[KB] Trump question

[wessr at oregonstate.edu]

If I could I'd bring back Ann Richards from the dead to run against Trump.

Just imagine what she would do if Trump hovered over her the way he  
hovered over Clinton in one of the debates.

I think she could even get some of his base to laugh at him.

He used humor to reduce some of his opponents to little objects of  
humor ("low energy Jeb," "lyin' Ted"). Too bad the Democrats can't  
come up with someone to return the favor.

Trump has a formula for reinforcing identification with his base:
       -do something that outrages elites
       -elites express their outrage on TV
       -his base laughs at the elites

Maybe the rhetoric of humor is an area to research for things that  
might work against Trump.

Bob

Quoting Sean Zwagerman <sean_zwagerman at sfu.ca>:

> I wonder about weariness--or perhaps the boredom of short attention  
> spans --as the force that might bring an end to Trump. Trump is the  
> nightmarish proof of Neil Postman's prescience in Amusing Ourselves  
> to Death: Trump is the ultimate, the rotten perfection, of the  
> television president. Television is so much the scene and the agency  
> of his presidency that it might provide the imagery for imagining  
> his defeat. Once the exciting Trump show becomes nothing but "dull  
> daily repetition" (having gone on a season or two too long), the  
> viewers/voters will turn the channel (vote for someone else) or  
> perhaps even turn it off (stop voting and paying attention  
> entirely). Of course this terministic screen just raises more  
> questions: will the star of the next hit show be an anti-Trump or an  
> even more extreme/ultimate Trump? Would an anti-Trump, in the form  
> of a candidate who rejects the TV T.S., get any attention at all?  
> Would the voters/viewers even see this candidate, and take him or  
> her seriously? And how much damage will Trump and his spin-offs  
> (Recep Erdogan in The Apprentice Turkey) do before the genre grows  
> stale?
>
>
>
> Clarke Rountree writes: "I also wonder about weariness and its  
> rhetorical implications. I'm exhausted from the daily drama and I  
> assume even his followers are. I would think that they might miss  
> the no-drama-Obama days when you could go several weeks without  
> hearing anything about the president or the White House. We  
> rhetoricians tend to focus on the notable more than the mundane in  
> rhetoric. The drip-drip-drip kind of rhetoric (from repeating: "MSM  
> is Fake News!" to a "Here we go again" kind of exhaustion) is harder  
> to account for."
>
>
>
> Sean Zwagerman
> Associate Dean, Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies,
> Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences
> Associate Professor, Department of English
> Simon Fraser University
> Burnaby/Vancouver, BC
> office: 6164 AQ
> cell: 604-374-1468
> campus: 778-782-4967
>