I posted a comment on Facebook and the Twitters: “The news anthropomorphizes Trump.”
Where the hell did that come from?
In the past few days, two completely unrelated clips catalyzed the insight, in the supersaturated coverage of the Mueller hearings.
First up: a Twitter thread that begins with some guy performing a magic trick for a baboon [Update: the original thread was removed, so I’ve linked to a YouTube video]:
Many commenters pointed out that the baboon did not in fact “love” the magic; my favorite response is from a psychologist and animal welfare scientist:
It’s a perfect example of a misunderstanding based on anthropomorphism, of assigning human characteristics to non-human entities. The baboon’s wide eyes and gaping mouth are not a sign of wonder, as they might be if you fooled Penn and Teller. It’s a sign of fear and aggression.
Second up: a CNN reporter talking about Trump’s response to the Mueller hearings:
The reporter, Kaitlan Collins, talks about Trump as if she knows what’s going on in his head—as if his tweets or public musings signify an inner life.
Her narrative represents Trump as a person whose attitude simply changed over time. He woke up “agitated,” but after the hearing, he “made it pretty clear” that he’s “in a good mood.”
Maybe that’s true. But look at Collins’s confidence as she goes on to lay bare Trump’s thought processes:
But now, after that performance, the president feels that the optics were in his favor today, because he didn’t think that the former Special Counsel had the performance he was fearing he was going to have . . . . [T]he president is viewing this as a win, and he sees it as successful because he feels like Republicans were able to successfully turn the tables on the Special Counsel, on the FBI and the DOJ overall, and that’s not what he was expecting when he went into today.”
Set aside all the “performance” and “optics” bullshit, which validates Trump’s reality TV sensibility. Collins is treating Trump like a human. Indeed, this is the press’s biggest weakness in response to this administration: they believe that Trump’s (or his administration’s) words mean something.
In the above clip, Trump’s words present a semblance of empathy for poor Mueller; it’s not Mueller’s fault that he “did a horrible job” in both the hearing and the investigation: “in all fairness to Robert Mueller, he had nothing to work with. You know, you can be a builder, but if they don’t give you the right materials, you’re not going to build a very good building. Robert Mueller had no material. He had nothing to work with. So obviously he did very poorly today.”
Nothing to work with?
The man is willing to say anything, any time, if he thinks it will have the right effect on his base; any connection to reality is coincidental. He’ll tweet one thing in the morning, and then another that afternoon, and then repeat that first thing again in the evening. Whatever “works.”
It doesn’t track to changes in attitude or belief; it tracks to expedience.
It’s dangerous enough to interpret what humans are thinking or feeling by interpreting their words. Humans are full of contradictions; we “contain multitudes,” as Whitman put it. But with enough interaction, comparing words to actions over time, we do a passable job of figuring people out—of making them human, so to speak.
But what if a person is willing to say whatever, to gaslight, to represent a patently false narrative as obvious and true? Pretending you know what that person is thinking is no less anthropomorphic than being charmed by a frightened and aggressive baboon.