Alyssa Farah, who served as Trump's Director of Strategic Communications, accused her former boss of using a racial "bullhorn" with his rant against "riggers".
He’s obviously racist AF, but I doubt this is a dog whistle. Guy is too fucking stupid and impulsive to attribute some kind of intent to his word vomit.
He's stupid in a lot of ways, but he's popular as a speaker for a reason, and he has done a lot of dog whistling in his life. This is just the most blatant. I do think it is intentional.
He's popular as a speaker because he "tells it like it is", which roughly translates to "he says the quiet racist parts out loud". I agree that this probably isn't a dog whistle. Or, it probably wasn't. It definitely is now, and I fully anticipate seeing someone wearing a shirt that colorfully uses the word "rigger".
This is where I’m at. He makes up stupid fucking words all the time. But those that follow him will absolutely run with it to “own the libs.” I’m not even sure they would’ve picked up on it if it were a dog whistle. Maybe in the context of the rest of the trial it reads that way, but I haven’t been following the shit coming out of his mouth. But strictly because there’s been a big deal made of it, it’s now ripe for those dimwits utilizing it “as a joke,” and then it’ll just turn into another in a long list of things that IS a dog whistle with some modicum of deniability
I think he has a natural talent to listen to what gets a rise out of people, what gets a reaction, and then copy that in his own way. What he says, once transcribed to written form, is often not very intelligent. It's his mannerism and even his unique makeup and hair - that people listen to far more than his actual meaning. I find people who think Trump is a great person often have serious difficulty interpreting and understanding hard sciences like chemistry and physics... and are influenced by advertising techniques in particular ways.
You overestimate them. Simple-minded folks have serious difficulty reasonning about any concept that require you to either :
Think of an abstract concept.
Hold and evaluate a thought they don't agree with
Any sort of application of logic and critical thinking requiring you to evaluate more than 1 or 2 elements in serie.
Their mind reset after making 1 "logical" deduction. Leaving them unable to evaluate both premises and arguments, or abstract concepts, or hold contradicting thoughts for evaluation, or any sort of concrete mental modeling of anything but the simplest cause to effect situations.
In that sense, the dumbest amongst us are not just incapable to do sciences, they can barely comprehend the very simple things surrounding them. They survive by gut-feeling, learned patterns, groupthink, and are driven by emotions (since it is all they have).
Pretty sure a 3rd grader could figure out that "riggers" sounds a whole lot like a really naughty word for black people, which is about where he's at mentally.
Regardless of whether he intended the visual/spelling similarity, I guarantee that his image of election riggers is exactly as racially coded as his image of "urban" Americans.
He’s definitely deficient as a human but never mistake the fool act for actually being a fool. More than anyone else in contemporary American society, Trump truly understands how to play to the lowest common denominator of his base
His word vomit is pulled from a very small bin of stuff that's "worked" in the past. Now that he knows it works as a dog whistle, we'll be hearing the word daily for the next 2 years, at least.
100%. It's just that I don't htink he has the mental capacity to put this together in the first place. He stumbled upon this because he loves to say shit is "rigged". Then a bunch of rabid degenerates turned it into something else, and it's now a thing.
For one thing, I would never agree to be his assistant, therefore ranking me orders of magnitude higher in observational capability than his former assistant.