06-15-2019, 09:37 AM
(06-15-2019, 07:17 AM)HairOfTheDog Wrote: It's part of the President's job to communicate clearly and effectively to all the people he serves and on behalf of the country he serves.
It's not a failure on any of the people's part when presidential communications are so unclear as to require the audience to assume or attempt to interpret what the President really means.
It's instead a failure on the President's part, which predictably leads to different interpretations and causes confusion/division.
Leaders who aren't naturally gifted with clear communication skills usually work at it and get better at it over time. If they don't, there are really only three possible reasons -- because they don't care, or because they lack the ability, or because causing confusion and division is the intent.
I don't know which of the reasons applies to President Trump. But, if he's re-elected, I sure hope he's able and willing to communicate more clearly and concisely on a consistent basis in his second term.
Its funny that you say that.
I will tell you about communication.
Trump was the only person to ever run for office who was not a politician or in the military. He was the oldest President to ever be elected (and will be even older when he wins again). He was up again the most qualified Presidential candidate ever. He ran against a media that hated him and a political establishment that did everything they could to stop him. It would be really a mistake to say that he was not a good communicator. If he was not a good communicator and could not deliver a message that hundred of millions of people understood, it would be evidenced in his monumental loss.....a loss that never happened BECAUSE in a large part, he was a good communicator.
Trump had a message and it was understood. What is the Democrat's message now. What is their slogan. What are they moving towards for the benefit of the American people. What have they achieved in the last 2 years of ANY worth? The Mueller report proved he did not collude with Russians. They managed to get a couple of people for unrelated crimes. A few people for process crimes that did not exist before the Mueller report and discovered a handful of Russians that they convicted for crimes they will both never serve and will ignore. $30 million tax-payer dollars. What was achieved? What are they doing now?
They have no message because their is no cohesion. The ONLY message THEY are communicating is "We hate Trump". That is no message, it is no policy and it does not further Americans in any way. It sure as Hell will not win an election.
Trump on the other hand is making America great again. Everyone knows that. That slogan and what it means is understood to ANYONE thinking about it and contextualising it within what he DOES.
See I am an Australian. I do not have the benefit of living there or understanding a lot of the cultural underpinnings but I got it. It really was not that fucking hard to understand. Him talking about how bad it was that so much manufacturing had gone overseas and how that hurt your country. I only have to listen to a few bars of Billy Joel's Allentown and I have this contextualised and understand that his idea of making America more competitive there may be Making America Great Again. I may not have had a clue about what kind of people were or were not coming into America from Mexico or whether they were good, bad or indifferent and did not understand his speech about THEM not sending their best. But I have Google.
A quick search through Google got me an article from Huffington Post about 70% of all Central American Girls crossing over being raped by the Cartel/Human Smugglers. Now I know who was sending them and who was not their best. I saw rape trees ( I had never known about these before). A bit more digging and I learned a heap about the brutality in and around the no man's land around the border. Murders, decapitations, flaying and all manner of nastiness done by the worst of people (not their best) just over the border. I read stories about how the frail and injured and weak, if they unable to keep up were left to die. Sometimes with water and sometimes without.
I explained this to a Progressive friend of mine once in this way "Chris, you think a wall is immoral? Are you fucking joking?" He was a bit taken aback that I was about to challenge this head on as this was apparently understood to be decided fact that it was xenophobia and bigotry at play and nothing more. "Imagine you are a Mexican or Guatemalan family. Say a Father your age and 2 teenage kids (boy and girl) and an elderly Grandma. You decide to make a trip to America illegally. By the time you have got there, your daughter and wife have been raped in front of you and your son, and your mother could not keep up and was left to die in the hot desert somewhere. Now, you may support the idea that there should not be a wall to easily allow the smugglers to smuggle people across. You may encourage this kind of thing. But I think that even IF we accept that there are always going to be people who manage to go around and under and through whatever obstacles, not having it completely open WILL act as a deterrent and the knock on is that the number of people exposed to this inhumanity will reduce. How could ANY moral person NOT support a wall"
He said it was a good point that he had never considered before. The reason he had not ever had to consider this is because he was told what the facts were. "Trump wanted a wall because he was racist and he wanted to keep all immigrants out. Trump was immoral. The wall was immoral and people that supported the wall were immoral." When he challenged me, he did it with the understanding that he was acting from a position of moral certainty. I reversed that on him.
It was not that Trump was difficult to understand especially. The media wanted to misinterpret what he said and then strawman him. That is all it was. It is dishonest and irrational. They then broadcast this and this (as with my friend Chris) becomes an uncritically accepted truth for hundreds of millions. It does not even really pass the smell test.
Confusion is NOT created by Trump. It is created by the people who wish to undermine him. The Progressive media and Democrats and Never Trump Conservative holdouts (Lets call them the establishment. Throw Academia and Hollywood into the mix as well).
If it is seen as courageous to be part of the resistance and opposing Trump then pretending to be confused about what he is saying goes right along with other tactics as downplaying his accomplishments, hassling his Administration in public when they go to eat or whatever, demonetising his supporters and deplatforming them and such. It is just another obvious tactic. It is without merit or value.
If he is re-elected (and not wanting to repeat myself but what is the Democrat message?) I hope his actions and his communication style and his productivity do not change one iota especially for people that would not support or vote for him regardless.