Categories
podcast

Taking Trump’s words out of context: How that drives conflict, and even helps Trump

In a recent Fox News interview, Trump was asked whether he thought there would be chaos and violence if he won the election, and his response included mentioning that, if necessary, the military might be needed. Many framed this response as indicating that Trump would go after his political opponents using the military, leaving out the context that he was responding to a question about election-related violence. I discuss what this incident can teach us about our toxic political divides.

A transcript, post-release show notes, and resources related to this episode are farther down below.

Topics discussed include: Republican-side grievances and how incidents like this relate; how conflict leads us to filter things in more pessimistic and negative ways; the self-reinforcing nature of conflict; the reasons why people framed Trump’s statements the way they did; Trump’s “bloodbath” language and similar reactions to that; the ease with which we can be biased without even realizing it, and more.

Episode links:

Show notes:

  • I think there are areas of nuance here that result in people talking about different aspects of it and misunderstanding each other.
    • For example, a piece by Tangle News focused on the badness of Trump saying he might use the military on protesters. I see the badness of that as quite debatable as I think there are scenarios where that’d be a reasonable response. Also Trump did say “if necessary,” which leaves a lot of room for ambiguity. But in any case Tangle’s focus was different than mine; I focused on people leaving out the context of the question Trump was asked, and framing it as if he were talking about dealing with his political opponents generally. (Learn why I recommend Tangle.)
  • As I discuss in this episode, when making these points I’ll receive criticisms like, “Trump is unhinged and dangerous; it’s clear what he meant.” (You can see a response like this in these comments. ) But the fact that I and others can have very different interpretations of these moments shows that the meaning of such things is not obvious. And hopefully you can see that you can think Trump is horrible while also seeing how overly pessimistic framings are bad and unhelpful (and while also seeing how such things can actually help Trump).

Resources related to this episode:

TRANSCRIPT

This is the People Who Read People podcast, with me, Zachary Elwood. This is a podcast about understanding people better, and understanding ourselves better. You can learn more about it at behavior-podcast.com. Also on my site are entries for these episodes with related resources and transcripts and more. 

In this episode, I’m going to discuss something in political news that bothered me a few days ago. I think it’s a good example of something quite specific and granular that tells us a lot about how our political divides work on a broader level. 

If you do disagree with me, I’d ask you to keep in mind the broader point that disagreeing on these things is easy. Often for these contentious issues, disagreement on political views or disagreement about specific points becomes a reason for people to walk away from thinking about these ideas. But if you can see the meta-level point that it’s easy for us to see things in very different ways, that’s very much related to the points I make in this video. 

In an October 14th interview on Fox News, Trump said some insulting and divisive things about liberals and Democrats, as he often does; He used the phrase the “enemy within” to talk about his political enemies, and discussed specific people, like Adam Schiff, who he saw as his enemies. During that talk, he was asked by the host, Maria Bartiroma, what he thought about the chances for violence after the election if he were to win. I’ll play that clip https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kmmx1zQCQds: 

Maria: Are you expecting chaos on election day?

Trump: No, I don’t – not from the side that votes for Trump.

Maria: But I’m just wondering if these outside agitators will start up on election day. Let’s say you win. I mean, let’s remember, you’ve got 50,000 Chinese nationals in this country in the last couple years, there are people on the terrorist watch list: 350 in the last couple years. You got, like you said, 13,000 murderers and 15 thousand rapists, um, what are you expecting? Joe biden says he doesn’t think it’s going to be a peaceful election day.

Trump: Well, he doesn’t have any idea what’s happening – he spends most of his day sleeping. Uh, I think the bigger problem is the enemy from within. Not even the people that have come in and are destroying our country – by the way, totally destroying our country, the towns, the villages, they’re being inundated – but I don’t think they’re the problem in terms of election day. I think the bigger problem are the people from within – we have some very bad people, we have some sick people, radical left lunatics. And I think – and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military, because they can’t let that happen. 

Trump’s mention of using the military was then framed in extremely negative terms by many in the media; ways that seem extremely biased to me. Here are a few examples of what I mean: 

Here’s a clip from New York Times’ The Daily podcast: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/17/podcasts/the-daily/election-roundtable.html (4:30)  Note that here they conflate together the “enemy within” language with the statement about the use of the military. Again, they don’t mention that there was a question about election-related violence that prompted the remark on the military. This show was the reason I started looking into this, because I was frankly pretty surprised by their framing and the lack of context given. 

