No matter what else is said about him, Donald Trump is widely recognized as a master of attracting and holding attention.
.. Look at his response to Lester Holt’s first question of the night: “When you look at what’s happening in Mexico — a friend of mine who builds plants said it’s the eighth wonder of the world — they’re building some of the biggest plants anywhere in the world.”
.. Time after time he would start a sentence only to immediately cut himself off with a short self-serving interjection before completing his thought.
.. Discovered in the 1920, the Zeigarnik Effect maintains that an interrupted or uncompleted task commands our attention much more than a completed one.
The Snapchat Presidency of Donald Trump
When Trump issues a statement, it may look superficially like a policy statement, but it’s usually just a symbolic assault in some dominance-submission male rivalry game. It’s trash-talking against a rival, Barack Obama, or a media critic like CNN. Trump may be bashing Obama on Russia or the Mideast, but it’s not because he has implementable policies in those realms. The primary thing is bashing enemies.
.. But this is probably the wrong way to read Trump. He is more postmodern. He does not operate by an if-then logic. His mode is not decision, implementation, consequence.
.. His statements should probably be treated less like policy declarations and more like Snapchat. They exist to win attention at the moment, but then they disappear.
.. To read Trump correctly, it’s probably best to dig up old French deconstructionists like Jean Baudrillard, who treated words not as things that have meanings in themselves but as displays in an oppositional power struggle. Trump is not a national leader; he is a national show.
.. it could be that the governing Trump will be a White House holograph. When it comes to the substance of actual governance, it could be that President Trump is the man who isn’t there.
The crucial question of the Trump administration could be: Who will fill the void left by a leader who is all facade?
.. I’ll be curious to see if Trump’s public rhetoric becomes operationalized in any way. For example, I bet his bromance with Putin will end badly. The two men are both such blustery, insecure, aggressive public posturers, sooner or later they will get in a schoolyard fight.
Christie Takes it to Rubio: ‘There It Is. The Memorized 25-Second Speech.’
New Jersey governor Chris Christie went after Florida senator Marco Rubio in Saturday’s Republican debate:
Can We Expect an Early Night?
she actually has a campaign, complete with number-crunchers and a turnout machine, whereas her opponent has a bunch of guys playing around with the maps on 270towin.com.
.. There will be no riots, the call will come early, and Trump’s concession speech will be a schizophrenic mess — half a conciliatory attempt to save his kids’ brand equity, half a ranting advertisement for Trump TV.