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Trump Thinks He's Found Biden's Greatest Vulnerability In targeting Hunter Biden
In targeting Hunter Biden, the president is waging psychological warfare against the Democratic nominee.
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/10/trump-waging-psychological-warfare-against-biden/616813/
. . .
Without a coherent message or an affirmative vision for a second term, Trump has clearly been betting his reelection on what military planners would call a “psyop,” or a psychological operation. That is, he hopes to use gamesmanship to destabilize the mind of his adversary, forcing him into a moment of anger or incoherence that illustrates his lack of fitness for the office. (“Too old and out of it” is how Trump puts it.) His attacks on Hunter Biden should be understood as the pillar of this strategy.
Although Trump might not have deep reservoirs of empathy or much patience for understanding an opposing point of view, he does excel at one psychological discipline: He possesses a bully’s eye for an individual’s point of greatest emotional vulnerability. During the 2016 campaign, he distilled his diagnoses of his opponents into epithets that he would repeat until they stuck. Jeb Bush was “low-energy Jeb,” thus rendering his palpable ambivalence about his presidential bid and more ruminative style into evidence of fundamental patheticness. Marco Rubio was “little Marco”—or even “liddle Marco”—which conflated his physical stature and his immature tendency to strain for unreachable rhetorical heights. For Trump, these efficiently dismissive phrases were a point of pride.
But the locus classicus of this Trump strategy came in the second debate of the 2016 general election. In order to mess with Hillary Clinton’s head, he planned on bringing Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, and Juanita Broaddrick into the hall as guests. The idea was that as the Democratic nominee fielded questions about NATO and Obamacare, she would have to avoid locking eyes with women who had accused her spouse of sexual harassment, sexual assault, or rape. In the end, the Commission on Presidential Debates nixed the gambit and warned that security would prevent the women from entering. (To save face, Trump held a pre-debate press conference with them.) Still, the episode perfectly captures the essence of his political thinking.
When Trump hurls accusations against Hunter Biden, he instinctively knows that he’s pressing his current opponent’s greatest vulnerability, one achingly depicted in a profile of Hunter by The New Yorker’s Adam Entous. Having survived the car crash that killed his sister and mother, Hunter has lived with the scars that make everyday life a seemingly unwinnable affair. As a grown man, Hunter would hole up in his Washington, D.C., apartment, leaving only to buy bottles of Smirnoff. His father, then the vice president, would call several times a day; he would show up unannounced to prod his son out of his darkest confines, telling him, “I need you. What do we need to do?”
The subject of Hunter was a source of such profound sadness that many aides disliked ever raising it with the vice president, even if they might have had misgivings about the younger Biden’s professional dealings. One source told Entous that difficult conversations about family would cause Joe Biden to get “deeply melancholy, which, to me, is more painful than if someone yelled and screamed at me. It’s like you’ve hurt him terribly. That was always my fear, that I would be really touching a very fragile part of him.”
That fragile part of him is what Trump is furiously poking now. He’s cruelly lashing Biden, not to explain the relevance of an esoteric scandal that doesn’t directly indict the ethics of his opponent, but because he seems to hope that his raising the subject will induce an unbecoming outburst of emotion onstage. On Trump’s own terms, perhaps the strategy has some logic to it. Earlier this week, Biden responded to a CBS News reporter’s questions about Hunter with a burst of apoplexy.
Although Trump might not have deep reservoirs of empathy or much patience for understanding an opposing point of view, he does excel at one psychological discipline: He possesses a bully’s eye for an individual’s point of greatest emotional vulnerability. During the 2016 campaign, he distilled his diagnoses of his opponents into epithets that he would repeat until they stuck. Jeb Bush was “low-energy Jeb,” thus rendering his palpable ambivalence about his presidential bid and more ruminative style into evidence of fundamental patheticness. Marco Rubio was “little Marco”—or even “liddle Marco”—which conflated his physical stature and his immature tendency to strain for unreachable rhetorical heights. For Trump, these efficiently dismissive phrases were a point of pride.
But the locus classicus of this Trump strategy came in the second debate of the 2016 general election. In order to mess with Hillary Clinton’s head, he planned on bringing Paula Jones, Kathleen Willey, and Juanita Broaddrick into the hall as guests. The idea was that as the Democratic nominee fielded questions about NATO and Obamacare, she would have to avoid locking eyes with women who had accused her spouse of sexual harassment, sexual assault, or rape. In the end, the Commission on Presidential Debates nixed the gambit and warned that security would prevent the women from entering. (To save face, Trump held a pre-debate press conference with them.) Still, the episode perfectly captures the essence of his political thinking.
When Trump hurls accusations against Hunter Biden, he instinctively knows that he’s pressing his current opponent’s greatest vulnerability, one achingly depicted in a profile of Hunter by The New Yorker’s Adam Entous. Having survived the car crash that killed his sister and mother, Hunter has lived with the scars that make everyday life a seemingly unwinnable affair. As a grown man, Hunter would hole up in his Washington, D.C., apartment, leaving only to buy bottles of Smirnoff. His father, then the vice president, would call several times a day; he would show up unannounced to prod his son out of his darkest confines, telling him, “I need you. What do we need to do?”
The subject of Hunter was a source of such profound sadness that many aides disliked ever raising it with the vice president, even if they might have had misgivings about the younger Biden’s professional dealings. One source told Entous that difficult conversations about family would cause Joe Biden to get “deeply melancholy, which, to me, is more painful than if someone yelled and screamed at me. It’s like you’ve hurt him terribly. That was always my fear, that I would be really touching a very fragile part of him.”
That fragile part of him is what Trump is furiously poking now. He’s cruelly lashing Biden, not to explain the relevance of an esoteric scandal that doesn’t directly indict the ethics of his opponent, but because he seems to hope that his raising the subject will induce an unbecoming outburst of emotion onstage. On Trump’s own terms, perhaps the strategy has some logic to it. Earlier this week, Biden responded to a CBS News reporter’s questions about Hunter with a burst of apoplexy.
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