Speakers Need Research, and President Trump Gathered a Little Bit of Research About the Coronavirus. Was It Enough? I Have My Doubts.

President Donald Trump, White House Photo

Speakers need research. I have blogged about that several times.

President Donald Trump’s talk yesterday in a press conference concerning the coronavirus was, well, to no one’s surprise, a case in point. If you watch TV shows and movies about presidential decision-making – The West Wing, for example – you get the impression of wise, informed people carefully discussing important issues so they can make the most prudent decisions. How naïve. I wish this were so, but it's not.

Let’s look at how being a bit uninformed made Trump sound a little silly.

Trump wisely started by showing that he had gathered information: “I have just received another briefing from a great group of talented people on the virus that is going around to various parts of the world.  We have, through some very good early decisions — decisions that were actually ridiculed at the beginning — we closed up our borders to flights coming in from certain areas, areas that were hit by the coronavirus and hit pretty hard.  And we did it very early.” Okay, I suppose that’s all debatable, and only time will tell whether he made the right decisions. Closing borders is obviously insufficient, but it is consistent with Trump's America First isolationism.

Still, kudos to the president for listening to a briefing. The President is notorious for ignoring policy briefings, and we should all be a tiny bit relieved that he at least attended this one.

But here’s what astonished me: President Trump seemed uninformed about influenza, an epidemic that the press often compares with coronavirus:

“I want you to understand something that shocked me when I saw it that — and I spoke with Dr. Fauci on this, and I was really amazed, and I think most people are amazed to hear it: The flu, in our country, kills from 25,000 people to 69,000 people a year.  That was shocking to me.”

Influenza/pneumonia has been among the top 10 causes of death in the United States for decades. Why did that surprise President Trump? Why did he say that this was “shocking to me?” If he knew nothing about influenza, why should we trust him to handle the coronavirus?

So, on the one hand, we should all be happy that President Trump received a briefing from qualified experts and acquired basic information about the possible oncoming pandemic. On the other hand, it bothers me that the President of the United States found an ordinary public health fact "shocking," that he was "really amazed."

So, yes, President Trump did his (last-minute) research. Good. But why didn’t he know more to start with? I, for one, would feel more comfortable with leadership that is not always playing catch-up with the facts. Trump complained bitterly about President Barack Obama's ultimately successful handling of the Ebola outbreak, so one would expect him to be supremely well-prepared for the current public health crisis. One might be wrong to expect that.

Do I think that all of our recent presidents  were well-informed? No. Trump just happens to be the problem this time. When leaders face emergencies – public health, foreign policy, economic stress – they are dealing with people’s lives. Our leaders should be smarter and better informed than the rest of us, not less so.

And maybe we should blame the voters just a little bit, shouldn’t we? Hillary Clinton was better informed about almost everything than President Trump, but she lost the election. Several of the Republican candidates in 2016 were far better informed than Trump, but they also lost. Elizabeth Warren is hands-down the best-informed of the Democratic candidates in 2020, and, judging from the polls, she doesn’t have a chance. Voters like to support candidates from their own group, who share their underlying attitudes. But, maybe, just maybe, we should pick people who know what they’re doing. And we should pick people who consistently gather information before they make critical decisions. Health experts are already questioning the accuracy of the Trump administration's response to the impending crisis. Not good.

Let’s give President Trump a B- at best for speech preparation this time. But, with a public health emergency looming in front of us, let’s hope for better.

P.S.: I didn't take time in this post to talk about Trump's speech organization. That was a problem with this press conference: Trump wandered rather aimlessly from one point to the next. This weakens the impact of whatever his central point was. I may or may not talk about that in a future post.

Why Did It Take So Long For General John Kelly to Say What He Really Thinks?

John Kelly

Retired General John Kelly, who served the Trump administration as Secretary of Homeland Security and White House Chief of Staff, gave a speech yesterday at Drew University. He contradicted President Trump on political and legal issues. But why now? Timing is everything in public speaking, as in most of life, and if you miss your moment, well, you’ve missed your moment.

For one thing, Kelly defended Lieutenant Colonel Alexander Vindman, a former National Security Council official who testified against President Trump during the House impeachment  hearings. President Trump recently fired Vindman and threatened him with military discipline. Kelly said that Vindman “did exactly what we teach them to do from cradle to grave” and “he went and told his boss what he just heard.” He explained that all military personnel are trained not to obey an illegal order and, in fact, they should report an illegal order up the chain of command. Kelly further explained that Trump’s phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky represented a dramatic change in American policy and that Vindman was therefore correct to express concern.

