When a divine entity allegedly intervened to save Donald Trump from a gunshot pellet that grazed his ear at a rally in Pittsburgh on Saturday 13 July, it was not the first time the former president had taken an interest in political assassinations.
His onetime lawyer Michael Cohen tells a story in his book Disloyal about helping Trump with a problem leading into the Indiana Republican Primary in June 2016. The polls were showing Trump’s Texas rival Ted Cruz heading to a likely win.
Cohen had been working with David Pecker, the owner of American Media and publisher of a large circulation celebrity gossip magazine called the National Enquirer. Their objective was to assist Trump win the Republican nomination, and an Indiana Primary victory for Cruz was not on their dance card.
Pecker employed a young Australian journalist by the name of Dylan Howard who Cohen described as a possessing a talent for coming up with useful stories “pulled directly out of his backside”. Pecker and Howard showed Cohen a grainy photograph of two men apparently taken on the day in 1963 when John F Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas. One of the people in the picture, Howard said, was Lee Harvey Oswald, Kennedy’s assassin. The other man was Rafael Cruz, Ted’s father.
The political merits of bold assertion
Trump loved the picture, especially when Pecker and Howard answered the question about how they knew it was Cruz’s father. Their answer was that it didn’t matter: “All we have to do is say it is”.
Once published, the Oswald-Cruz story was fanned by Trump on ‘Fox and Friends’ and it went viral in right-wing circles, resulting in Cruz losing the Indiana Primary to Trump 53 votes to 37, with Trump lavishing praise on the Enquirer for its outstanding journalism.
Cohen reported similar stories written at the expense of Marco Rubio, a sanctimonious Catholic Primary rival from Florida, who was depicted in the Enquirer as a gay cocaine addict running a second family, with a love child aborted by his mistress. The stories were baseless, but they helped end Rubio’s candidature.
Donald Trump’s 2024 CNN debate performance against a lucklustre Joe Biden was a reminder of that storytelling technique. By employing his trademark gish-galloping style in telling false stories about Biden and his failings, a critical mass of gullible viewers instantly came to believe them. Gish galloping involves the storyteller running a succession of stories out of the mouth so quickly and with such energetic confidence that there is no opportunity to contest them in real time. Trump is a bold and skilful gish galloper.
Following the debate, CNN’s fact checker Daniel Dale found that Trump had made 30 false claims. They included the ridiculous proposition that fetuses are routinely aborted by Democrats during the eighth month and ninth month of pregnancy, and in some cases after babies are born. Post-natal termination is not a description of abortion but the crime of infanticide. It’s murder. Babies still die after birth in America when their life is unsustainable but their lives are not terminated by Democrats, despite Trump and the MAGA cult repeating over and over that they are.
Audacity as a communication method
Three factors are at play to make this form of communication work, and Trump uses them to useful effect.
The first is confidence. In making an assertion he must not blink, and if challenged he must repeat the assertion emphatically, especially if it’s an extravagant claim without foundation.
The second is to build the assertion on a grain of truth. Many of Trump’s lies are like the claim about his 2016 inauguration crowd, which lacked any observable basis in fact. He did have a crowd at his inauguration, however, but it wasn’t the biggest crowd ever and it wasn’t bigger than Obama’s crowd, which were claims he made, and were similar to false assertions about rally numbers he still makes. He may come to believe those claims because as former FBI director James Comey said, he regards the silence of his listeners as acceptance of the truth of his assertions. Likewise, Trump’s insistence of voter fraud at the 2020 election isn’t entirely untrue. There is always an element of voter fraud at presidential elections, as there was in 2020, but not anywhere near the degree that would have materially affected the result in any state. Nearly four years later, Trump continues to make claims that he won the election by a big margin, but has been unable to produced evidence to support them.
The third factor is the passing of time. By the time the CNN fact checker had reported that Trump’s made 30 false statements during the debate, millions of viewers were no longer watching the broadcast, so for many of them his mixture of outright lies and half-truths had become uncontested facts. And no media outlet was interested in the tedious exercise of systematically unravelling multiple Trump lies after the event. The technique relies on things moving on in time and voter forgetfulness.
