Quotes About Trump

Trump-era rules: violence is speech and speech is violence.

In January 2013, the Republican Hispanic Leadership Network issued a diktat to elected Republicans, coaching them on which words and phrases they may and may not use...Other Republicans slavishly followed the Hispanic Leadership Network's directions. Trump proceeded to violate every rule--as well as a few new ones.

While the other candidates were memorizing all the countries in NATO, practicing their pronunciations of Arabic names, and learning the geography of Syria, Trump shut to the top of the polls with an opening speech about Mexico sending rapists and drugs to our country. Do not mistake me for a politician of nuance-- I'm going to tell you the truth.

how hard it was to see strength of spirit trumped by weakness of flesh.

We humans don't like uncertainty, so we are attracted to those who offer clarity and simple answers, even if the answers are wrong or incomplete. Master Persuaders can thrive in chaotic environments by offering the clarity people crave. And if an environment is not chaotic already, a skilled persuader who understands both social media and the news business can easily stir the pot to create an advantage through chaos. Candidate Trump was a champion of this method.

Trump ignores facts whenever they are inconvenient. I know you don't want to think this works in terms of persuasion. But it does. I want to be clear that I'm not expressing a preference for ignoring facts. I'm simply saying that a Master Persuader can do it and still come out ahead, no matter how many times the media points out the errors.

Keep in mind that disapproving of Trump's style and personality is a social requirement for people who long for a more civil world. Effectiveness is a separate issue from persuasive skill.

The ideas that you think about the most are the ones that automatically and irrationally rise in your mental list of priorities. And Trump made us think about the wall a lot. He did that because he knew voters would see him as the strongest voice on the topic. It also sucked up media energy that might have focused on political topics he didn't understand at the same depth as his competitors. Master Persuaders move your energy to the topics that help them, independent of facts and reason.

What I saw with Trump's candidacy for president is that the "within reason" part of our understanding about reality was about to change, bigly. I knew that candidate Trump's persuasion skills were about to annihilate the public's ability to understand what they were seeing, because their observations wouldn't fit their mental model of living in a rational world.

When candidate Trump answered questions about policies, it was clear he didn't have a detailed understanding of the more complicated issues. Most observers saw this as a fatal flaw that would keep him out of the White House. I didn't see it that way. I saw it as Trump recognizing that people don't use facts and reason to make decisions. A skilled persuader can blatantly ignore facts and policy details so long as the persuasion is skillful.

Trump's many "mistakes" can be misleading. For example, he knows that saying provocative and often untrue statements will attract energy—which is good—but it comes with a high cost. You can't evaluate the costs of Trump's persuasion systems independently of the benefits. You have to look at the net.

How will Trump make America great again? The answer: any way you want it to happen. I might imagine that Trump improves the economy, because that's what I care about, while you imagine he defeats ISIS, because you think that is the top priority. With Trump, you get to fill in the blanks with your most potent self-hypnosis.

It turns out Trump was up to the challenge. The solution to the Hitler movie is to act non-Hitlerish in public until people can no longer maintain the Hitler illusion and it falls apart.

Trump's talent stack is so strong that I believe he could make almost any basket of policies sound good to the public. I will go so far as to say that Trump could have run as a Democrat, embraced Bernie Sanders's entire platform, and won the election that way.

The popular interpretation of how Trump won is that he understood the American people and devised policies that they wanted. My filter says the opposite. It says Trump convinced the public that his policies were the ones they should care about the most. And so they did. Obviously every voter is different, and one variable doesn't explain an election. But my point is that persuasion was more important to the outcome than policies; we just perceive it to be the other way around.

If you think Trump's policies got him elected, you have to explain why his positions substantially changed during the campaign and he still won. My filter explains it perfectly: Trump is so persuasive that policies didn't matter. People voted for him even as his policies were murky and changing.

Trump knew his Republican base has a strong negative reaction to O'Donnell, so he bonded with them on that point. This is the persuasion method known as pacing and leading. First you match your audience's emotional condition to gain trust, and later you are in a position to lead them.

And sure enough, Trump's win set off a cluster bomb of cognitive dissonance the likes of which history rarely sees. To untrained observers—voters and pundits alike—the public reaction looked like a combination of anger, disappointment, fear, and shock. But to trained persuaders, it was a front-row seat to a show of cognitive dissonance so pure and so deep that it was, frankly, beautiful.

Trump's unexpected win created a persuasion bomb that no one knew how to defuse. The anti-Trumpers were locked into their Hitler movie, and confirmation bias would keep them there. It was a terrible situation for a country. And it was an enormous challenge for Trump, the Master Persuader.

This man, Trump. There is no way he could be president. Okay, just take my word for it. It was never going to happen.

trail during the last year, he has not managed the same trick with law enforcement. SPY has learned that Trump's 1988 sale of Resorts International to Merv Griffin is now the subject of two criminal investigations, one by the FBI. "We are looking

A mobster who knew Trump socially said of him once, "He'd lie to you about what time of day it is—just for the practice.

I don't know the fitness that Donald Trump possesses to be commenting on other people's heroism. The most lethal foe that he is ever faced in his own life, I think was Rosie O'Donnell.

Donald Trump really is who he is, and I think, for example, he'll probably tweet his entire life - and that's a fact. I just hope people get over it.