Scapegoating And Purchasing Truth, Part 1
Subscribe Today!
In this episode, Bill Stierle and Tom discuss the narratives amidst the Coronavirus pandemic, particularly the White House press briefings on COVID-19 and Donald Trump’s participation. Get to know Tom’s take on how the president is purchasing truth and the scapegoating he is doing by assigning blame or completely ignoring the issue altogether. Bill dives into the way the Press Corp is pursuing information and their lack of preparation knowing how the president attacks these kinds of questioning. Learn what could be a better way of questioning to disarm the landmines and get the president to work and to own something.
---
Watch this episode here
Bill, I am fired up, unusually so. I know I take the minor role in these episodes appropriately so but now, I am bothered, to say the least.
Your body’s working perfectly and you got upset, saw some things, irritated, and aggravated by some stuff. Tell us a little bit about this so the readers can hear the foundation of your upset.
We’re all aware that there’ve been these daily White House briefings on COVID-19. It’s a daily press briefing and the President is participating in this every day. There was an Inspector General report that came out, which was a survey. We’re not talking about a report with an agenda here. We’re talking about a survey of hospitals in the United States that are dealing with COVID-19 and all the patients. The survey was asking about their supplies of masks, testing kits and personal protective equipment. The materials they need in order to treat people and battle this worldwide catastrophe of a virus. In the press briefing and this was not anyone particular reporter with a “got you” question trying to get at the President. They are reading this report and asking the President about it, “Is this going to change the White House’s or the administration’s or our government’s response to meeting the needs of the hospitals,” and things like that.
You’re getting close to the thing called the observer, Tom. In language, the thing I listen for is an interesting sentence, “What did the person say or what did the person do?” You did a good job of giving us the foundation of which we can create some understanding. You’re upset. The first thing that I’m going to do in communication is to go after your upset. You’re aggravated because the way this press briefing went did not meet your need for truth, professionalism, or the dissemination of information to the public. That’s going to be getting you or pushing your buttons. I can go over to Tom and go, “A whole bunch of your buttons is getting pushed.”
It doesn’t take much to aggravate and anger me on this issue. It’s frustrating because what happened is the first reporter asked the President, then the next reporter and it continued. They asked the President about the Inspector General report and it was pretty clear that the President didn’t have a lot of awareness of the report before the question was asked. It was not a secret. It was made public and it was news on its face. They were saying, “Mr. President, the Inspector General report came out with a survey of 300 hospitals.” He heard enough to say about supply shortages of critical equipment and things like that then engage at all in the report. He immediately starts acting like a middle schooler and says, “Inspector General report, really?” It was what he said. As if, “You’re asking me about an Inspector General report?” Somehow as if the Inspector Generals are not worthy of writing reports and putting these things out.
You’re going to feel aggravated and angry about the need for respect not being met or the skill. To be empathetic to President Donald Trump, he felt surprised because either he didn’t have the information or he had the thought that, “This is something I don’t want to talk about. My job, my role here is cheerleader and optimist to the population. I’m doing a strategy that either I learned when I was a child or developed while I was an adolescent or polished one when I was an adult, which is talk about the positive things.” That famous thing when you ask a contractor, “When is this going to be finished?” “The building will be finished in two weeks.” He’s a little bit in that building real estate space, but the problem with it is he has not been prepared for and his people are not able to prepare him for playing in this new industry.
You need somebody that knows how to juggle a lot of balls from different parts of this country with different people all wanting different things with different issues and be able to throw that ball and then throw this other ball in the air. Language and communication-wise, he doesn’t have that dexterity, flexibility, or the ability to shift perspectives and be able to turn it into a presidential moment. He can’t do that. Notice that you’re exasperated by even listening to me because he doesn’t have the skill.
He doesn’t have this skill and his agenda is to use these press briefings not to help meet the American’s needs for safety, protection, and certainty that we’re going to get through this, but instead, use it to make himself look like he’s doing a perfect job. That’s all he cares about. After he said, “Inspector General, really?” he took the lower road and said, “What is his name?” Meaning the Inspector General. He’s asking the reporter, “What is his name? When was he appointed?” He was going after trying to imply that this couldn’t be somebody his administration appointed. It must be somebody he was implying that was appointed in the Barack Obama administration and therefore, trying to say that, “This report cannot be trusted. We shouldn’t even be looking at this report.” The President’s behavior was childish, adolescent and he’s not being the leader and the father figure that America needs. The reporters didn’t help themselves either and their skill was lacking.
The press corp has some struggles because of their line of questioning. They’re pushing an assumption in his direction and they’ve got to stop doing it. The assumption is he’s read the report, been briefed, understands what has been briefed and can be honest about what he’s been briefed about and then give an adult response. All of those assumptions are false. Every one of them is. They already know that he doesn’t read. You can ask him straight up. Does he read? No. Does he listen to other people? No. What does he do with bad news? He attacks. Why are you asking him a question that’s going to result in this type of firestorm? How are you participating in a shame-based narrative? It’s like, “I am not going to talk about the thing that I eventually need to feel shame about. The buck does stop here.” He doesn’t have that belief that the buck stops here. He doesn’t have the belief around accountability and integrity. He does the same thing with a lot of people at the top of certain industries. “It’s not my responsibility. Joe Biden down there made the mistake. I’m firing Joe Biden.”
