If Donald Trump is So Dumb, Why is He Still in the White House with a Chance to Win Again in 2020? –

“We are a race of tit-men, and soar but little higher in our intellectual flights than the columns of the daily paper … Consider how little this village does for its own culture … We need to be provoked — goaded like oxen … into a trot.”
– Henry David Thoreau, Walden

New American Journal graphic

The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson –

If I’ve learned anything in 40 years of covering news and politics, this much I know for sure. Democrats are not going to beat Donald Trump or win elections with boilerplate PR or arguing with each other on Facebook, or calling Trump a dumb ass on Facebook and Twitter.

It is going to take way more than that, so you might want to listen up. The stakes could not be higher.

For thousands of years, humans communicated with each other with narratives, by telling stories. We still do to some extent. It’s just that now these stories are shortened into sound bites on television, and tweets on Twitter. Who can tell the best stories in 144 characters or less?

The masses of people who still read actual news stories at all are used to six paragraphs written on the fifth grade level that are sensationalized into what we now call clickbait. There is a never-ending competition to share sensationalized stories fast on social media to lure people into clicking on your website to read the full story and expose yourself to the ads so news publishers can make money.

Our communications system is fairly broken, but it is what it is.

We do what we can to help keep our audience informed on what’s going on in the state, country and the world. Here at the New American Journal, our motivations are altruistic, not selfish, and it’s not about profit, because we certainly don’t make any. If IRS rules allowed non-profits to do politics, we might have registered as one. We registered as an LLC instead to save the paperwork.

But we do have to generate enough revenue to keep the site up and going so we can produce the stories we are able to get to and publish.

So on Saturday, when the email came in with the results of the first poll out on the presidential election after the Republican National Convention, I quickly grabbed the results and broke a news story about it.

Trump’s RNC Gambit from the White House Cuts Into Biden’s Lead in the 2020 Election for President

This caused a bit of a shit storm on Facebook, with people arguing with me in the comments like they know more about news, politics and polls than I do, even though public opinion is one of my academic and journalistic specialities.

I knew when I broke the story that other news organizations would have their own version of the story by Monday. But some readers wanted the aggregated results faster than that.

By Sunday, the film maker and TV personality Michael Moore, who is often quoted as one of the few people saying Trump had a chance to win in 2016, was being quoted warning people that Trump could pull it off again.

Michael Moore warns that Donald Trump is on course to repeat 2016 win

Apparently aware of this flurry of activity on social media about this, the guy who writes the daily email newsletter for the New York Times woke up early Monday morning and addressed this issue as the top story.

David Leonhardt – The Morning: The Rush to Polling Judgment

Now Leonhardt has held positions as the Washington bureau chief for the Times, edited The Upshot blog and won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for commentary. So he is a guy worth listening to. But he’s not any smarter, more educated or experienced than I am, and as far as I know, he’s never owned his own business or published independently on the web. All his experience is in working for print newspapers, which are hamstrung by standards developed in the 20th century with all kinds of filters and constraints.

But since many of our readers can’t afford to or won’t pay to read the New York Times, we consider it a public service and fair use under the current digital divide to summarize what’s being reported.

“Four years ago, Donald Trump rallied from a summer deficit in the polls to win the presidency. In the wake of this year’s Republican convention and the continuing chaos in some cities, many people — both his supporters and detractors — seem obsessed with the notion that he will do so again,” Leonhardt writes. “And he may. Trump could certainly win re-election, especially because he would not need to win the national popular vote to do so.”

But then he went on to claim there is “a rush to declare that he has emerged from his convention in a much stronger position than he was before it.”

His source material? Not news stories, but Twitter.

He quotes G. Elliott Morris, who writes about polling for The Economist, who tweeted over the weekend, “I see that people desperately want a post-RNC bounce news cycle.” And he quotes As FiveThirtyEight’s Nate Silver, who wrote, “There is a lot of ‘the pendulum is swinging away from Biden’ speculation based on rather little actual evidence.”

“In truth,” Leonhardt concludes, “the evidence of a recent Trump bounce is somewhere between mixed and weak.”

But wait.

Then he quotes the same poll I used out from the Morning Consult, which is backed up by another poll from Yahoo News showing Biden’s lead over Trump shrinking from 10 points to six points.