Here’s a similar clip from Jake Tapper: https://www.instagram.com/p/DBM2-F8O1GH/?hl=en . 

Here’s a headline from NYT: https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/15/us/politics/trump-opponents-enemy-within.html: Trump Escalates Threats to Political Opponents He Deems the ‘Enemy’: Never before has a presidential nominee openly suggested turning the military on Americans simply because they oppose his candidacy. 

Here’s a headline from MSNBC: https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/trump-enemies-within-military-protest-rcna175410: A military that quashes protest is a part of Donald Trump’s fascistic dream

Kamala Harris also talked about it. She said, during a Fox News talk, that Trump suggested he would quote “turn the American military on the American people.” https://www.scrippsnews.com/politics/truth-be-told/truth-be-told-trumps-threat-to-use-military-against-enemy-from-within 

Now, to be clear here, I myself am very much anti-Trump – but I’m also someone who is concerned about what some far left people might do if Trump is elected. For the upcoming election, one of the paths to worst-case scenarios I see involves Trump winning followed by far left people doing bad things, which then leads to counter protestors doing bad things, and to escalating street violence, and then to Trump and others cracking down harshly on protestors, leading to more outrage and protests, and more crackdown, and so on. That’s one of the pathways that scares me. 

So the idea that there may theoretically be a substantial amount of violence and the idea that it may theoretically be necessary to use the National Guard to break up protests isn’t an unreasonable idea to me. 

Also we should note that Trump was prompted to answer here, so he had to say something, and note that he also did say, “if necessary.” This wasn’t a statement he produced out of the blue; when analyzing statements for meaning, we must differentiate between prompted speech and speech that one produced unprompted. 

This statement from Trump about the theoretical use of military force, if you subtract all his usual “sick and bad people” type language surrounding it, struck me as quite banal, all things considered, and as the kind of thing that Kamala Harris might say, using different language, if asked about the possibility of far right violence if she won. From my point of view, this was a quite minor moment compared to some of the much more objectively bad things Trump said in this talk, including calling his political opponents the “enemy within” and other things. The thing is with Trump: there are just so many more clearly and unambiguously objectionable things to focus on, which makes it a strange decision by anti-Trump people to focus on the more subjective things he’s said. 

Some people thought that Trump’s “enemy within” language showed that he was talking about more than just violent protestors, because that’s a term he used elsewhere to describe his political opponents in general. But that to me is not persuasive evidence; we know Trump likes to speak in extremely divisive and insulting and dehumanizing ways about his opponents. But granted that we know that, it’s not surprising that he would keep using the same phrase, the “enemy within” to describe his enemies as a whole, and that he’d fail to distinguish between the different types of his so-called “enemies.” We also know that Trump loves catchphrases; he often will go a while using the same phrase, because he just seems to get a kick out of using it. This is just to say that the claim that he was talking about his opponents in general as opposed to violent protestors specifically is not an objectively obvious or provable one; I think that it’s overly pessimistic. 

At the very least, even if you disagree with me on that, maybe you’d agree that it would have been good and responsible journalism to mention that the statement about the military came after he was asked about potential election-related violence. 

In my books on polarization, my main focus is on the self-reinforcing nature of conflict. When you take the worst-case interpretations of everything your adversaries say and do, you amplify the toxicity of the conflict. It’s entirely expected that these pessimistic takes and interpretations should happen, when we’re conflict; that’s what conflict does to us. Pessimism begets pessimism. People on both sides of the conflict see the other side in increasingly negative and pessimistic ways, and then filter everything through that lens, and so on. 

If you care about reducing the toxicity of our divides, or even if you mainly are interested in accomplishing specifical political goals, you should care about how this cycle gets worse, and you should want to work against it.

And not only that: worst-case interpretations help build support for the “other side.” Our worst-case, pessimistic interpretations help those on the other side of the conflict construct their narratives where we are the bad guys. We’ll often view our own behaviors and statements as reactions to the other side’s badness, but they will see our criticisms and reactions as provocations and aggressions. For this specific incident, it’s easy to imagine how Republican-leaning voters view this: these are the incidents that confirm for them why they are right to distrust liberal-leaning mainstream media. I’ll say that even for me, these incidents are extremely disappointing and agitating; for one thing, it means that when I hear the latest outrage on the liberal side, in respected liberal outlets, I can no longer trust that things happened as they’re claimed to have happen; when I hear something that Trump or Republicans did that is supposedly worthy of outrage, I can’t trust the sources anymore, I have to go do my own research. This is what’s so frustrating about this, even apart from the fact that I see these things as amplifying conflict for no good reason. 

