How can Trump lie so much and be 'authentic' at the same time? Here's one explanation

https://www.cnn.com/2018/05/05/politics/trumps-lies-authentic-to-his-supporters/index.html

by Gregory Krieg, CNN

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Conducted by a trio of scholars from MIT and Carnegie Mellon University, "The Authentic Appeal of the Lying Demagogue: Proclaiming the Deeper Truth about Political Illegitimacy" argues that some of the same "norms" being mourned by Trump critics were actually, somewhat ironically, vital components in establishing the social and political environment that helped fuel his rise to power.

Here's how: Norms are establishment-defined expectations we have for how people should behave in a functioning society. Not lying, for example. So when anti-establishment voters see a candidate, like Trump, so blatantly and unapologetically breaking a norm, it's not only forgivable to them, it can actually be desirable as a protest against the system.

"You should never assume that just because a norm is publicly endorsed that it's privately endorsed as well," says one of the authors, Ezra Zuckerman Sivan, a professor and deputy dean of MIT's Sloan School of Management. "And so that creates the raw material for someone (like Trump) to essentially say, 'Hey, you know these norms that you're feeling are imposed on you -- they're not necessarily (legitimate)."

The key, Zuckerman asserts, is to understand that even plain lies will resonate with "anti-establishment listeners" if they're convinced of the sense that the speaker is channeling something fundamentally true.


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