Commentary

JOHN BRUMMETT: Truth as illusion

The gaslighting era formally launches in the United States tomorrow. It's been introducing itself for more than a year, actively since Nov. 8.

Gaslighting is a word newly in vogue, coming across my radar screen only in the last few days.

It stems from a 1930s play and a 1940s movie called Gaslight. In the play and film, a sinister husband keeps dimming the household gas lights, but telling his wife, when she notices, that the lights are as bright as always. He's trying to make her doubt her competence to recognize accurately what she thinks she sees.

The new application is to the messaging of the Trump administration, which tries to make all of us who behold plain evidence wonder if maybe we don't.


An example: Vice President-elect Mike Pence was arguing Sunday on CBS's Face the Nation that Trump will act quickly in office to undo the Obama record because Trump won a "landslide."

Trump finished in second place, with 2.9 million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton. She outpolled him more than John F. Kennedy outpolled Richard Nixon and more than Jimmy Carter outpolled Gerald Ford.

Others have lost elections and gone home by what Pence called a landslide.

I'm not arguing that Trump didn't win under the rule--because the electoral college is the rule, regrettably. I'm not arguing he's not the legitimate president. I'm arguing that he is, as I've taken to saying, the preposterous second-place president.

Preposterous refers to the absurdity of his behavior. Second place refers to where he finished in the race. He is a place horse steered into the winner's circle.

Mainly I'm arguing that getting nearly 3 million fewer votes than your opponent is the lamest, lousiest excuse for a landslide I've ever heard of.

For that matter, Trump's electoral advantage was produced by narrow victories in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin--about 100,000 votes cumulatively, fewer than attend a Wolverine football game in Michigan.

Democrats actually gained two U.S. Senate seats and a few House seats in the recent election. Not many. Not nearly enough. And they'll probably be given back in the midterms. But they happened.

An effective element of the Trumpian gaslighting is showing you a map coloring most of the country in Trump's red with only small blue Clinton dots here and there. It's true that Trump won a clear landslide if we're talking about acreage. But those blue dots for Clinton--that's where most of the people are. The red expanse for Trump represents swamps, bayous, forests, deserts, plains, farms, mountains, grazing lands and the rising Confederacy.

The point of the Trumpian gaslighting about the election is to create the appearance of a mandate for implementing major policy changes.

If Trump can lull you into buying the gaslighting on his supposed landslide, then he and the Republicans can better justify undoing Obamacare on the concurrent gaslighting that it is an abject failure. And they can better justify cutting taxes for rich people on the gaslighting that the Obama recovery was so pitiably anemic as to be not real.

But Obamacare is not a complete failure. Most people--those on company plans and Medicare and Medicaid and veterans' coverage--haven't been fazed by it in the least.

It is a good try on a complex problem. It has expanded health insurance broadly. It has helped millions of people.

But it has not done so affordably or by a cost trend that would be sustainable. It needs to be fixed in the matter of uncontrolled costs--both to government and consumers--but not repealed and replaced with something the Republicans can't seem to come up with.

You'll go along more compliantly with repeal and mystery replacement if you've been successfully gaslighted into believing we are experiencing utter national health-care chaos, which we aren't.

As for the supposed anemic Obama recovery, here is the eight-year improvement record amid a period of stressful global economic change: The U.S. unemployment rate has dropped from 10 percent to 4.7 percent. More than 9 million jobs have been created--or 14.3 million if you start the count at the bottom of the George W. Bush recession that occurred while Barack Obama was early in office. The stock market has nearly tripled on a seven-year bull run that was interrupted only briefly when the Republicans shut down the government. The deficit has been reduced from $1.4 trillion to $548 billion.

The only way to justify cutting income taxes on the rich--the supposed job creators--is to dim the lights of the preceding paragraph.

Those of us who could plainly see the light of the last eight years need never to waver from the understanding that the dimming is real and that Trump and the Republicans are the sinister husbands causing it.

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John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, was inducted into the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame in 2014. Email him at jbrummett@arkansasonline.com. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

Editorial on 01/19/2017

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