If you’re curious to learn more about that, I have a talk with Yakov Hirsch in the backlog of episodes, where we talk about the importance of anti-Trump people having cognitive empathy for Trump and Trump supporters; for understanding why Republicans can perceive a huge, biased system aligned against them, and how that makes them feel and act. Again, in all of these areas, you can arrive at empathy and understanding for other people’s narratives without agreeing with their views. Contrary to what our instincts tell us, understanding does not equal agreeing.

Here’s a clip from Maria Bartiromo’s show yesterday, October 20th, where she talks about people taking Trump’s statement out of context https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLR1c9tEvz4&t=12m40s:  

No surprise this week to see the media critique and misread my exclusive interview with President Trump last weekend when he responded to my question about whether outside agitators would emerge to create chaos and election day should it appear that Trump was winning instead most media Outlets cut out my question entirely to suggest Trump wanted the military to take down his political enemies here’s a clip.

[Here she plays the clip from her interview…]

Following my interview Democrats and many mainstream media outlets constructed their own political narrative without including the full context of the Q&A about outside agitators on Election Day among the media Outlets that ran misleading headlines NPR Vanity Fair the part and many others and this is how the interview was covered on television: 

Watch this in a Fox news interview the former president also suggested using the military to go after what he called the enemy from within on Election Day it comes as former president Trump is deploying increasingly inflammatory rhetoric against his rival and suggesting using the military against what he described as domestic enemies it we’re at the point where where he’s saying I’m going to use the National Guard and the military to take my political enemies out of the country talking about but I’m talking about

Donald Trump saying that he wants to use the National Guard in the military to go after the left that’s what he’s saying on the campaign Trail Trump this weekend stepping up his anti-immigrant rhetoric and suggesting he might use the military against quote radical left lunatics on Election Day. 

Joining me now in this Sunday Morning Futures exclusive is Trump organization Executive Vice President and the son of the 45th president Eric Trump. Eric, great to see you thank you for being here your reaction. 

Eric: Thanks Maria listen my reaction is very simple. I’ve lived this for 10 years Maria I mean it started with the dirty dossier where they made up the most Unthinkable things about my father then they went to

the Russia hoax and that hung over my father’s presidency for threeyear period of time then they tried to impeach him the first time then they went after Brett Kavanaugh then they tried to impeach him the second time then they raided his home they raided melania’s closet they raided you know Baron’s room then they tried to take him off the valley in Colorado then they tried to take him off the ballot in Maine then they weaponized every AG and DA in Atlanta in New York and in Washington DC to go after my father then you had you know Paige and stru and and Comey you had me getting 111 subpoenas you had

them ban him from Twitter ban him from Facebook ban him from Instagram the they I I mean where do you want me to stop and and that’s exactly what my father’s talking about that’s the enemy within. 

I include this clip not because I agree with what Eric Trump says; in fact, I think Eric is someone that, like many people these days, has been deranged by conflict. He filters everything about the quote “other side” through the worst possible lens, and it’s a very distorted lens, in my opinion. He sees everyone on the quote “other side” as all being aligned against him, as all being part of a big plot; that is also what conflict does to us. He filters everything through a very pessimistic lens while being unable to empathize with the reasons why people view his father so negatively. Remember that Eric Trump is the person who said, about Trump’s political opponents, “I’ve never seen hatred like this. To me, they’re not even people.” He can’t see the big picture of the conflict; he is only focused on the badness of his opponents, as he sees it. And it’s easy for conflict to derange us; easier than we think.  https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2017/6/7/15755852/eric-trump-not-people-dehumanization 

I include this clip to help people understand how incidents like this one fit into the broader narrative building that happens on the Republican side where Trump’s enemies are the undemocratic ones, willing to do and say whatever they can to make Trump look bad. Again, you don’t have to agree with that to understand why people feel that way, and to see why that can be a large factor in support for Trump. Grievance and anger are big factors in our politics; more so than most people want to believe, on either side. 

Another prominent example of this dynamic was around Trump’s “bloodbath” comment, in which he made the statement that, if he lost, “it’s going to be a bloodbath for the country.” I’ll play that clip:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FtE4Z0yWbPA 

[PLAY CLIP]

As with the statement about use of the military, this specific phrase struck me when it happened and got media attention as a non-issue. Listening to Trump’s statement in context, it struck me as completely banal. The kind of thing that would pass unnoticed by most people if people besides Trump were to say it. 