Then he cites an ABC News-Ipsos poll which found no change, and a poll by the University of Southern California that showed Biden’s lead actually going up slightly.

Even in Nate Silver’s FiveThirtyEight polling average, Biden went from a 10 point lead to a lead of 8.2 percentage points, a 2 point bump for Trump.

Then he consults Nate Cohn — who writes about polling and helps design NYTimes polls — to help make sense of confusing times.

“Trump has a serious chance to win re-election,” Cohn said. “Most people seem to be doing a good job of remembering this.”

But, “Post-convention polling bounces usually fade. So for a post-convention bounce to be good for Trump, it would probably need to show that he was doing better than trailing Biden by six points.”

And, “Polling is often messy immediately after the conventions, and you’d be wise to wait until after Labor Day to come to any conclusions about whether the campaign had changed.”

“I think people sense that the issue environment has changed in a way that *could* benefit Trump: crime/unrest is more salient; COVID less salient. I think that’s plausible. Whether it’s true, consequential, or lasting is all speculation.”

Yes, but isn’t that often what news is about? Isn’t that what takes up most of the time on TV news talk shows, speculation?

I wasn’t speculating. I was simply reporting one piece of news.

Then I wrote a column on Sunday with more food for thought about this election. The point is to try to get people to think and work to save democracy and the planet.

Trump Promotes Messiah Complex With Low IQ, Religious Voters

If you think you are going to beat Donald Trump arguing with me and every Democrat you can find on Facebook, competing selfishly to prove you are smarter than me and all the other journalists and Democrats, you are sadly mistaken.

There is only one power that will beat the Republicans in this and any election. The power of people working together altruistically within groups. This is the fundamental evolutionary strategy we must adopt if we are to survive.

“In a group, selfish individuals beat altruistic individuals. But, groups of altruistic individuals beat groups of selfish individuals,” Alabama native E.O. Wilson once said. “Competition within groups tend to undermine groups. The rest is commentary.”

It’s Not the Time for Selfish Competition Within Groups

Furthermore, what I see coming out of campaigns on Facebook is boring boilerplate public relations that moves no dials on any public opinion scale. Spending millions of dollars on Facebook ads to raise money to buy more Facebook ads only robs news organizations of even more resources to produce the narrative and even investigative stories we need. All that money might as well be flushed down the drain and end up in the sewers polluted with COVID-19.

What we need are real, educated and experienced journalists out there working in the field on the stories that could win the day, like the story that ole Judge Roy Moore was banned from the Gadsden Mall in Alabama in 2017, when Birmingham Democrat Doug Jones pulled out his victory in that race by 1.6 percent. And we need the masses of people sharing those stories on social media so that everybody finds out about them, including everybody’s Republican friends and the late night talk show hosts on television.

Trump and his campaign team are smarter than you think they are. They are masters at mass media manipulation and propaganda, using key words and phrases to stir up the disgruntled and maybe even subliminal advertising, a phenomenon we haven’t talked about in decades.

Just look at this image of Trump from the RNC with the White House seal in the background. You think this is accidental?

You think it’s a violation of the Hatch Act?

We often like to say that in America, no one is above the law. But this is clearly no longer the case. Donald Trump is the first American president to get away with it, but clearly he is above the law. He’s said as much many times, and so far, no prosecutor has stormed into the White House to arrest him and prove him wrong.

When he tries to steal this election and refuses to vacate the premises in January, it is going to be up to “the people” to storm the Bastille, so to speak, wearing gas masks and using leaf blowers to push back the tear gas to get him out of there.

It does him no harm to be called a dumb ass on Facebook, when he can just go on national television and his massive Twitter feed and call the Democrats dumb asses too.

Haven’t y’all heard?

“Dumb is the new smart, and smart is the new dumb.” You can quote me on that. I believe it is an original thought.

I’m sharing this story I wrote in March, 2018, one more time, until everybody who needs to reads it and shares it.

“The day I realized it can be smart to be shallow was, for me, a deep experience.”
– Donald J. Trump

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An idiocracy it may be. But if you are so damn smart, why can’t you figure out how to beat him?

That’s all I’m saying.

Ignore it at your peril, and to the peril of American democracy and the future of the planet.

I can’t explain it in 144 characters or a meme. Sorry.