? No. But it doesn't need to. Because politics is a numbers game and anything that skews the numbers changes the odds. Change the odds enough and win.

He's not just doing it to Biden, either.

"They're doing it to Crazy Bernie again." is doing the same thing in one tweet, *in a single sentence*. There are TWO stories in that sentence and both land with a different impact on different targets.

The same kind of cold yet appealing logic that tells you that people should be making rational choices based on policy tells you that if you can see that Trump is lying then you're immune to his lies. But a tweet like that is scoring a lot of hits, albeit many of them glancing.

If you read his tweets about how Crazy Bernie is being cheated and you only throw out the crazy part as being obvious slander or only throw out the cheating part as obvious incitement, you're being suckered. He's picking your pocket with both hands and you only caught one.

Donald Trump's con artistry is a blunt instrument but it's so blunt it can power through a lot of things. He's a social engineering speed runner. Doesn't bother with finesse or making it look nice. Just glitches through a wall and goes right to the end.

And while I'm saying that basically we're all going to fall for this a little bit, I think most of the people reading this might not be fully swayed by any of it. But as many have noted, Political Twitter is more engaged/aware than the electorate at large, and not representative.

And an essential thing about Trump's con messaging is that he is not trying to persuade anyone who isn't low-hanging fruit. He doesn't care how many people see it and point it out. He can speak to millions at a time. If you're not easy to fool, you're not worth his effort.

So to circle back around from Remedial Con Artistry and media recs all the way back to Greg Sargent's point:

Yes, Trump is selling two conflicting messages to the electorate.

But he's not selling them to the *same* electorate.

And the buyers will mostly self-select themselves.

Hoo. This was a wider-ranging thread than I'd envisioned when I started but I feel good about it. If you got something of value from it, feel free to give something of value back.
Thank you.

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