Donald Trump’s Megaphone

 https://gfile.thedispatch.com/p/donald-trumps-megaphone

During the Trump years a lot of people found safe harbor in changing the subject or playing tu quoque games. It only makes sense. If you can’t defend something indefensible, bring up something the other side did that’s not defensible either and talk about that. To any inconvenient charge or fact about Trump, his defenders would respond, “What about …?” the Democrats, Antifa, Hillary, the New York Times, Barack Obama, Hunter Biden, the designated hitter rule, whatever. 

There are three chief advantages to such rhetorical tactics. First, we live in an idiotic age where people believe that the alleged hypocrisy of a critic nullifies the merit of criticism. A parent who smokes is a hypocrite for telling his kid not to smoke—but that doesn’t mean the kid should therefore smoke.

Second, it’s what the audience wants to hear. And no “principle” explains cable news opinion shows more than “the customer is always right.” The Fox audience craved permission to be saved from its own cognitive dissonance and whataboutism as an exit ramp from having to confront the actual facts.

Finally, it lets you avoid explicitly lying. You just don’t answer the question that matters by pointing out the flaws of the other team. 

The problem, at least for me, is that if you follow this approach too long you’ll eventually become complicit in a larger deceit. And that’s where the lie by omission comes in.