Donald Trump the Blogger
This piece combines two of my favourite topics: Donald Trump and communication. If you’re a Trump fan, read no further– you won’t like it.
Most everyone knows that last year, after some especially egregious tweets, the Donald was banned from Twitter. Now, that’s like telling a spoiled three year old to put away his favourite toys. “You can’t make me!” he screeched, “I’ll create my own social media platform, and it will be nicer than your nasty old stuff! Nah-nah-nah-na-na-nah!”
Little Donnie’s brilliant breakthrough tech is actually an old fashioned blog, much like this one, in technology if not in substance. It rejoices under the clever name From the Desk of Donald J. Trump, a tribute to one of his three favourite pieces of furniture (a television being one of the other two), and the J. to distinguish him from the multitude of other Donald Trumps out there.
Its purpose is to fill the gap left by the shutdown of DJT’s constant stream of spittle-speckled frenzies. But it ain’t working, and it never will. And understanding why is a key insight into communication.
There are, broadly speaking, two distinct streams of communication– articulate and inarticulate. The former comes from the frontal part of the brain where it is somewhat processed before being allowed out into public. The latter comes from the more primitive part of the brain, often called the reptilian or crocodile brain, which basically emits noise in order to control an immediate situation or feed a need. Some of my saltier language falls into that category.
The product of the crocodile brain has no need for logic and no constraint of conscience– it is little more than a sophisticated grunt and is intended only to control, manipulate or coerce by inciting fear or lust or fury or some other primitive emotion. It’s simple, extraordinarily effective, and has no more concern for the truth than does your average crocodile.
But when your communication comes from the prefrontal cortex, you actually need to string ideas together in some kind of coherent fashion, with an introduction, a concept development, and a conclusion. It kind of has to hang together, because the intelligent recipients are going to receive and process the message in their forebrains, not just their crocodile brains. The critical listener or reader expects consistency and cogency. And if you’re going to lie, you need to be fairly clever about it.
Not so with tweets. Tweets are meant to titillate, not to educate. And this is why The Don is lost in blogworld– he never had anything of substance to say, so when forced from a place of inarticulate screeching to a place of articulate explaining, he is literally tongue-tied. If he can’t rabble-rouse, he has nothing to say. Never has, never will.
This seventy-four-year-old brat is too old to learn, which means that so long as he’s in the no-tweet straitjacket, we don’t have to listen to his stream-of-consciousness tantrums, and the world is a better place.