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We're in the abusive father phase [1]

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Date: 2022-06-30

Tuesday—just two days ago!—the political world was rocked by Cassidy Hutchinson’s testimony. Even Fox News anchors were speechless. Longtime Trump allies and cronies, such as Mick Mulvaney, pronounced the testimony devastating. Carl Berstein declared that Trump’s political tombstone had been written that day.

But Fox and other conservative outlets went into overdrive and began churning out copy meant to salvage Trump from this evisceration. And that meant tearing Ms. Hutchinson apart.

Immediately, anonymous sources associated with the Secret Service contacted the news media to start a he-said/she-said debate upon Hutchinson’s testimony. While several outlets were adamant that anonymous sources do not amount to appearing before the Select Committee and providing testimony under oath, the fact that the rebuttals, such as they were, were given equal parity in terms of airtime was just enough for them to do their job.

Because, for Trump World, all they have to do is discredit Hutchinson’s testimony on the smallest part, then they can widen that out to discredit her in her entirety. Call it the bros before hos tactic. Same thing that worked with the Johnny Depp trial. Why were certain men so triumphant when Depp was acquited? Because to them no woman’s word can be taken above a man’s in a head-on dispute.

But even that tactic would work on a limited audience. The rest of Trump conservatives, including what’s left of the moderates, were I’m sure almost certainly horrified with the rest of us regarding Trump’s temperament. Throwing dishes full of food at the walls? Lunging for a steering wheel in an actively moving car? This is besides the major boom let down in the testimony, which is that Trump wanted armed supporters in his crowd. The man is a maniac. That was what reverberated throughout the political world Tuesday night.

By Wednesday, Fox had pulled itself together enough to begin to massage the brains of their viewers. They cannot deny that Trump probably did throw food and dishes, and that ketchup ran down the walls like blood in The Shining. Can’t deny that—so instead they’re trying to soothe the audience and get viewers to simply be okay with his behavior.

Anybody that the president—you know, knowing what we’ve seen, observing him over the years, if he got angry, then he might throw his lunch. I’m not sure—it’s obviously a very dramatic detail. And the way that she describes it is. But I’m not sure if any of this is wholly out of character with the Donald Trump and the president, the Trump that people came to know over the years. And there’s a lot of people over there who obviously shared his feelings of frustration over the course of the days. Problem was that they couldn’t back it up with anything in the courts and they couldn’t back it up with evidence that they produced. And that obviously was probably a source of deep frustration as well. Things were clearly not going his way. All of this is revelatory in terms of character and action, and for people to take in and do with that information what they will over the course of time.

This, in case you’re not familiar, is what abuse looks like. Specifically, this is the enablers coming in to clean up. It could be a spouse, or a sibling, a loved one, a friend; some well-meaning neighbor; a counselor, therapist, or priest; or the parent/partner him- or herself coming in later, gift in hand, trying to smooth things over. The major mechanism employed is a rationalization of the behavior, a papering over, even a justification.

Except in this case, the guilty party isn’t even showing up with flowers or an apology. We just have the enabler coming in to reframe the situation so that, in the distortion, the abuse doesn’t seem quite so bad.

I wrote last year, quite amazed at the time, that Fox had accomplished something similar in the wake of the Chauvin verdict. Within the span of one weekend, they had shifted the opinion of their target demographic by at least 20 points.

They’re doing the same thing here. Despite some of their personalities believing that Hutchinson’s testimony had “moved the ball”, higher-ups (Laclan, perhaps?) have decided to throw the network’s weight toward rehabilitating Trump, even after this apparent low.

I don’t have a poll at the moment showing that the Fox audience will have been moved by this effort. But this is how the new brainwashing works. It’s the same strategy employed by abusive parents and partners the world over. And once the abused person accepts the distorted framing, they’re locked in that cycle of abuse with little chance of getting out on their own. This is precisely because of their adjusted, distorted viewpoint.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2022/6/30/2107474/-We-re-in-the-abusive-father-phase

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