“I’m firing Joe Biden and he was hired by another administration and was inherently biased and you can’t believe that report because of it.”
“You can’t believe that report because that’s not truthful.” I guess we could hang it on Joe Biden’s manager or he worked on with this other company. It’s weird. It’s like if somebody works at another company, you hire them for their skill on the other company and then they happened to be in your organization when you get there. You can’t say, “They don’t have the skill anymore.” You’ve got to assess what that is and what they’re doing and go like, “The person is not giving me what I would like. Therefore, they’re not loyal to me,” but they’re bringing you information that’s valuable. All of this stuff that we’re doing is no help. It’s no help to explain this to all the readers out there that are nodding their head and going like, “How do we do this? How can the reporters get some skills or have some communication and evaluate about how to disarm the landmines and/or get him to walk the fields of landmines, and get him to own something in a new way?”
They can’t get there from here, whether it’s CNN, CBS or MSNBC because their line of questioning and the way they’re pursuing information is as if they’re asking somebody that has a good sense of the facts, utilizes the facts, but also doesn’t scare the crap out of the public about the facts. Let’s do something and you’ll get a sense of this. Years back, a tsunami ran through the Indian Ocean and the South China Sea. It hit the Western Coast of Africa. It was this big tsunami. It killed many people. As the news was covering that, Americans started to get scared of a tsunami on the coast. They had to dial it back because it’s in another part of the world. It could happen here, but we’ve got to put it in a perspective, not sugarcoat it, but also not go too far.
If you sugarcoat it too much, “There are five cases and those will be gone really soon.” That’s sugarcoating too much. “We have five cases and here are the things we’re doing about those five cases, then there are 25 cases. We need to get our arms around the 25 cases, then there are 90 cases.” That is a leader staring down the challenge, not downplaying truth, or assigning blame to someone else because we’re bringing them the bad news. There are certain parts of the country that people don’t watch the news. They don’t follow politics. They’re not interested in the conflict. They don’t have a civic responsibility. They didn’t take civics as a class in school because it has been removed from school. Can you imagine that? We want to stand for principles, but we don’t teach the principles that we stand by. How’s that going to go for us in the long run?
That’s not going to help.
That’s a greater truth. How’s that going to go for us? Somebody mentioned this to me. A friend of mine goes like, “I was in the store and somebody was standing right next to me in the grocery line. Even though there were red lines on the floor, they were saying, ‘What are all these red lines for?’” to the cashier.
That’s a serious lack of awareness.
“What are these red lines for that are six feet apart from each other?” You’ve got to treat President Donald Trump a little bit like the unaware guy, the person that doesn’t want the perspective. The guy that’s also standing next to you to the cashier line is like, “I don’t have the disease. There’s nothing going on with me,” but you don’t know if I have it and I don’t know if the cashier has it. That person will become defensive in that grocery line like Donald Trump becomes defensive with the press corps, “I don’t know something. I’m not going to talk about the thing I don’t know anything about. I am going to take that piece of information and find the flaw in the thing you don’t know, then I’m going to be able to dismiss all the things that you do.” You better have not just the piece of information called this is what the IG report is, but you better have the name, the history.
You better have, “He was hired in this. The reason why he was hired by this person that you hired in order to do that. That’s your chain of command.” You’ve got to tie his chain of command back to him. “Your guy did this. Your guy hired this person. This is your chain of command. I believe that the buck stops with you and we’re asking if you know anything about what this valued employee, this public servant is doing, and that they’re bringing that number. Mr. President, it might not be the positive message that you would like to present to the public, but what we’re doing is reporting the numbers from the report that we’ve received. Mr. President, maybe you would like to get back to being positive with the American public. Is that correct?” Give him the off-ramp.
That’s one big piece that’s missing here. First of all, the preparedness of the reporter, they weren’t prepared. They were not prepared because the President said, “What is his name?” That reveals a very interesting gender bias of the President because he says, “What is his name?” and not, “What is that person’s name?” It ended up being a woman who is the Inspector General named Christi Grimm. Here’s the interesting thing that played out. The President is attacking them, saying, “What is his name? When was he appointed?” You are right, number one, lack of preparedness by the reporter because the reporter should have had that information.
They should have known the President is going to attack the people that created the report and if he doesn’t like what the report says. Here’s the next thing they did. The President asks those questions and instead of moving off of those questions, the President is asking them and trying to get to the bigger picture issue. The reporters and people behind the scenes scramble and try to find the answers to those questions to provide them to the President. It’s like you’ve got two teams on a field to play a game. One is playing by hockey rules and the other is playing by basketball rules. To take it out of the political context, they weren’t playing the same game at all.
