"We All Know What He Meant" (The Abdication of Cognition: Part II)
(This is the second post of the Abdication of Cognition series, wherein I detail the irrational thought patterns that I see being used within the MAGA movement.)
Perhaps the most noteworthy strategy that the second Trump administration has applied is "flooding the zone":
It involves overwhelming the media and political opponents by creating an overload of information and controversy such that both the opposition and the general public loses focus and concentration, as well as the ability to clearly discern what’s going on.1
This strategy would be insidious enough if the American public were prepared to conduct an honest assessment of the myriad controversies that come tumbling from the executive branch on what sometimes feels like a daily basis, but making sense of such rapid bursts of activity is further complicated by the MAGA movement's predilection to interpreting everything President Trump says in an extraordinarily, even ludicrously, charitable manner. Trump's base habitually attempts to gaslight the greater American public by arguing for interpretations that strain credulity at best, or brazenly defy common sense at worst.
One of the more recent examples is Trump's early-April threat against Iran:
A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS? We will find out tonight, one of the most important moments in the long and complex history of the World. 47 years of extortion, corruption, and death, will finally end. God Bless the Great People of Iran!2
Endeavoring to put aside one's preconceived notions of who Trump is as a person and as a statesman, a plain reading of this post immediately brings genocide to mind. There is no equivocation, jargon, double-meanings, abstract verbiage, or language loose enough to make room for multiple angles. Trump has long been lauded by his sycophants as the political outsider who eschews flowery and deceptive language in favor of "telling it like it is" and speaking "just like us." Trump does not (and is arguably incapable of) dressing up his words in such as a way as to confound his audience. So when he says "a whole civilization will die tonight," there is no great reason not to take him at his word.
This was, quite transparently, a threat against not merely Iran's government, but against its people. All of its people. And it may, interestingly enough, have itself been a violation of international law regardless of the fact that he backed down:
Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions prohibits "acts or threats of violence whose primary purpose is to terrorize civilians.”
Trump's statement — issued on the morning of a self-imposed deadline, to an audience of millions, by the commander-in-chief of a military actively striking Iran — is such a threat. It is not background noise. It is a weapon. The 90 million Iranians who read it, heard it, or had it reported to them felt its massive weight as a physical fact. Nor is the distress of their relatives abroad — people who woke up that Tuesday morning to learn that a president with unmatched military power had vowed their civilization would not survive the day — a secondary or incidental harm. It is the primary and foreseeable effect of the statement.
The Nuremberg tribunals, which tried major Nazi war criminals, understood this dimension of language and atrocity. German publicist Julius Streicher was convicted not for personally ordering a single killing but for the sustained incitement of a population toward genocide through speech. Nuremberg established the principle that words directed at the destruction of a people carry criminal weight. And that principle is one of the foundational achievements of the post-war legal order. It was built on the recognition that the language of civilizational destruction is not merely the symptom of atrocity but one of its instruments.
Trump's statement meets that threshold with a directness Streicher's propaganda never did.3
Despite the potency and clarity of this threat, many of Trump's supporters proceeded to twist themselves into knots in order to justify the unjustifiable. A common refrain was that he didn't actually mean he would kill everyone, because "a whole civilization" should somehow be understood to refer merely to the Iranian regime. This was just the latest success in Trump's perpetual quest to own the libs, and those of us smart enough not to get triggered over mean words understand that such manifestations of his strong-man bellicosity aren't supposed to be taken seriously.
But these excuses are bandied about every time Trump says something controversial. He's just kidding, or he's intentionally upsetting people, or he's making a show of force, or he's putting himself into a stronger position for negotiations, or he's executing a long-term plan we're not yet aware of. One or all or any combination of these justifications are always on the lips of his supporters, but very seldomly do I see any of them admit when he has done or said something ineffective or odious. This is why I referred to gaslighting earlier: the MAGA creed is to doubt the evidence of your eyes, to reject a plain interpretation of Trump's words and actions in favor of the one most charitable, no matter how incomprehensible the leap required.
The result is that his goodness as a person and effectiveness as a politician cross into the realm of the unfalsifiable. That is, one cannot demonstrate to a Trump supporter that he has said something reprehensible because a post hoc rationalization of his every utterance is manufactured before they actually allow themselves to consider it. If something Trump says paints him in a negative light, it's evidence not that Trump has said something bad, but that the proper explanation for what he said has not yet been found. "I know it makes sense, but I don't yet know how." Trump is elevated to the station of an oracle, whose wisdom and infallibility are accepted as a matter of course before he's even opened his mouth.
This is a strong motivation for why his supporters are accused of operating within a cult of personality. Most of the time is seems that they support Trump not because he happens to be the man whose policy goals align most closely with their own, but because he is the proper choice regardless. Trump is the "peace candidate" who will avert the conflicts overseas that Kamala Harris intends to delve into, and Trump was completely justified in initiating a war overseas. Trump is the only guy in Washington with the balls to tell it like it is, and his words can only be properly digested with the understanding that he will say false things in order to upset the liberals. Trump is the superior statesman because he will definitely end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of taking office, and the fact that the war in Ukraine has not ended over a year after he took office is not a stain on his effectiveness as a leader. If your interpretation of Trump's words or actions leaves a bad taste in your mouth, it's only because you're supposed to keep interpreting until they seem innocuous, even praiseworthy, after which you must discontinue thinking immediately.
Trump has never, will never, and can never say something incorrect or abhorrent. If you think he has, you're stupid, and at least we true patriots all know what he meant.