Dutton the uncomplicated strongman
Donald Trump is not alone among right-wing leaders in employing communication techniques of that order, especially if they can rely on an obliging media’s unwillingness to contest their questionable assertions. One such person is an Australian Trump admirer, the present leader of the Liberal Party, Peter Dutton
Returning from an unannounced trip to the United States in the third week of July 2024, Dutton made a point of announcing his arrival home. He let it be known that he had attended the NATO Summit meeting in Washington DC, at which Australia was represented by Deputy Prime Minister Richard Marles. Dutton didn’t say in what capacity he attended the Summit because he has no official standing as a representative of Australia in international forums, and no member of the press reported attempting to clarify that question.
What Dutton did say was that “many people” he spoke to at the summit expressed their disappointment at Anthony Albanese’s failure to be there in person. None of the people with whom he purportedly spoke were named, and no member of the press asked for names. Nor did any member of the press remind him that his standard responses to Albanese’s overseas working trips in the past have characterised them as “Airbus Albo” on holiday frolics at taxpayer expense.
Uncontested assertions of that order are now a key part of Dutton’s modus operandi in the year leading into the 2025 Australian election. They are clearly designed to project an image of Dutton as a strong leader doing for Australia what Albanese is failing to do, and they are greatly assisted by friendly media representatives such as David Speers from ABC Australia deciding to call Dutton Australia’s “Shadow Prime Minister” rather than by his actual title, Leader of the Opposition.
Dutton’s strategy is to use any issue at all to project himself as strong, visionary and prime ministerial compared to Albanese who is indecisive, unadventurous and spineless.
Last week Dutton said he would throw the book at John Setka and the CMFEU, complaining that Albanese’s plan to deregister the union is the “weakest possible response”.
Dutton has also announced he will take on the supermarkets over cost-of-living issues, and claims to have personally put the leaders of Coles and Woolworths on notice to take actions he has no authority to take.
These assertions of fake authority come on the back of Dutton’s display of high dudgeon when the High Court decided that indefinite detention was illegal, leading to the release of refugees who had been in detention for many years with no end in sight. For Dutton it was a simple matter of making sweeping claims that the many rapists, murderers and paedophiles among them must remain under lock and key forever.
Dutton’s bold statements about the merits of nuclear power as Australia’s energy solution continue to fall over at every hurdle, but to the inattentive voter they sound visionary and resolute.
On Gaza, Dutton has unequivocally supported Israel’s “right to defend itself” and to exercise no restraint in confronting the evil of Hamas. He claims to see a simple good versus evil scenario in the Middle East, compared with Albanese whose approach he paints as ambivalent and feeble.
Political journalists such as Phillip Coorey from the Australian Financial Review assist Dutton’s leadership claims with stories under headlines such as this: “Beware the uncomplicated politician: Dutton on the rise as PM falls”.
Albanese has not helped himself by walking away from the Labor Party platform which calls for recognition of the state of Palestine, and his hot-headed burst of hubris on the matter has lost a brave Senator in Fatima Payman, along with an incalculable number of voters who identify as Muslim or support Payman’s principled position on Palestinian recognition and ethnic cleansing. The result is that many of Labor’s faithful are also noisily expressing their disenchantment, including Payman’s West Australian Labor branch leaders who have labelled Albanese a “jellyfish”, a characterisation from the Labor faithful which is in perfect alignment with Dutton’s portrayal.
In striking contrast with his simple projection of strength by assertion, Trump is making headway against the Democrats in the US by labelling the Biden (now Harris) administration dithering and worn out. On multiple fronts, Dutton employs the Trump strategy by audaciously behaving as though he is the powerful winning contender as Australia’s Government in Waiting, and Albanese impotently appears content to let him do it.
There are many unanswered questions. Among them is whether Albanese’s advisers have persuaded him that keeping his head down is a winning strategy for retaining Government. Alternatively, is he ignoring more astute advice?
Paul Begley
Paul Begley has worked in public affairs roles for three decades, the most recent being 18 years as general manager of government and media relations with the Australian HR Institute.