READING TIME: 4 minutes
SUMMARY: That Trump uses Hitler’s Propaganda Playbook effectively is apparent to all. One technique he uses hacks our brains so we do his work for him. He gets us to sane wash him by using our affinity for patterns. We’ll use an usual print found in the snow near my house to explain the technique, and then discuss with regards to the audiences Trump projects his explosive diarrhea of propaganda at.
KEY TERMS: Brain Hack, Sane Wash, Fill-In the Blanks, Snow, Illusory Explanation, Patterns, Pattern Seeking, Incoherence, Media, Pundits, Reporters
COMMENT: How can we encourage reporters and pundits to report Trump’s incoherence more accurately and refrain from trying to make sense of him?
- Brain Hack: Illusory Explanation, the Key to Sane Washing
- The Prints in the Park Explain Sane Washing
- Sane Washing Trump’s Incoherent Rambling
- Image Attributions
The El Gran Jefe Estúpido knows how to use Hitler’s Propaganda Playbook: Tell the lie on repeat. Put it on steroids. Ignore all factual challenges. It works because it hacks the biases and heuristics that the human brain evolved as energy saving shortcuts.
To survive Titler’s attack on our democracy, we have to understand how he is hacking our brains. It is important to understand three things:
First, he is cynically taking advantage of our natural ways of thinking. These hacks work on us all because we are born this way.
Second, it takes cognitive effort to stop them from working. However, you can’t stop them from working all the time. You’re gonna get hacked by Trump, an advertisement, or a teacher at some point. Since we evolved to be lazy thinkers because our brains are such energy hogs, it makes thinking hard. We should not look smugly at MAGA and think that they’re stupid. We should be looking at them and think, “There but for the grace of executive functioning go I.”
And third, once hacked, it can be nearly impossible to unhack your brain. Once you start believing the garbage that Trump is pumping out, you always have nagging doubts about whether you are right in dismissing him.
Brain Hack: Illusory Explanation, the Key to Sane Washing
One of the most effective brain hacks Trump uses is that of the illusory explanation — an explanation that sounds right as long as one does not think about it too much. It is the secret to the sane washing that reporters, editors, and media pundits engage in.
Because we are so emotionally affected by the destruction of our democracy, it can be difficult to see the effect when looking at how the Orange Caricature is using it. So, we’ll take a look at how this works using something a lot less nocuous than our political rhetoric and beliefs. We’ll look at some prints I found in the snow when walking through a park.
The Prints in the Park Explain Sane Washing
The pathway is covered in shoe prints, bicycle treads, and the markings of the snow clearing machine. It is still winter here with a meter of snow standing in the open field, which are covered in animal droppings and tracks as well as snowshoes and cross country ski tracks.
Explaining the Mysterious Print in the Snow
I saw the track to the right one day. Take a good look at it. It caught my eye because it looked like a print made by a ball, perhaps a basketball. Now, that seems foolish since it doesn’t have a basketball pattern, just something that vaguely resembles a basketball, but it looked round like a circle. It seemed too short and wide to be a shoe print. It wasn’t continuous like a tire print.
What could have made it? Was someone dribbling a basketball through the park? That was impossible. The path’s surface was too pitted and pocked to make bouncing a ball predictable.
I finally settled on snowshoe. Someone had to be walking along the path with their snowshoes. After all, you had to go from your car and to the fields, right? And, what did I know about snowshoes? Why couldn’t it be the tread on a snowshoe? I’d never seen one before.
Exploring the Print
The next thing to do was to to measure the print against my own boot.
Placing my boot next to it, clearly it just wasn’t long enough to be a shoe, right? That’s a size ten right there. It’s a pretty average size.
The print clearly seems too wide to be a shoe print. I do have wide feet. Do they still measure foot width with letters? When I was a kid, it devilled my mom because I had a D-width foot, which were harder to find. In an impoverished anxious family that was damaging. When we bought these boots, though, I don’t remember any discussion of how wide they needed to be, just length. See what you miss out on when you live thirty years outside the country?