Supporting the view that it was rather banal, I’ll read a snippet on this incident from Factcheck.org https://www.factcheck.org/2024/03/trumps-bloodbath-comment/: 

“If you actually watch and listen to the section, he was talking about the auto industry and tariffs,” Steven Cheung, a spokesman for Trump’s campaign, told the Washington Post, adding that “Biden’s policies will create an economic bloodbath for the auto industry and autoworkers.”

That explanation seems the most plausible, given the context of Trump’s comments.

End quote

Also supporting evidence for this is the fact that one of the understood meanings of bloodbath is an “economic disaster.” https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/bloodbath 

And yet, in this case, also, many smart and influential people, from academics to political leaders to pundits, ran with the most pessimistic interpretation possible.   

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have both repeated the claim that Trump’s “bloodbath” language was meant to predict or threaten violence if he lost. 

In the debate in June, Biden talked about this:  https://www.c-span.org/video/?536407-1/simulcast-cnn-presidential-debate

 “And now he says if he loses again, such a whiner that he is, that there could be a bloodbath.” 

Here’s a clip from Kamala Harris from their debate in September:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eYbTQ4MmqdY “Donald Trump the candidate has said in this election there will be a bloodbath.”

Tim Snyder, https://snyder.substack.com/p/the-bloodbath-candidate is the author of the best-selling book On Tyranny, in which he makes the case that Trump poses an authoritarian threat. Snyder framed it as obvious, in context, that Trump really did mean a physical and literal bloodbath. He made the case on his substack that one must put Trump’s statement into context. After laying out the context he saw, he wrote: 

By now we have taken into account some important contexts: how Trump himself introduced his speech; the politics and mendacity of his coup attempt of 2021; and the history of fascist violence generally.  All of this confirms that when Trump threatens a bloodbath he means a bloodbath.  

Later he writes:

The people who say that the car context rescues Trump ignore the meaningful contexts: history, Trump, the opening of the rally, what he said in the speech generally.  Focusing on the cars has the effect of casting away the fascist overture and rest of the speech, and all of the other contexts.  Those who speciously insist that Trump had in mind an automotive bloodbath never mention that he had just celebrated criminals, repeated the big lie, dehumanized people, and followed fascist patterns.

This helps us see the explanation for why smart people, people who I think should know better, can justify overly pessimistic interpretations: They think that you must take into account all the context and look behind the surface level meaning. The arguments in that direction tend to sound like this: “We know how bad Trump really is and the many bad things he’s said before; we can’t give him the benefit of the doubt” and “Don’t be naive; we know what he was really thinking; he tries to speak in ambiguous ways so you can’t be sure exactly what he means but we know better.”

But this is all quite bad logic to me: these are justifications for taking the worst-case interpretations of things people say; they aren’t logical reasons why you should do that. 

For one thing, reaching for the most pessimistic interpretations possible is what people on both sides of an extreme conflict will find themselves doing. This is what Trump and Republicans do to their opponents all the time. This is what conflict does to us. If we want to work against conflict, we must see it as important to not jump to pessimistic conclusions about everything around us. The truth is that in the course of speaking, all of us every day say things that could be taken in extremely pessimistic ways; there is no shortage of things to use to build pessimistic narratives. And if we do that for other people, they’ll be more inclined to do it for us. 

The impulse to engage in mind-reading is one clue of this mindset; we see this from highly angry people on both sides of our divide; people who say things like “We know what’s in their hearts; we know what’s in their minds; we know the dark, dangerous things our opponents are thinking.” 

For another thing, if your goal is to criticize Trump, there are just so many things Trump has said that are worthy of criticism and that don’t require reaching for subjective, ambiguous, and non-persuasive interpretations. If your goal is to persuade others of Trump’s badness, reaching for the most subjective and ambiguous examples of his behavior are a surefire way to drive people away from you and make them see your arguments and your concerns as silly. Think about it from a Trump voter’s perspective for a moment: when they see people overreacting about Trump’s “blood bath” language and his mention of using the military to quell unrest if necessary, they will find it easy to write off other liberal-side concerns about Trump. They will find it easy to think anti-Trump people are overreacting in general.  https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/14/us/elections/trump-promises-extreme-rhetoric.html 

Another defense I hear is from people who agree that these aren’t good things, but who say: “But the problems are so much worse on the other side; why are you focused on this small stuff?” But hopefully by the time you’re done this video, you’ll have a better sense of why I find these things so important to talk about and to consider.  