Kelly also refuted Trump’s claim that the press was “the enemy of the people.” Maybe Kelly’s most important point was to disagree with President Trump’s statements about immigrants and migrants. He said that migrants were not evil and that, “In fact, they’re overwhelmingly good people. He continued that "they’re not all rapists and they’re not all murderers. And it’s wrong to characterize them that way. I disagreed with the president a number of times.”

Okay, fine. Decent people already understood all of that. But the question I started with was, why now? 

1.  If Kelly found the President’s policies offensive, he could have spoken out publicly at the time. Instead, he chose to work from within the White House, while publicly assenting (silently or otherwise) to Trump’s policies. Was that right or wrong? The history of domestic and foreign policy is full of people who supported policies that privately repelled them. Maybe they thought they could be more effective working from within. I’m sure that Kelly felt that way. Rarely has that been true. People who struggle behind the scenes usually just get co-opted, exactly as happened to Kelly.

2.   It’s fine for Kelly to defend Lieutenant Colonel Vindman now, but no one stopped him from defending Vindman during his testimony. The conservative media and President Trump attacked Vindman viciously, and then – not now – is when Vindman most needed his support.

3.   I expect that, over the coming years, a whole flock of cackling former Trump administration officials will write books and give speeches to explain how wrong Trump was. That’s too little, too late. At least Kelly is speaking up while Trump is still President, and his comments might have an effect, albeit a tiny effect, on current political opinion. For all of these people to speak up too little, and too late, is a disservice to the American republic.
 

There is a reason that President John Kennedy’s best-selling book Profiles in Courage, which describes courageous acts by American public figures, is so short. Few public officials seem to have much moral courage. Let’s give General Kelly a C+: he spoke up before it was absolutely too late, but he didn’t speak up in time.

Yes, in public speaking, timing is everything. It’s not just what you say; it’s also when you say it.

Technical note: Rhetorical theorists talk about kairos, which is the art of saying something at the best moment, the right time. If you're interested, I wrote about kairos in one of President William McKinley's speeches in chapter 9 of my book about the 1896 presidential campaign. The book is available in paperback, and you can read it free in many large university libraries.

More about Kelly: This is not the first time that General Kelly’s public speaking has irritated me. You might want to read my earlier post about him. In that post, I explain how a 2017 speech that Kelly gave was full of vicious errors and misstatements. 

Photo: Dept. of Homeland Security

Why Did Jay Sekulow Propound So Many Conspiracy Theories? Why Are Conspiracy Theories Persuasive? I Have Some Scary Thoughts about Those Questions.

US Senate Chamber, via Wikimedia Commons

Jay Sekulow’s January 28 speech defending President Donald Trump in the Senate impeachment trial pandered to fearful people by disseminating discredited conspiracy theories. I’ve been blogging about that speech for a few days. Sekulow’s ludicrous arguments claimed that the Mueller investigation illegally destroyed evidence and FBI agents conspired against Trump in Operation Crossfire. Even if he had made truthful arguments, which he didn’t, his complaints had no bearing on the legality of Trump’s Ukraine phone call, which occurred years after those events. Since Sekulow is not a complete idiot, he surely knew that. So what was the point? That’s simple! His point was to show that the impeachment investigation was only one part of a massive effort to smear President Trump. This is incredibly bad argumentation, but bad conspiracy theories often persuade people. Let’s look at why.

What are conspiracy theorists doing? What is their purpose? What do they accomplish – rhetorically speaking – by espousing far-fetched or discredited conspiracy theories? And why did Sekulow say such ridiculous things at such length?

First, the conspiracy theorist works from tiny bits of evidence that are often relevant but insufficient, or that might be completely fabricated, to establish a claim that otherwise cannot be proven. For example, Sekulow noted that FBI agents Peter Strzok and Lisa Page’s cell phones were wiped (which turned out to be routine FBI procedure) and concluded, without any further evidence, that Special Counsel Robert Mueller had obstructed justice. The evidence – the fact that the FBI repurposed the phones – is real, but it is not enough to prove the conclusion. FactCheck.org found that the accusation was “baseless.” They concluded that “There is no evidence that Mueller — or anyone else — illegally deleted text messages sent or received by Strzok and Page.”

Second, the conspiracy theorist deflects responsibility. By all accounts, President Trump abused his authority, and many people recognize this, but Republicans want to keep him in office anyway. The conspiracy theorist implies that the accusations, however well-supported, are part of a larger conspiracy, a cabal of evil to disrupt our government. Thus, Sekulow’s theme; he repeatedly cried out this phrase: “danger, danger, danger.” To the conspiracy theorist, it is not the lawbreaker who threatens us, but the people who want to bring the lawbreaker to justice. Conspiracy theory creates a complete moral reversal.

