Bait and Switch: Psychology and Trump’s Voter Fraud Tantrums

Voter ID warning. File is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication. Author: MarkBuckawicki

by Roy J. Eidelson, PhD

In recent days President Trump has, yet again, ludicrously asserted that millions of people illegally voted against him last November. Lies of such magnitude and consequence from the White House certainly deserve the attention and scorn they’ve received. After all, once we move beyond the realm of “alternative facts,” the real evidence shows that a person is more likely to be struck by lightning than to impersonate someone else at the polls.

But to fully understand Trump’s complaints about “illegal voters,” we need to recognize that voter fraud and voter suppression are opposite sides of the same coin. By promoting beliefs about the former, the groundwork is laid for pursuing the latter. In this way, tales of unlawful voting have long been a pretext for obstructing the voting rights of U.S. citizens.

The mass manipulation at the heart of this strategy relies on what I call the “combating-injustice mind game.” With two steps, this psychological ploy preys upon the public’s acute and compassionate sensitivity to issues of right and wrong. First we’re bombarded with dire warnings that something terribly unjust is happening. These overwrought claims aim to spur broad outrage and demands for reform.

Then the propagandists step forward with carefully crafted proposals for how to address the purported injustice. But there’s a catch. Their recommended changes are designed with a very different goal in mind: to advance a narrow self-aggrandizing agenda, one that leaves those who were already disadvantaged even worse off than before. So, behind the seductive façade of combating injustice, wealth is extracted, power is entrenched, and the common good is trampled.

 In short, complaints of rampant voter fraud are really just an elaborate cover story, constructed to hide repugnant attempts to gain electoral advantage by disenfranchising Americans. Paul Weyrich, for decades a leading voice of the conservative movement, indirectly acknowledged as much almost fifty years ago. In a speech in Texas back in 1980, he explained, “I don’t want everybody to vote. …Our leverage in the elections, quite candidly, goes up as the voting populace goes down.” That master plan hasn’t changed in the intervening years.

That’s why the Republican Party’s 2012 platform emphasized, “Every time that a fraudulent vote is cast, it effectively cancels out a vote of a legitimate voter”; why Reince Priebus, now Trump’s chief of staff, has argued that requiring a photo ID at the voting booth is “fair, reasonable, and just”; why other right-wing mouthpieces insist we must “keep fraudsters away from polling places” and “vote fraud pervades our election process”; why True the Vote, the Koch-funded Tea Party outfit, cunningly describes itself as “regular citizens standing up for fair elections”; and why the GOP’s 2016 platform endorsed legislation calling for both “proof of citizenship when registering to vote and secure photo ID when voting.”

It’s no surprise that the favorite targets of voter suppression efforts include African Americans, Hispanic Americans, students, and low-income workers. That’s because most members of these groups are traditionally unlikely to vote Republican. They’re also less likely than most Americans to have a driver’s license or other valid photo ID.

But ID laws aren’t the only suppression tactics employed. For example, requiring physical proof of citizenship when registering to vote undercuts the effectiveness of low-income voter registration drives. Closing polling places on or near college campuses makes it tougher for students to vote. And eliminating early voting periods and same-day registration options particularly disadvantage voters of lesser means. These assaults are likely to shift into even higher gear if Alabama Senator Jeff Sessions is confirmed as the country’s next Attorney General. Sessions has described the Voting Rights Act as a “piece of intrusive legislation” and the NAACP and ACLU as “un-American.”

So the President and his allies are actually right when they warn of a dangerous plot to cripple and corrupt our democratic institutions. But the mischief doesn’t take the form of impersonators at the voting booth. Rather, electoral justice and the integrity of the ballot box are endangered by well-organized conservative efforts aimed at preventing some Americans from voting at all. Indeed, it’s the unjustly disenfranchised in the United States who truly number in the millions today.

Roy J. Eidelson, Ph.D. President, Eidelson Consulting,Past President, Psychologists for Social Responsibility www.eidelsonconsulting.com

This post was originally published by Psychology Today at https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/dangerous-ideas/201701/bait-and-switch-psychology-and-trump-s-voter-fraud-tantrums

 

 

 

Resisting the Mind Games of Donald Trump and the One Percent, Part 3

Title page of The Golden Fleece by William Vaughan (1577-1641). 1626. In the public domain. Memorial University of Newfoundland website (and there is fleecing going on in the public domain today too). us-public-domain-tag

My last post shows how lies and manipulations have the country into a state of ever-growing fear and anger.  Unfortunately, without active resistance, the current crisis may go….

