Donald Trump's Style

No, not his style of dress but his style of argumentation.

As many people know, Trump is fond of using Twitter ("tweeting"). It is said that late at night, alone in the residence areas of the White House, he tweets away to his heart's content. If any other US president has used Twitter at all, none has used it so much.

He has no tolerance for criticism of himself (someone recently said he has the sensitivity of a teen-age girl), and so he lashes out at anyone who attacks him. A favorite tactic is to apply negative adjectives to anyone who has criticized him. The New York Times recently published an op-ed piece written by an anonymous White House insider who claimed that Trump's staff tries to thwart some of his ill-advised decisions and actions. In Trump's attack on the  NYT he called the paper "failing." A politician who criticized him he called "weak." These are two examples out of perhaps hundreds.

These tactics of Trump's became very obvious to those who watched him during his political campaign for the Presidency. But to attack someone's argument by attaching negative adjectives to him was known even to the ancients as a fallacious type of argument. The  Romans called it argumentum ad hominen--that is, rather then rebutting or refuting a man's argument, you attack the man himself.

It saddens and amazes me that nothing Trump does or says seems to reduce the support he receives from his followers and supporters: not his actions, which have served to help corporations and wealthy individuals at the expense of the common man and may  have brought us close to nuclear war with North Korea at least once; not his encouraging of white supremacists and other racists; not his surrounding himself with crooks and criminals in his government; and certainly not his lies, which at least a few times he has had to "walk back" (as the current jargon would have it). As I think I have said elsewhere, too many people are not critical of what they hear and read. They are ready to believe anything Trump says and don't seem to care when it's been shown that he lied.

Copyright © 2018