Why the President Is a Grand Master of Semantics

Source: CNN, used with permission.

President Trump’s win in the 2016 election was in no small part due to his propaganda skills. His mastery of the art of propaganda predates his presidential career by decades. By touting his own greatness, he created an image of power, wealth, and success around his name.

The Trump image is his livelihood. It saved him when he went bankrupt for the fifth time in 2004. When the former producer of the television show Survivor approached him with an idea for a new show, Trump keenly accepted the opportunity and became the star of The Apprentice, which he used to publicize himself as a businessman.

Once he had risen to stardom, Trump used his fame to recover from bankruptcy by licensing the Trump brand to other businesses, which pay him for the permission to feature his name on the products they sell, be they steaks, water, neckties, or luxury apartments. As a result, most Trump-branded properties and products around the world are not owned by Trump. Licensing the brand to other businesses saved him. As historian Cory Wimberly points out in his article “Trump, Propaganda, and the Politics of Ressentiment": “Trump is a true postmodern for whom there is no difference between the appearance of success and success.” (p. 180)

The propaganda skills by which Trump honed his flair for attracting media attention and connecting his name to power, wealth, and success also helped him win the 2016 presidential election.

One of Trump’s secrets is to address the public in a way that is reminiscent of historical propagandists. In his 1895 book, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind, Gustave Le Bon, a crowd psychologist, offered an overview of the psychological tools needed to control the crowd. Le Bon was not referring to just any crowd or group. Rather he used “crowd” to mean the underclass in post-revolution France, those who did not belong to the French elite.

Le Bon assumed that the “crowd” was intellectually inferior to the French elite. He, therefore, saw the need for propaganda to be communicated in an impoverished language appealing to emotions rather than reason, evidence, and objectivity.

Trump’s communication with the public is governed by the same low communicative standards recommended by Le Bon. Whether it’s fully deliberate is less clear. Wimberly argues that Trump operates at the level of propaganda discourse not as a tool to control others, but as his native level of operation.

I am skeptical. Although there is no doubt that Trump masters the art of propaganda, this is far from his only (natural) mode of operation. Trump is far better with words than can be assumed from his mosaic tweets or his heartless comments after catastrophic events. When it matters, he is more than capable of manipulating semantics to his advantage.

When his former lawyer Michael Cohen was convicted of violating campaign laws for having paid hush money to silence Stormy Daniels, Trump agreed that he had asked Cohen to pay Daniels hush money, but denied having asked Cohen to do anything illegal. To be sure, Cohen’s payment to Daniels was and is illegal. That’s why Cohen felt the need to cover it up. Yet when Trump admits to having asked Cohen to pay Daniels, which is illegal, yet denies asking Cohen to do anything illegal, he isn’t contradicting himself. He is exploiting the distinctive nature of reference-shifting verbs like “to ask,” “to request,” and “to want” to his advantage. Verbs like these create a special referential context. Take the verb “to want": You can want something under one description but not under another. In Superman stories, for example, Lois Lane wants to date Superman but not Clark Kent, even though “Superman” and “Clark Kent” refer to the same person.

Asking someone to do something entails wanting them to do it. So, if Trump didn’t want Cohen to do anything illegal, then neither did he ask him to do anything illegal. But this is nonetheless consistent with Trump wanting and therefore asking Cohen to use campaign money as hush money.

Trump is not denying that he knew using campaign money as hush money was illegal when he asked Cohen to pay Daniels. Asking someone else to do something is the third-person version of intending to do something. Even if you know that paying hush money is illegal, you can intend to pay hush money yet not intend to do something illegal.

An unintended consequence of something you intentionally do is called a “known side effect.” The concept was introduced by philosopher Filippa Foot as a way for pro-life activists to justify abortion when continuing a pregnancy puts the mother’s health or life at risk. Pro-lifers can justify abortion when it can prevent a serious risk to the mother, she argued, by drawing a careful distinction between what those performing (or sanctioning) the abortion intend to do (save the mother) and what they know will happen (the fetus will die). They know that preventing a serious risk to the mother by aborting the fetus will kill it, yet they don't intend to kill it. They merely intend to save the woman’s life.

This, roughly, was Foot's argument. And it is the same style of argument Trump availed himself of when admitting to having asked Cohen to pay off Daniels using campaign money, which he knew was illegal, yet denying having asked Cohen to do anything illegal. Very clever, indeed.

Trump's apparent adeptness with semantics suggests that when he runs amok in a tweet (or five), or speaks seeming nonsense when addressing "the crowd" at his political rallies, this may be a deliberate move to sway those most susceptible to his rhetoric, anti-professionalism, and anti-political correctness. Trump's bombastic, politically incorrect style appeals to his base. He may be cynical, but he's not dumb: He knows exactly what he's doing.