Did Trump say he'd use the military against opponents? Or did he not?
Conflict makes us more biased, and our bias in turn amplifies the conflict
I was listening to New York Times’ The Daily podcast the other day, and they spoke as if Trump had threatened to deploy the military on his political opponents. They played a clip of Trump saying “And I think – and it should be very easily handled by, if necessary, by National Guard, or if really necessary, by the military” and then one of the hosts said “He was out this week in an interview on Sunday talking about how he would potentially deploy the military to target liberals who oppose him.” Then they played a clip of Trump talking insultingly about Adam Schiff, giving the impression that Trump had been talking about using the military against Schiff.
This all got me curious: it struck me as something that, similar to some other instances of anti-Trump outrage, might contain more nuance than I was getting from that show. So I went to listen to the Fox News interview they’d been discussing and, sure enough, found that a very important piece had been left out of the reporting. Trump’s mention of the military had been specifically in response to a question from the host about what he thought about the chances for “chaos” and violence if he were elected. It seemed extremely irresponsible to not include that detail in their coverage; then I went and watched some other coverage and saw it was handled in a similar way frequently, without mention of the question that sparked that sentence.
I created an episode of my podcast talking about this, and why we should all care about this, no matter our political views. It’s focused on how the cycle of conflict leads us to be more biased and pessimistic in our views of the “other side,” which in turn leads to them getting more angry and fearful, which in turn leads to them being more biased against us, and so on.
If we care about reducing toxic polarization, or even if we only care about achieving our political goals, we should want to understand how the widening gyre of polarization operates: how it sucks us into a vortex of negativity and pessimism that is hard for us to escape without disciplined effort.
In this episode, I also talk about overly pessimistic views that some will reach for to explain such things, like, “The liberal-leaning media is purposefully lying.” There, too, I hope that people who have such views are willing to examine how they might be falling pray to overly negative framings of a state of affairs that is fairly easy to explain: conflict makes many of us highly biased.
I have show notes, additional thoughts, and related resources here: https://behavior-podcast.com/taking-trumps-words-out-of-context-how-that-drives-conflict-and-even-helps-trump
Watch this video here:
Zach, Thank you for this “thought-provoking” post.
Finding my way through the sea of Political Opinions seems to be a never-ending journey.
There are times when my head hurts just trying to select from the endless perspectives written on the subject of our Presidential Candidates for our upcoming Presidential Elections.
I was always taught to seek the Truth of a matter with honesty and integrity and to “Give Credit Where Credit Is Due”, but in today’s political environment it can seem like an impossible task to discern the “Reality” (if that even exists during intense Political Battles 😵💫).
That is why I want to thank you for your attempts here to show that things aren’t always as someone might want to believe them to be (like it or not). I can see how, on a very human level, “Confirmation Bias” is a tempting thing to fall into.
But I’ve found that I’d rather do my due diligence (to the best of my ability) to see “the good, the bad and the ugly” rather than finding that my biases blinded me making me regretful after all is said an done.
Let’s not sane wash this man. He’s unhinged. “These are bad people. We have a lot of bad people. But when you look at ‘Shifty Schiff’ and some of the others, yeah, they are, to me, the enemy from within,” and he’s willing to use military means to destroy his enemies. This is just so abundantly clear.