Third, continuing to deflect responsibility, the conspiracy theorist diverts attention from the real issue to fear-inducing but imaginary problems. Page and Strzok, Robert Mueller, and Operation Crossfire all occurred years earlier. Perhaps the facts show that President Trump engaged in grossly improper behavior. But Sekulow wanted his audience to think that impeachment was part of a partisan conspiracy. That is the best way to understand the main point that Sekulow made in his speech, which was this:

“But if partisan impeachment based on policy disagreements, which is what this is, and personal presumptions or newspaper reports and allegations in an unsourced—maybe this is in some-body’s book who is no longer at the White House—if that becomes the new norm, future Presidents, Democrats and Republicans, will be paralyzed the moment they are elected, before they can even take the oath of office. The bar for impeachment cannot be set this low.”

If impeachment was based on massive evidence (which it obviously was), Sekulow’s arguments meant nothing. Sekulow’s main point, however, was that the process was entirely partisan, and he presented conspiracy theories to reinforce that theme. He wanted to put impeachment in the larger context, which was, he wanted deceive people into thinking, that mysterious, behind-the-scenes forces – what Trump would call “the swamp” – were behind the entire process. His thin, inaccurate, and distorted evidence therefore took on a pretense of meaning. If impeachment emerged from a conspiracy, Sekulow wanted us to believe, he could imply that the Democrats’ documents, sworn testimony, and video recordings were just part of the massive anti-Trump conspiracy. Since he could not prove that there was anything wrong with the Democrats' evidence, he instead tried to prove that impeachment fell into a conspiratorial context. "You can't view this case in a vacuum," he said.

Fourth, the conspiracy theorist takes advantage of the fact that real conspiracies occur all the time. In fact, the House managers presented an enormous amount of evidence, including sworn testimony, documents, and videos, to prove that President Trump was engaged in a conspiracy. The Watergate conspiracy was real. Organized crime conducts conspiracies every day. But conspiracies are secret, which makes it hard to ferret them out. Very few conspirators are foolish enough to do what President Trump did, which was to conduct a conspiracy in front of several honest witnesses. The public doesn’t necessarily expect to hear a lot of evidence for conspiracy, because we all know that conspiracies are secret and that conspirators routinely destroy evidence. Thus, extremely suspicious people could think that Sekulow’s onion skin-thin arguments were persuasive.

Fifth, many people fear that the world is spiraling out of control. Change is happening faster than we can keep up. Maybe this is inevitable. However, the ever-suspicious conspiracy theorist worries that changet is a result of sinister forces working behind-the-scenes for evil purposes. People like Sekulow appeal to those fears.

Six, Sekulow’s argument was not directed to the Senate. Very few senators are stupid enough to believe the silly things that he was saying. His argument was directed to President Trump – who does seem to believe these things – and Mr. Trump’s base voters – who also believe them.

Indeed, a massive Cambridge University study found that 41% of Trump voters believe that immigration is part of what they think is a replacement conspiracy to displace white people. They also found that Trump voters were “more likely to believe that climate change is a hoax, vaccines are harmful, and that a group of people ‘secretly control events and rule the world together.’” To people who think rationally, that’s all silly. But Sekulow knew his audience and he knew that Trump voters could be persuaded to reject impeachment if he could tie impeachment to conspiracy theories that circulate in conservative media.

Seventh, most obviously, fear causes people to believe in unproven conspiracies. That is why Sekulow kept repeating "danger, danger, danger" all through his speech. Fearful people believe that conspiracies control them.

Many mainstream media writers and some of my academic colleagues like to pretend that conspiracy theories are fringe beliefs. If that is what they think, they are badly deluded. Conspiracy theories are not fringe beliefs. There are historical times when paranoia – unjustified fear – rules the world, and we seem to be living in one.  We all know that Trump’s presidency flows from conspiracy theories, but it is still a shame to hear a famous person like Sekulow speak such nonsense on the United States Senate floor. Too bad.

Click this link to read Sekulow’s speech, which begins on page S622.

Previous posts:

• Sekulow's conspiracy theories. This post gives details about the conspiracy theories in the same speech.

• Sekulow's science fiction-ish language. Danger, Will Robinson! This post looks at Sekulow's fear-inducing language.

• An oldie, but one of my most popular posts: "Speeches about Conspiracies: How Can We Tell Whether A Conspiracy Is Real?"

P.S.: I have been citing fact-checking websites the last several months. These websites, especially FactCheck.org, PolitiFact.com, and the Washington Post's Fact Checker, do a wonderful job. The AP Fact Check website has been working hard. There are, however, plenty of unreliable fact checkers out there, so, reader beware! Alas, conspiracy theorists pretend to care about facts even though they really don't.