Donald Trump's First State of the Union, Part 2: Ordinary Americans as Examples

First Lady Melania Trump with Special Guests

I promised to follow up on my earlier post to show why using ordinary Americans as examples could be a poor speaking technique. Now, I do not diminish the wonderful contributions of the various special guests who President Donald Trump introduced during his 2018 State of the Union Address. All of those people had important stories, and it was quite fine for First Lady Melania Trump to host them and for Mr. Trump to call them out and recognize them.

The problem, however, comes when we use examples that are insufficient. Although examples, personal stories, and comparisons are wonderfully persuasive, they are not always logically valid. To give valid proof, examples need to meet these familiar tests:

1. There must be more than one example. One example proves nothing. Suppose one of my university students had dated a man, and he turned out to be a jerk. What a shame. Would that prove that all men are jerks? Or even that most men are jerks? No, it would not. It would only prove that one man was a jerk.

Mr. Trump's speech basically gave one example--one special guest--for each of his points. He gave one example of a welder who was using his tax cut, which he had not yet received, to buy a new house. That wasn't enough to establish a trend. An exception is that he introduced the parents of not one, but two, girls who were cruelly murdered by MS-13 gang members. That was, at least, two examples of a horrible crime. Even so, was this enough to establish that immigrants were, in general, threats to public safety? That is debatable. Even two examples, however powerful (and these were emotionally powerful examples), represent minimal evidence.

2. Also, the examples must be typical. MS-13 members are not typical immigrants, and so these two tragedies, although horrible, didn't prove that immigrants are dangerous in general. (Still, a Trump supporter could argue that if we excluded all immigrants, we would have excluded the MS-13 members. That seems draconian, but valid.)  That one American feels optimistic about the tax cut is evidence of the tax cut's worth, but does not, by itself, prove that consumer confidence is rising over the entire nation. We would need more examples, and probably an economic analysis, before we could say that the speaker has proven his point.

3. The speaker should account for counter-examples. For instance, Mr. Trump should account for immigrants who came to the United States, set up a business, and contributed to the community. There are many such people--I would be happy to supply some names--and they could equally have been invited to sit next to the First Lady and to receive presidential recognition. Of course, the First Lady is herself an immigrant, and yet the President did not call out her status as an immigrant who has made a massively positive contribution. However, since such counter-examples would not support the President's strict immigration policies, President Trump did not recognize such cases, and therefore his proof had a big gap.

So, examples are very convincing and can give evidence for the speaker's point but do not always prove the speaker's point. The personal stories that President Trump told about his wife's special guests were important, but insufficient to prove that his policies had merit.

Of course, at some point the listeners should apply these critical tests to determine whether the speaker had proven his point. The President is an advocate, but the audience must listen, not with cynicism, but with care, so they will only believe things for which there is enough evidence.

Photo from White House Flikr page

Donald Trump's First State of the Union, Part 1: Ordinary Americans as Examples

Donald Trump Giving 2018 State of the Union Speech

President Donald Trump gave his first State of the Union (SOTU) speech last night at the United States Capitol in Washington DC. My comments are based on NPR's transcript, which is based on his remarks as he actually delivered them.  This is because speakers often say things that are not in the official press release transcript. (I'm ignoring NPR's very opinionated commentary, however.)

As expected, Mr. Trump, in general, mostly followed his prepared text. As expected, he sounded presidential, whatever, exactly, that means. He expressed his agenda in moderate language and supported his points with evidence (much of which was, sadly, inaccurate.)

But let's talk about the ordinary Americans who Trump called out during his speech. The White House called them "special guests." They sat in the balcony next to First Lady Melania Trump, whose lovely and very telegenic white suit became a story in itself. It has become common practice in State of the Union speeches to invite war heroes, police officers, business owners, crime victims, or harried homeowners to sit in the balcony to illustrate one point or other. From a public speaking standpoint, this is both good and bad. In this post, I'll show what was good about this speaking technique.

Why It Is Good to Showcase Ordinary Americans in the SOTU?

The State of the Union speech tends to be filled with generalities, over-generalizations, exaggerations, inaccurate statistics, promises, and unrealistic policies that mean little to anybody. This has been true for years, and Trump's speech was no exception. Consider, for example, this important but soporific passage from Mr. Trump's SOTU speech:

"In recent months, my administration has met extensively with both Democrats and Republicans to craft a bipartisan approach to immigration reform. Based on these discussions, we presented Congress with a detailed proposal that should be supported by both parties as a fair compromise."

This was a perfectly reasonable thing to say, but it doesn't raise your heartbeat, does it?

In contrast, when Mr. Trump talked about ordinary Americans, he could bring his points home, showing the human side of America's problems and the potential benefits that his ideas could create.
Here are a few of the ordinary Americans from this speech: 

1. Mr. Trump introduced Staff Sergeant Justin Peck who risked his life to rescue a comrade during Middle East fighting. This illustrated the fight against ISIS:  "Kenton Stacy would have died if it were not for Justin's selfless love for his fellow warrior. Tonight, Kenton is recovering in Texas. Raqqa is liberated and Justin is wearing his new Bronze Star with a "V" for valor." He continued that "Terrorists who do things like place bombs in civilian hospitals are evil." So, the message reached a moral level: ISIS was evil, while the American hero was good, and our side is winning. Staff Sergeant Peck's face, shown on television, made the news event become real and moving.

