Trump is ‘Using One of the Main Tactics of Autocrats’ With Psychological Warfare, Pollster Claims

After examining former president Donald Trump ‘s recent campaign activities, a Republican pollster concluded that he is effectively using a method many autocrats have employed: exhausting American citizens’ capacity to feel outrage .

Sarah Longwell, Republican pollster and founder of organizations Republican Voters Against Trump and The Bulwark, was on CNN and was asked about a recent piece written by Edward Luce of the Financial Times that discussed how Americans were riskily accepting and resigning to Trump’s constant lies and hate speech. “First of all, I think that’s 100 percent right,” Longwell began. “The psychology of people is just not built to take this.”

Longwell continued by pointing out that Trump is, whether he realizes it or not, using strategies that autocrats have utilized for centuries, Raw Story reported. “One of the main tactics of autocrats and authoritarians is to exhaust people, right?” she said. “That’s what they want you to be: They want you to be too exhausted to fight back. They want you to be too exhausted to parse through all the noise to figure out what’s going on.”

The Financial Times piece CNN was referring to is an oped that details how Trump is undermining democracy by overwhelming voters. Trump’s constant stream of lies and outlandish claims is frequently ignored, yet every mistake made by his rivals sparks a huge controversy. He works in a whole distinct political sphere as a result of this double standard and the media’s difficulty covering him properly.

The author contends that Trump’s unorthodox conduct is deliberate. He wants to overwhelm the media, the public, and the opposition, to establish a distinct political landscape for himself. Trump’s former top strategist, Steve Bannon, called his media strategies in 2018 “flooding the zone with sh*t.” This diminishes the benefit of having the ability to be astonished, which is what’s happening with American voters.

Longwell said on CNN that President Joe Biden has a critical chance to present a concentrated case against the former president, who was twice impeached and is the subject of criminal indictments in four different jurisdictions, as a result of Trump’s chaotic actions.

“This is the time for Joe Biden and his campaign to roll out a thousand surrogates to go on offense against Donald Trump and say, ‘You do not want this guy,'” she said. “You don’t have to talk about each case. You’ve to say, ‘This guy’s running for president to stay out of jail, he’s got [$500 million] plus in legal fees that he’s going to raise from you.’ Those are the kinds of things you do to sort of paint an overall picture.”

She added, “There’s a reason that roughly 30% of Republicans say that if Trump’s convicted of a crime, they won’t vote for him. Now that number is too high but it demonstrates that there are people who are saying, ‘Yeah look come back to me if there’s a verdict on these, and if he is guilty, that matters to me.'”