From Bad to Worse

To be clear, it certainly makes sense that our core concerns — about vulnerability, injustice, distrust, superiority, and helplessness — should be front-and-center when it comes to thoughtful deliberations about matters of public policy and the common good. Meaningful, far-reaching progressive change requires nothing less. But it’s profoundly destructive — and deeply immoral — when these concerns are instead exploited in a manipulative and disingenuous manner to advance narrow interests that bring harm and suffering to so many. That’s the legacy of Trump’s successful presidential campaign. It’s also a disturbing preview of what we should expect from him and his administration going forward.

At the same time, we shouldn’t mistake Trump’s targeting of these concerns as unique. Indeed, back when he was known as just an ethically impaired real estate mogul and entertainer, other plutocracy-enabling leaders in both major parties were relying on similar psychological mind games: to block climate change initiatives (Senator James Inhofe in 2003: “Could it be that manmade global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people? It sure sounds like it.”); to justify voter suppression tactics (Texas Governor Greg Abbott in 2006: “In Texas, an epidemic of voter fraud is harming the electoral process.”); to defend discriminatory law enforcement practices (former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg on stop-and-frisk in 2014: “Every American has a right to walk down the street without getting mugged or killed.”); to oppose wage hikes (New Jersey Governor Chris Christie in 2012: “Here’s what’s going to happen — they’re going to have to lay people off.”); to preserve healthcare as a profiteer’s paradise (Senator Rand Paul on healthcare as a right in 2011: “I’m a physician. That means you have a right to come to my house and conscript me. It means you believe in slavery.”); to protect tax breaks for the super-rich (U.S. House Committee on Ways and Means, on the estate tax in 2015: “The death tax is unfair and in conflict with the American Dream”); to turn public education over to greedy privatizers (former Obama Education Secretary Arne Duncan on the 2010 premiere of a pro-charter school, anti-teachers’ union film: a “Rosa Parks moment”); and to galvanize support for deadly wars of choice (President George W. Bush in 2002: “Facing clear evidence of peril, we cannot wait for the final proof — the smoking gun — that could come in the form of a mushroom cloud.”). Those are just a handful of examples.

In some ways, then, Trump’s move to Washington will simply reinvigorate a well-entrenched predatory agenda that already enriches the few at the expense of everyone else. But there’s also something that clearly makes him qualitatively worse than many other prevaricating one-percenters: he brings to the White House a toxic brew of bigotry, belligerence, and brutality. This has obvious and far-reaching significance. It means that those who are now disadvantaged — especially people of color and other marginalized groups — will face even tougher times ahead as scapegoating and misdirected hostility intensify.

But Resistance Isn’t Futile

There are avenues for withstanding and rebuffing the coming onslaught. The mind games used by Trump and others like him are primarily designed to mislead, to confuse, and, most importantly, to suppress broad opposition to extreme inequality and the withering of democracy. That’s why their worst nightmare is the formation of strong coalitions that bridge stubborn cultural, racial, religious, gender, and class divides. Building and nurturing these coalitions must therefore be a top priority. It’s an endeavor that will require unwavering support for those most immediately at risk and, simultaneously, a clear recognition of what we share in common: voices that have grown weaker, opportunities that have grown scarcer, and children whose futures have grown dimmer. In short, organized and unrelenting resistance will be a key element in obstructing the new administration’s calamitous ambitions.

It will be equally important to directly counter and debunk the President-Elect’s continuing barrage of duplicitous psychological appeals. During the election campaign, this effort proved inadequate. In part that’s because there was a widespread failure to fully appreciate the extent to which Trump’s false claims and assurances rang true for millions of disgruntled voters eager for change. Just as problematically, his final opponent was ill-suited to persuasively offer a compelling alternative narrative, one that would energize an electorate yearning for a candidate who’d take their fears, doubts, frustrations, and hopes seriously.

The 2016 election is over. Now it’s time to work together to make sure that Donald Trump’s hollow tales lose their luster and his self-aggrandizing motives are laid bare for all to see. In the weeks and months ahead, Americans of all stripes must come to realize that, through artifice and manipulation, super-sized hucksters have fleeced and betrayed the country and the people that made their staggering wealth and power possible.

Originally published in Counterpunch, December 22, 2016.  Reprinted with permission.

Roy Eidelson is a clinical psychologist and the president of Eidelson Consulting, where he studies, writes about, and consults on the role of psychological issues in political, organizational, and group conflict settings. He is a past president of Psychologists for Social Responsibility, former executive director of the Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict at the University of Pennsylvania, and a member of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology. Roy can be reached by email at reidelson@eidelsonconsulting.com and on Twitter @royeidelson.

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