This Is Why Trump Lies Like There's No Tomorrow - "orthodox mind-sets" and the "primal super hero" [View all]

[BlueWaveNeverEnd]

https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/28/opinion/donald-trump-presidency-lies.html




George Edwards, a political scientist at Texas A&M and a retired editor of Presidential Studies Quarterly, stated the case bluntly: “Donald Trump tells more untruths than any previous president.” What’s more, “There is no one that is a close second.”

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If we see Trump’s lies, Smith continued, “not as failures of character but rather as weapons of war, then we can come to see why his supporters might view him as an effective leader. From this perspective, lying is a feature, not a bug, of Trump’s campaign and presidency.”

Lee’s insights provide a partial explanation for the loyalty-to-Trump phenomenon, but gaining an understanding of Trump’s intractable mendacity requires several approaches.

..... the most egregious and damaging of which is the claim the 2020 election was stolen from him — raises an intriguing question: How can this immense delusion persist when survival pressures would seem to foster growing percentages of men and women capable of making discerning, accurate judgments?

The authors ask how, in this context, powerful “orthodox mind-sets” emerge, mind-sets that restrict free thinking, armed with a “disproportionate righteousness with which they try to protect cherished narratives.”

Marie and Petersen argued that these mind-sets may derive from three main cognitive foundations:

First, oversensitive dispositions to detect threat, from human out-groups in particular. Second, motivations to try to mobilize in-group members for cooperative benefits and against rival groups, by using moral talk emphasizing collective benefits. Third, (unconscious) attempts to signal personal devotion to accrue prestige within the in-group.

The prevalence of orthodox mind-sets in some realms of our political system is difficult to comprehend for those who are not caught up in it.

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For Trump, McAdams wrote,

truth is effectively whatever it takes to win the moment, moment by moment, battle by battle — as the episodic man, shorn of any long-term story to make sense of his life, struggles to win the moment.

Among the many reasons that Trump’s supporters excuse his lying is that they, like Trump himself, do not really hold him to the standards that human persons are held to. And that is because many of his supporters, like Trump himself, do not consider him to be a person — he is more like a primal force or superhero, more than a person, but less than a person, too.