Pessimism and contempt beget more pessimism and contempt. For people who see liberal-leaning media acting in biased ways, they will also reach for pessimistic conclusions, like, “The media knows they’re lying; they’re purposefully lying to hurt Trump; this is all part of a big plot.” 

But this is another overly pessimistic interpretation. The simple fact is that conflict produces bias and overly pessimistic views. Conflict diverges our narratives, making it harder for us to understand the narratives people on the quote “other side” have. In my book Defusing American Anger, I include a section on our polarized, divergent views of Trump, where I talk about how we can arrive at such divergent, entirely different views of the things Trump has said and done. 

[Show diagram] When you see these dynamics clearly, you’ll have a better understanding of things that can be rather mystifying. For example, on a personal note, I’ll say that it’s rather mystifying to me how smart people in the liberal-leaning media can so often arrive at these extremely pessimistic and, to me, illogical, takes about Trump. Why are they focusing on these subjective and non-persuasive things, I wonder. In the same way, I am often perplexed by the very unreasonable and divisive framings of things in conservative-leaning news. It would be quite easy for me to reach conclusions like, “All the reporters and leaders I think are speaking in very divisive and biased ways are purposefully trying to deceive people.” It would be very easy to jump to extremely pessimistic conclusions about so many people. But because I’m someone who works against pessimism, I think it’s important to examine the underlying causes at work. Smart and compassionate people can arrive at views they believe are completely defensible and logical but that I and others see as extremely biased and misleading. Just as Timothy Snyder can defend his framing of Trump’s “bloodbath” comments by arguing it’s all about the context and putting the pieces together, others in various ways are doing the same thing. They are connecting the dots in various ways. 

For example, for Trump’s military comments recently, some made the argument that it was clear, from the context of the rest of the aggressive and divisive interview, that Trump’s statement about using the military didn’t just apply to violent protestors; that in the context of him talking about the “enemy within” and talking specifically about Pelosi and Adam Schiff and such elsewhere in the talk, that it was clear that he was insinuating violence in general against his so-called enemies as a broad group. As I previously said, I don’t find this persuasive logic, as it requires deductions and assumptions, but I can understand how they got to that stance. 

The truth is that we’re all making all sorts of deductions and assumptions every day. Our logic and our thinking are built on all sorts of assumptions and deductions. And what does conflict and polarization do to us? It makes what we focus on and the deductions we make more pessimistic, and more hysterical; it makes our thinking itself more team-based and unreasonable. As humans, we’re good at assembling stories; we’re good at assembling the pieces of the puzzle in all sorts of ways, and often the picture we put together will be overly dark and scary. 

This is just to say: if you’re someone who is drawn to often thinking that people on the “other side” are always lying; that they can’t possibly believe the things they say they believe – I hope you consider that, more often than you think, those people really do believe what they say they believe. This is not to say there aren’t liars (because conflict makes people more willing to lie, too), but just to say that often our divergence in narratives will mean we’ll have a hard time distinguishing between true believers and liars. 

Our divergent narratives and interpretations will lead to moments like this https://www.mediaite.com/tv/jake-tapper-shuts-down-mike-johnsons-spin-of-trumps-enemy-within-comments-hes-literally-talking-about-using-the-military-against-democrats/ between two people who I think do genuinely have completely different but yet defensible views of this incident: 

TAPPER: He’s literally talking about, using the military against Democrats. I mean he’s literally talking…

JOHNSON: No, he’s not. No, no, he’s not, Jake.

TAPPER: Yes he is!

JOHNSON: No, he’s not. No. No, he’s talking about using the National Guard and the military to keep the peace in our streets. 

I write about these dynamics in my book Defusing American Anger, which is written for all Americans and is currently only in ebook. My book How Contempt Destroys Democracy is written for a liberal and/or anti-Trump audience and is available in paperback as well as ebook. My work in this area has gotten some good reviews. For example, Kamy Akhavan, Executive Director of USC Dornsife Center for the Political Future, called it “One of the better books on polarization” and said it contained a “great explanation of how polarization actually works.” Kirkus Reviews said it contained: “Compelling arguments, based on astute observations and backed by solid research.” Daniel F Stone, a polarization researcher and the author of the book Undue Hate, which I highly recommend, gave me a book review in which he said that I’m quote “one of the wisest voices on the topic of toxic polarization.” 

You can learn more about my polarization-related work at www.american-anger.com. 

I hope you found this of interest. If you did, please consider sharing on your social media; sharing my work is how you can encourage me to do more of it. 

Thanks for watching.