No. of Recommendations: 9
Seeing discussion of Trump's NATO comments ("I didn’t even know what the hell NATO was") put me in mind of one of the mistake that Democrats keep making in dealing with Trump's rhetorical style.
There is a brief funny scene in the movie
Elf that illustrates the point nicely (link at bottom). Buddy, the protagonist who is a naive but kindhearted elf, walks by a diner with a neon "World's Best Cup of Coffee" sign in the window. He goes in and with great enthusiasm congratulates the staff in the run-down diner (who clearly do not serve upscale coffee) for having accomplished a great feat. Explaining a joke ruins it, but the humor comes from Buddy being too naive to realize that the sign was an exaggeration, not a literal acknowledgement that their coffee is the best in the entire world.
Putting legalese into a joke ruins it even more, but this is actually a real concept in the law. Businesses are not allowed to lie about their products, but if they make claims that are
so exaggerated that they are clearly not intended to be taken as true by the customer, then they fall into the category of
"puffery". Like the "world's best cup of coffee," which patrons would understand was not a literal claim of being the best in the world, but just the shop communicating that they think their coffee is pretty good, as far as these things go.
Trump is a real estate salesman, and puffery one of his favorite rhetorical tactics. Because in his pre-political world, puffery has always been a legitimate safe harbor. There are two ways you won't get in trouble for claims about your product: either the claim is exactly and provably correct, or it's
so exaggerated that it's puffery. In real estate sales, puffery becomes part of your ordinary discourse. Any claims about the quality of your product that can't be proven correct, your customers have a legal cause of action against you - unless you use puffery, rather than specific facts, to communicate that quality.
Trump does this reflexively, using puffery rather than precision to communicate a general point. He'll say bacon costs five times more than when he was President, or he knew nothing of NATO before being elected, or that we had the lowest taxes ever on January 6th. He knows those things aren't true, and he knows his audience knows those things aren't true. He says them to communicate a
general point through exaggeration ("prices are high," "I went from being an amateur to managing foreign policy pretty quickly," "I'm more in favor of keeping taxes low than the Democrats"). And he uses the rhetoric of puffery ("lowest taxes in history") rather than specific claims ("a one-eighth reduction in weighted tax rates compared to the latter two years of the Obama Administration" or whatever), because
that's an effective way of communicating to a lay audience.
The trap for Democrats has been responding to his puffery as they would to lies or mistakes. If Trump claims gas costs six times more than it did when he was President, Democrats will treat that as one of his thousands of lies or that he doesn't know what gas costs. But that goes over as well it would if someone took that coffee shop sign seriously and filed a claim that the owners were trying to commit fraud. It shows that the critic doesn't understand the context of the coffee sign and is just being a persnickety scold failing to get the point. To most Trump supporters, the same is true of his puffery - he knows it's not literally true,
the audience knows it's not literally true, and when the Fact Checkers swoop in they're actually just signaling that they both misunderstand the communication style
and are implicitly insulting Trump's listeners by implying that they're not smart enough to know that gas isn't really $14 a gallon.
BTW, this doesn't make what he's doing
right. Unlike a real estate salesman, the words of a President are parsed very carefully and have enormous impact - there's a reason why the norm for Presidents is to choose their words equally carefully. But it's why treating claims like "I had the best environmental numbers ever" as if they were literal claims to be fact-checked, rather than the verbal equivalent of the "world's best coffee" sign as a means of saying "hey, air and water quality was still generally pretty good when I was President," doesn't land.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wIiu89zKa4U 