Trump’s Authoritarian Approach to Managing Public Opinion
Quote:It says a lot about the political system’s (and the news media’s) adjustment to the Trump Era that this tweet from the president of the United States seems like routine news:
Quote:Donald J. Trump ✔ @realDonaldTrump
Any negative polls are fake news, just like the CNN, ABC, NBC polls in the election. Sorry, people want border security and extreme vetting.
Polls aren’t inherently flawed, it seems: just those that are “negative” about Trump’s policies. That is because he is uniquely qualified to understand what the American people want. Why? Well, presumably because he won the presidency despite “fake polls” suggesting he would lose.
It appears Trump is going to keep repeating this chain of convoluted logic until people who look favorably upon him accept it implicitly: He won a big, landslide victory that was disguised by media lies and many millions of fraudulent votes against him; thus he has a mandate to do exactly what he is doing; and what he’s doing is popular, notwithstanding the lies about it from the same lying pollsters and media.
Once you accept the “landslide” premise, it all follows naturally, since Trump’s popular-vote defeat and incredibly narrow path to an electoral vote majority are wished away, and with them the reasonably good record of national polls, which were more accurate in 2016 than in 2012.
Thus, the foundational untruth about the actual results of the 2016 election paves the way to the authoritarian (in the most literal sense of the term) premise that only Trump or Trump-approved sources of information can ever, ever be trusted. And actually, that may understate the claim, since the president constantly asserts that media are deliberately, consciously lying about him. And so: Once you accept his overarching lie, everything that contradicts it must be a malicious untruth. The logic is inexorable...
NYMag
As blatant as all of this is, that Trump could even forward such an authoritarian message and have anyone buy into it comes as a consequence of decades of prior right wing propaganda which has paved the way for such a figure as Trump and such a bizarre narrative.
As I've observed/stated before, the fundamental premise upon which right wing media exists and justifies/promotes itself is that all other media is not to be trusted. Only right wing media is honest. Only right wing media will bring you the truth. All other media is filled with lies driven by "liberal bias". Listen to any Limbaugh broadcast, read any Coulter column, attend to any O'Reilly or Hannity show on Fox. The chances are about 95% that any one of them will contain this claim, explicit usually or sometimes implicit. But it will be there. Every broadcast, every column, every episode.
It is no work at all to understand why folks on the right here or anywhere else believe this to be so. It is the water they've been swimming in for decades.