What made the print? Obviously, it had to be a shoe. There really is nothing else that it could be. So, why doesn’t it look like a shoe print? Why does it look like a circle?
Sane Washing the Print
The human brain hates a vacuum. If we see something that we recognize as a familiar pattern, even if it is incomplete, we will see it as whole. We assume that the familiar pattern is there just not visible to us. Consider this triangle:
Clearly there is no triangle present here. The vertices are formed by the missing area of the circles. But, wait, there arent any circles, either. You compete the familiar pattern of the circle and assume that there is a segment missing. Since the lines of the missing circle segments align, you assume that the lines connect and see a triangle.
Filling-In the Pattern
Our brains hate a vacuum. We look for patterns. Here’s how it applies to the example of the shoe print.
When you see the print, you see the outline of the two arcs at the toe and heel.
The blue line becomes the diameter of the circle.
We use the diameter to complete the circle, filling in the arcs where none exist.
The diameter helps us complete the circle. We see the shoe print as being as wide as the diameter of the circle making it impossibly wide for a shoe.
Sane Washing Trump’s Incoherent Rambling
When we hear El Comandante Demente ramble incoherently about the illegal Iran War ending soon, being over, being won, and needing to last longer, we perceive a pattern. The pattern of a war, fought with objectives, battles, victories, and losses. Even though Trump can’t explain the reasons he started the war, we fill it in for him as long as he gives us the bare bones of a reason. It is the same for the objectives and when it will end.
Trump goes on to give us the Pu-Pu Platter of reasons, objectives, and ending dates like it is dim sum, and we select the one that makes the most sense to us. His minions across the administration and Congress will give their interpretations of what he’s saying further confusing and contradicting the matters.
Making Trump’s Rambling Explanations Make Sense
Each one of us, reporter, Republican, supporter, resister, Democrat, alike will complete the circle. We’ll fill-in the missing pieces according to our vision of what war is. The less informed the listener is, the more supportive of Trump the listener is, the more willing the listener is to make sense of what information they’re receiving.
You ignore the pieces that don’t make sense. You connect the pieces that seem to connect. You fill-in the missing bits, and viola! You’ve got a coherent-ish explanation for why we started the war, what we’re doing there, and when we’ll be finished.
Those of us who are mainlining politics and watching carefully key in on the contradictions, kinda like we realized that the lines didn’t complete the triangle. And, just like we were surprised that there weren’t any circles in the diagram, those of us listening to Trump et al. with a critical ear, still fill-in for him. It can’t be helped.
Why Don’t We Know Better?
I can understand MAGA and low-information citizen for accepting the illusory explanation that is being given. What I cannot understand or forgive is the professional reporters who work hard to sane-wash what he’s saying to make it make sense to us. In part, they see it as their job. It’s almost like they think they’ve missed something and they are afraid of looking foolish for having missed it, so they fill it in. It’s like mansplaining. It’s just by this point in our experience of Trump, reporters should know better.
It is gratifying to hear some reporters and pundits on some networks and outlets saying things like, “I don’t know what he means…” or “I’ve given up on trying to figure it out…” It helps all of us see the illusion for what it really is, a jumble of information that vaguely when looked at just right forms a coherent whole. While that can be comforting, it is dangerous for us to be doing.
Image Attributions
All images of shoe prints in the snow were taken by me and are unlicensed free to be used by anyone anytime for any purpose.
This image was found on WikiMedia Commons has a Creative Commons license
The Psy of Life 
He’s not just hacking us. He’s sane washing himself too, so he feels smart.
We have another need when we are in a post-facts realm, to believe that somebody knows what they are talking about, especially a voice we hear constantly, so, again, we fill in with plausible bits and pieces.
That’s why I don’t listen to his speeches, but prefer to read them. It is more automatic for me to read with my critical thinking hat on. Also, his voice irritates me (even more than W’s did), and part of that may be reaction to his brain hacking.
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