Corey Adams

2. Touting the tax cut bill that he had signed, Mr. Trump mentioned a welder, Corey Adams, "an all-American worker," who was, Mr. Trump said, buying a house with the tax cut: "Corey plans to invest his tax cut raise into his new home, and his two daughters' education. Corey, please stand." This showed that the tax cut, which Democrats and independent analysts say mostly helped the rich, was also helping a working American.

3. Mr. Trump also introduced the parents of two teenage girls who were murder victims of the vicious MS-13 gang. Since many MS-13 members are immigrants, this showed the harms of immigration--one of Mr. Trump's signature issues. Instead of giving numbers and crime statistics, Mr. Trump introduced the bereaved parents. The heartbroken parents cried during this part of the speech, making the immigration issue more emotional, more real, and more powerful.

And so forth.  These were only three of the ordinary Americans highlighted during the SOTU speech.

So, Meanwhile...

These personal stories made policies seem real. Audiences can identify with personal examples more easily than they can identify with numbers and generalities. We don't always care about statistics, policies, or promises, but most of us do care about other people. The actual people appeared on television during the speech. Viewers had someone to care about.

So, that's the good side. In my next post, later today, I'll show why giving examples of ordinary Americans is not always a good public speaking method.

Images from WhiteHouse.gov

Why Should Russian Computer Bots Scare Us?

Robot, Українська: Робот

Not all persuasion involves people giving speeches. Computers also express political opinions, and may have affected the 2016 United States election. Personally, I want to know what people think, but don't care what robots think.

Russian Bots Are Out There

Twitter recently announced that computer bots linked to Russian accounts retweeted Donald Trump’s tweets about 470,000 times near the end of the 2016 presidential campaign. Russian or Russian-linked accounts were responsible for at least 48% of WikiLeaks’ activity at that time. Russian bots communicated more than 2 million tweets during the campaign’s closing month, and received about 455 million reads. Russian accounts related to the Russian government routinely reached out in personal outreach to a great many news organizations. Over 100 news agencies published stories that were at least partly based on this activity. Twitter is trying to suppress much of this activity, albeit a bit late.

Similarly, over 60,000 Americans responded to Facebook events that Russian computer bots had created about the campaign. More than one out of twenty-five of retweets of Trump’s messages were the work of Russian systems. Altogether, it is estimated that more than 120 million Americans received information from online Russian disinformation campaigns.

Congressman Devin Nunes’s Republican staff has prepared a secret memo purporting to give evidence of FBI misconduct in the Trump-Russia investigation. Should this memo, whose partisanship is obvious and whose credibility is questionable, be released to the public? The Twitter hashtag “ReleaseTheMemo” has been spread by about 600 Russian-linked accounts. The obvious purpose is to discredit the FBI investigation and thus protect Mr. Trump. One also sees readers’ comments that mix the Roman and Cyrillic alphabets; it is hard not to suspect that Russian bots are behind these.

Bots Don't Bother Conservatives - Yet!

Yet, few conservatives seem troubled. Writing on a conservative website,  David Harsanyi questions the “veracity” of a report that Russian bots were behind “ReleaseTheMemo.” He asks, “has anyone yet produced a single voter who lost his free will during the 2016 election because he had a Twitter interaction with an employee of a St. Petersburg troll form? Or do voters tend to seek out the stories that back their own worldviews?” Fair questions. Should the Russian bots worry us? Yes, they should, and here's why:

Bots, Which Are Not Real People, Persuade Real People

Bots can be persuasive. 

First, people are vulnerable to the bandwagon effect. When pro-Trump messages flood your Twitter account by the zillion, it is hard to avoid feeling that Trump is on a public relations roll. If many of those messages are actually fakes produced by a foreign government, you are jumping on a bandwagon that isn’t real. It just looks real.

Second, by cognitive dissonance theory, people whose beliefs are disproven by events are reluctant to change those beliefs. Instead, under certain conditions, they instead seek to evangelize nonbelievers to their point of view. In other words, if many people agree with you, you are likely to continue to believe that unlikely or silly things are actually true. You're OK with that, as you have social support from other people who believe silly things. However, if the other people are just bots, your social support exists only in your own imagination. It isn't real.

So, no, people don’t lose their free will when they read nonsense published by Russian bots. They can, however, get conned.

How to Detect Bots 

I generally oppose censorship. I do think that people should have enough sense not to let bots persuade them. Here, from medium.com, are some ways to spot bots:

1.  A bot is likely to post far more often than a person could. Look at how many posts a day the account published. More than 50 posts a day are very suspicious. Real people don’t post that much.
2. Bots give little personal information. Real social media accounts usually say things about the author. My accounts on Blogger, Twitter, and Facebook give personal information about me. Bots don't usually bother.
3. Bots tend to publish posts that show little real thought; instead; they repost headlines and links.
4. Bots are likely to publish lots of retweets and little original content.
5. Bots that belong to a network tend to post the same content at the same time.
6. Bots often use profile pictures copied from the Internet.
7. Look for handles or ID’s that are meaningless groups of letters or symbols, rather than actual names.

It can actually be hard to identify a bot. I have on occasion caught myself arguing with bots on Twitter. Oops! I might just be wasting my energy, since the bot isn’t a person at all.  Still, maybe my replies help put the record straight against the bot’s disinformation campaign. What do you think?

Yes, political bots are dangerous, and they can have a persuasive effect. No, they don't take your free will away. Yes, you need to be vigilant not to think of them as people. 

Look at the cute robot at the top of this post. Doesn't the robot look cute and innocent? Of course! But political bots are not cute and innocent. No one creates political bots for innocent purposes. Bots look real, but they are just part of a con.

Public Domain Image from Wikimedia Commons