The "cognitively irresponsible" presidency
"It's a giveaway that a leader is an authoritarian," Jen Mercieca tells us.
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The volume of BS that Donald Trump blasts into the public sphere on a daily basis is flabbergasting. He overwhelms us with tsunamis of lies every single time he opens his mouth.
Consider the brief press event Trump held on Monday to sign some executive orders. Over a span of a mere 20 minutes, Trump took credit for “turning on the water” in California (he actually recklessly dumped more than two billion gallons out of reservoirs), then claimed his administration blocked USAID from spending “$100 million on condoms to Hamas” (this increasingly exaggerated lie was already widely debunked last week, but you can’t shame the shameless). Trump insisted that “close to 300,000” Americans die from fentanyl each year (the actually number is far below 100,000) and asserted a fictional right to unilaterally eliminate congressionally established agencies like USAID “when it comes to fraud.”
“These people are lunatics,” Trump projected.
Then, as if all of this lying and obfuscation wasn’t enough, Trump told reporters that Canada could avoid being hit with tariffs if the country agrees to “become our 51st state.”
There are so many examples of Trump sounding like a maniac from this week alone that it’s hard to know where to begin or end.
For instance, as I was prepping this newsletter yesterday, Trump spoke at the National Prayer Breakfast and served up a world historical word salad about air traffic control systems (video after the transcript):
We're all gonna sit down and do a great computerized system for our control towers. Brand new. Not pieced together, obsolete, like it is, land-based. Trying to hook up a land-based system to a satellite system. The first thing that some experts told me when this happened is you can't hook up land to satellites and you can't hook up satellites to land. It doesn't work. We spend billions of billions of dollars trying to renovate an old, broken system, instead of just saying cut it loose, and let's spend less money and build a great system done by two or three companies, very good companies, specialists, that’s all it is. They used 39 companies. That means that 39 different hookups have to happen. And I don’t know how many people of you are good in terms of all of the kinds of things necessary for that. And it’s very complex stuff. But when you have 39 different companies working on hooking up different cities at different people. You need one company. With one set of equipment. And there are some countries that have unbelievable air controller systems. And they would’ve, bells would’ve gone off when that helicopter literally even hit the same height. Because it traveled a long distance before it hit. It was just like, just wouldn’t stop. Follow the line. But bells and whistles would’ve gone off. They have ‘em where it actually could virtually turn the thing around. It would’ve just never happened if we had the right equipment. And one of things that’s gonna be, I’m gonna speaking to John and to Mike and to Chuck and everybody, we have to get together and just as a single bill just pass where we get the best control system. When I land in my plane, privately, I use a system from another country because my captain tells me, I’m landing in New York and I’m using a sys— I won't tell you what country, but I use a system from another country because the captain says ‘This thing is so bad, it’s so obsolete.’ And we can’t have that.
(As a side note, check out how the Associated Press sanewashed those comments.)
Then, about an hour later, Trump tried to outdo himself with another syllable spray about water in California and how he purportedly fixed it by opening up “millions and millions of barrels a day.” (Video after the transcript.)
The environmentalists didn’t want water. They still don’t want it. If they had their choice they don’t want it. I said, are you crazy? And I’m sure you’ve seen it. The water comes down from the northwest parts of Canada, I guess, but the Pacific Northwest. And it comes down by millions and millions of barrels a day and uh, I opened it up. It wasn't that easy to do. But I opened it up and it's pouring down. And it’s a beautiful thing.
In a word, whew.
Jen Mercieca is one of the country’s leading experts on political rhetoric in general and on Trump’s rhetoric in particular. She uses the term “cognitive irresponsibility” to describe what Trump is up to with his incessant and often ridiculous assaults on truth and coherency.
“‘Cognitively irresponsible’ leaders are authoritarian,” Mercieca told us. “They’re the ones that don’t want to have the give and take of ideas. They don’t want to be held accountable for their words and actions. They don’t want to have to persuade the nation to accept or adopt their policies. They really just want to rule by dictate. They want to make a policy, and when we ask why, they want to say, ‘Because I said so.’”
But, as Mercieca points out, there’s a media strategy behind Trump’s madness.
“We’ve seen in the past a few examples of someone having a one-on-one interview with Trump and being able to press him repeatedly to get him to answer questions, but it’s very rare,” she said. “I’m thinking of Jonathan Swan, who was at Axios, and he pushed and pushed. It was uncomfortable, even. That’s not the norm with Trump. He’s really good at using different strategies, like the gish gallop. You ask him a question, and he gives you 50 different lies, and you can’t fact check all of them. He’s good at spewing disinformation.”
With the world having to come to terms with having a “cognitively irresponsible” president back in the White House, we connected with Mercieca to talk about Trump’s rhetorical techniques and how understanding them can help you reach the MAGA Kool-Aid drinkers in your life.
“I try to explain how the strategies work, because I think if people can see it for themselves, then maybe they will self-persuade,” she said. “You can introduce doubt. You want to get them to realize they can ask questions and think critically, because it is cult-like in the way people get programmed.”
A full transcript of Mercieca’s conversation with Public Notice contributor Thor Benson, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows.
Thor Benson