How Trump and His Enablers Manipulate the Voting Public

[Res Ipsa]

Remember the 60 Minutes “scandal?” The one where Trump backed of an interview he’d agreed to on the grounds that they wouldn’t sit by while he claimed that up was down? (And trust me, it had nothing to do with low stamina falling asleep at campaign stops or his rambling, stream of consciousness word salad answers to even softball questions, or 40 minute absence seizures during town halls.)

After CBS aired Harris’s interview, which showed Harris to be a sharp, intelligent candidate, and not the blank faced drooler Lyin’ Don describes in every speech, Lyin’ Don decided he needed a weapon of mass distraction.

So, he did a thing he regularly does: create a scandal out of thin air. 60 Minutes, and numerous similar interview shows, conduct an interview that is much longer than the time allotted for the broadcast and then edit the interview down to size. Now, from time to time an interviewee complains that the interview was edited to make them look bad. There is potential merit to such a claim, as the interview was present during the interview and knows what occurred. In that case, it seems only fair to release the entire tape.

But Trump’s claim was bizarre. He had absolutely no idea of what occurred during the interview. He just claimed, based on no evidence at all, that the edits were made to hide some disastrous, embarrassing answer that would out Harris as the 50 IQ drooler he claims she is.

He. Made. It. Up.

Not only that, he portrayed it as the biggest scandal ever in the history of history. Nobody has ever seen anything like it. “Sir,” the Statue of Liberty said with tears in her eyes. “I’ve never seen anyone treated so unfairly. This is your freed slave lynching moment. For the love of God, take these 20 million immigrants and dump them in Tiajuana. Here, take these Democratic politicians, too. Oh, the humanity.”

Pro-tip: Trump’s use of superlatives is a tell that he’s lying to you.

This kind of made up crap works because it reinforces what Trump supporters already believe — that the Lamestream Media is in the pocket of the Socialist, Marxist, Born-Baby killing, Child raping, Democrat Party. It also plays to the conspiracy oriented portion of his base who believes a cabal of Globalists is pulling the strings of literally everything.

Seriously, Trump threatened to go after CBS’s license. Gasp. That must mean that this is a serious scandal.

The reality? When editors edit down an interview to fit it into a time slot, they want to present the substance of questions and answers. Inevitably, cutting stuff that doesn’t add to the substance will make both the interviewer and the interviewee look “better” than the cut parts would.

It’s a made up, phony “scandal” But it works. Immediately his press and political enablers started piling on. Soon, everyone is focused on the fake scandal, and everyone has forgotten that Trump had to renege on his interview because any side by side comparison would show viewers that he is an old, tired, senile man who is not competent to be president.

Lest any voters be tempted to recognize the distraction for what it is, MAGA land pulled one its favorite tricks: demand proof that Trump’s totally fabricated scandal is false. More distraction. Now, instead of people discussing why Trump pulled out of the interview he’d agreed to, everyone is focused on “what’s CBS got to hide?”

Mission accomplished.

But, I’ll bet you know what’s coming up next. Every accusation is a confession.

Trump appeared on Fox for an ongoing feature showing conversations in barbershops. The old geezer appeared pretty sharp and focused.

And then someone uploaded a chunk of the unedited tape to the internet. Here are some of the edits Fox made to make Trump look good:

Fox deleted Trump’s lies about the Haitians in Springfield and the Venezuelan gans in Aurora.

Fox cut a number of Trump’s petty insults, including ones directed at Wall Street and the Wall Street journal.

Fox cut Trump’s praise of authoritarian strongman Victor Orban, who has sabotaged Hungary’s democracy in the same ways that Trump threatens to.

One of the most glaring examples was Trump’s answer to a customer asking if federal taxes could be eliminated. Trump responded “there is a way.”

But that’s not what happened — not even close. The question and answer were seven minutes apart. Those seven minutes were filled with Trump's stream of conscious rambling, bouncing from topic to topic while the customer tried repeatedly to get an answer to the question he had asked. Only after the question was asked several times did Trump give the answer that Fox showed.

So, is Trump going after Fox’s license? No. Will Harris? No. Why not? Because both of them have given many recorded interviews and they both know that editors clean the interview up for broadcasts.

This is carny con man level stuff. Trump turned perfectly normal expected behavior into a “scandal” knowing perfectly well what video editors do to get from raw footage to the broadcast version. He’s playing his supporters for suckers. He bet that confirmation bias would prevent his supporters from figuring out what he knew from the beginning — there was no scandal.

And the distraction was the payoff. He is desperately trying to keep his supporters from taking a hard look at him and realizing that the would be emperor is stark naked.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/24/media/fo ... id=ios_app

[Some Schmo]

What's kind of hilarious about it is that Trump always makes the accusation in close proximity to having done the thing. He's seeing Fox completely hack the interviews to clean them up, thinks, That's great. What sleaze balls. I should accuse 60 minutes of doing that for Kamala.

[Moksha]

This is carny con man level stuff.

Or perhaps the fuel for many Ceeboo-type threads.