Indeed, Trump divines his own truth seemingly without consequences. And Americans have become largely indifferent to the daily barrage of lies and scandals. Sad
Washington (CNN) Donald Trump has learned he can get away with anything.
While the President has always profited from creating his own reality, the impact of having a commander in chief who so frequently bends fact is only beginning to be understood.
Before Trump, the idea of having a President who habitually fails to tell the truth and survives would have been unthinkable. But it's becoming clear that Trump's tenure is not just a lesson in fractured presidential convention. It amounts to a unique challenge to the office of the presidency itself, to the institutions that underpin American democracy and the long-held idea that government can only function effectively if it has the trust of the governed.
The most shocking aspect of the President's latest flurry of untruths in recent days relating to events before the 2016 election is that they were not at all shocking to a nation numbed by his barrage of easily disprovable claims and statements.
Revelations that Trump dictated a doctor's report on his health before voters went to the polls and his ever-shifting story on a hush payment made to porn star Stormy Daniels might have been a debilitating blow to any normal politician.
In Trump's case, they were simply more of the same flurry of daily controversies that characterize his presidency. While his critics reacted with outrage, his supporters saw media fact checks as just more "fake news."
MUCHO Mas:
Trump divines his own truth without consequences - CNNPolitics
It's this new phenomenon in this country.
The Dunning-Kruger Effect:
Some believe that many of those who support Donald Trump do so because of ignorance — basically they are under-informed or misinformed about the issues at hand. When Trump tells them that crime is skyrocketing in the United States, or that the economy is the worst it’s ever been, they simply take his word for it.
The seemingly obvious solution would be to try to reach those people through political ads, expert opinions, and logical arguments that educate with facts. Except none of those things seem to be swaying any Trump supporters from his side, despite great efforts to deliver this information to them directly.
The Dunning-Kruger effect explains that the problem isn’t just that they are misinformed; it’s that they are completely unaware that they are misinformed. This creates a double burden.
Studies have shown that people who lack expertise in some area of knowledge often have a cognitive bias that prevents them from realizing that they lack expertise. As psychologist David Dunning puts it in an op-ed for Politico, “The knowledge and intelligence that are required to be good at a task are often the same qualities needed to recognize that one is not good at that task — and if one lacks such knowledge and intelligence, one remains ignorant that one is not good at the task. This includes political judgment.”
Essentially, they’re not smart enough to realize they’re dumb.
And if one is under the illusion that they have sufficient or even superior knowledge, then they have no reason to defer to anyone else’s judgment. This helps explain why even nonpartisan experts — like military generals and Independent former Mayor of New York/billionaire CEO Michael Bloomberg — as well as some respected Republican politicians, don’t seem to be able to say anything that can change the minds of loyal Trump followers.
Out of immense frustration, some of us may feel the urge to shake a Trump supporter and say, “Hey! Don’t you realize that he’s an idiot?!” No. They don’t. That may be hard to fathom, but that’s the nature of the Dunning-Kruger effect — one’s ignorance is completely invisible to them.
Neuroscientist Reveals What’s Wrong with Trump Supporters’ Brains