Rhetoric expert explains why there's no way to fact-check Trump's 'layers of lies'
Rhetoric expert, Professor Jennifer Mercieca, explained that the way that new "Meet the Press" host Kristen Welker held the interview with Donald Trump had no hope of ever being able to adequately fact-check the president.
"Meet the Press" conducted the interview "live to tape," with the claim that they would be fact-checking him. Mercieca outlined that in an hour-long show, there simply isn't enough time to cover the pile of false claims.
"His whole 'reality' is layers upon layers of lies. It's honestly a waste of time," she said. "He lives in a very dark fantasy world. So does the whole right-wing media audience. It's a real shame."
When Trump answers a question, she explained that "he tells 20 lies in the process and you can't stop each of those 20 lies." Especially, she noted, when the reporter simply wants to get to the answer of their actual question.
"It's called a 'Gish Gallop' by old-timey propaganda folks," she said.
MSNBC's Mehdi Hasan wrote about it for The Atlantic when his book about winning debates and arguments came out. The Gish Gallop "aim is simple: to defeat one’s opponent by burying them in a torrent of incorrect, irrelevant, or idiotic arguments. Trump owes much of his political success to this tactic — and to the fact that so few people know how to beat it. Although his 2024 campaign has been fairly quiet so far, we can expect to hear a lot more Gish Galloping in the coming months."
Mercieca said that Trump uses a "tone" that makes him sound like a reasonable man, while saying "insane" things. It ultimately confuses the listener.
Comedian Eddie Izzard made that part of her standup routine, where she explained that experts say that it isn't what you say but how you say it and the way that you look. She uses the American National Anthem as the perfect example,
"If you're lost in the middle of it and you're singing the words — you know the Tannoy systems in stadiums, it doesn't matter," she said. "All people care about is the look. There's figures on this, 70 percent of what people react to is the look. Twenty percent is how you sound, and 10 percent is what you say. So, if you look good and sound good, just standing up there — Bahhh wair sa fahhhh!"
Izzard goes on to sing the American national anthem without saying any of the words, but being loud and proud.
"Big mouth!" she proclaims. "The eyes! Use the hand! And keep confirming and denying" in the gestures.
"I'm not sure who the audience is for this interview," said Mercieca about the Trump interview. "I assume MTP viewers are high information voters. Highly engaged/high information voters in the reality-based community would see through his lies. Low-information voters wouldn't know better, but they're not watching this."
"Fascism throughout the interview," she continues. "He calls himself a hero, a martyr. Everything is corrupt, according to him. He is the only truthteller, according to him. The only one who has common sense and wants what is good for the nation. Consuming fascist propaganda like this makes you even more vulnerable to fascist propaganda. It is engineered/designed to create the conditions under which fascism flourishes. You cannot put Trump on TV without normalizing fascism in America."
She cited his tactics including "ad hominem, tu quoque, conspiracy, lies, false accusations of corruption, attacking the interviewer, [and] frame warfare."
"Every response he gives is an evasion," she closed. "He will never answer your questions to your satisfaction. You cannot hold him accountable. You just can't. Trump using anchoring (they like me, we're the same) to talk about his relationship with fascist leaders while also claiming that he wants peace is the kind of rhetorical trick that confuses the brain and makes it difficult to understand what he actually believes."
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