One is the game that my thirteen-year-old would play and the other one is the adult trying to get the kid with the tantrum to quiet down by giving him the answers the way he would like the answers. Instead of just being present and asking questions towards the President that would be things that would provide him support from where he is in his skill set of a communicator. He is not a strong communicator. He is a communicator that engages, messaging that hijacks the person’s truth and perspective so that he can put people in boxes that his followers agree that that’s a box that they don’t like. I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t trot out the Never Trumper box.
He was trying to go that way in a hurry because he said, “Give me the name.” Eventually, they get the name. He was like, “When was she appointed?” They didn’t have that information, but they said, “She served in the previous administration.” That was a bad fact to bring out because the President attacked and said, “She was appointed by the Barack Obama administration,” and she wasn’t, but he seized on that. She’s been a public servant in Health and Human Services since 1999. She was serving in both Republican and Democratic administrations, but Donald Trump’s administration appointed her to the Inspector General in January 2020. If they had been armed with that information, it would have taken a lot of the wind out of the sails of the President’s attack that the information is bad. It’s biased because Barack Obama appointed this person. He used Barack Obama’s name at the press conference. It got to the point where it was not implied anymore. I’m like, “What kind of Orwellian universe are we living in?” This is why I got fired up. The reporters allowed it to happen. They were not skilled.
Before the Coronavirus, lives we’re not fully at stake. There were lives at stake when you’re poking a stick at Iran. There are lives at stake when you kill a general. There are lives at stake and those people are in the frontline of danger and you are trying to make a statement to meet your need for respect with other countries and you’re using force to get there. This virus does not care. This is not one of those pieces. This is not, “I can spin this about they’re bad, we’re good,” and the virus is like, “I’ll kill another 100, 200, or 500 people with that narrative because you’re going to allow me to go to spring break and not shut down the beaches.” That’s what the virus does. It’s like, “Great, thank you so much. You don’t want to shut down the beaches. That’s fantastic. We’re good with that,” because it’s unseen. You can’t tell. It’s invisible. There’s nothing to shoot at. There’s no way to buy guns for this thing. It is challenging.
It is challenging and it angered me so much that the President never responds well to things that don’t make him look good. He was trying to manufacture news. He’s the guy who labels real news as fake news, “Don’t believe this report because it doesn’t make me look good.” When the testing kits came up and he again says, “We have more testing than any other country in the entire world.” It’s like, “How long are you going to keep selling this stuff?”
He’s also pretty brazen and okay about pulling the curtain back from the wizard pulling the handles. Mike Pence gets up one time. The President is up there, he turns to him, “Would you like to handle that?” Mike Pence comes on and he talks and he doesn’t answer the reporter’s question. President Donald Trump says, “Isn’t that nice? Within one paragraph or two, he did a wonderful job of not answering your question.”
The President said that?
He’s okay with pulling the curtain back in and going like, “We’re not going to answer that question because it’s going to make us look bad. We’re not going to answer the question because we’re trying to maintain respect here,” but he doesn’t say any of that stuff. He grabbed Mike Pence by the elbow and went like, “Isn’t it nice that he was able to put that in a paragraph and not answer your question?”
The virus is unseen. It's invisible. There's nothing to shoot at. You can't buy more guns for this.
CLICK TO TWEET
Why don’t you give the middle finger to the press corps?
They’re okay with it. There are times when the press corp is pushing for truth ahead of safety. Not necessarily safety with the virus, but safety for the economy because if you scare people too much, you’ve got a 10 or 7-year downturn instead of a 3-year downturn. Now we’re sitting with a 1 to 3-year downturn because you think that in the fall, we’re not going to be talking about COVID protection coming into the winter season. COVID is with us, just like influenza is with us. Seasonally, it is going to kill X number of people. COVID seasonally will be killing X number of people. There are going to be certain wings of hospitals dedicated to COVID isolation.
As the virus goes on, it will tend to get into some cooperation with our body so it doesn’t kill as many of us and is able to be spread more. That’s what’s happening. That’s what the virus does. It’s going to adjust to hang around more so it doesn’t kill its host too soon. It’s a little unsettling, but that is the cooperative, collaborative nature of biology, nature, and survival. You don’t want to kill too many of them off, but you still want to be alive so you’ve got to kill some of them, not until they infect other people. The viruses are thinking this. It’s the biological process of, “Here’s what’s available.”
The virus is very efficient in how it spreads itself.
It will become more until we get some vaccines, some shut-off switches, these things showing up and the new normal is a greater distance from people, a greater space from each other. Online platforms, video conferencing, recording like we’re doing, this is how connections get to take place. Finding our tribe of people to connect with, a new silo, our community silos, where we don’t talk about other communities even though we’re living next to people that are in different communities. These are crazy things that human beings are getting ourselves into. The thing to capture here is that the reporters have got to do a better job of giving President Donald Trump an off-ramp so he can talk in the way things would want and then make it easy for him to tell truth, so that truth is easy for him to speak about. Not assign blame and not have the blaming narrative in your voice.
“Mr. President, I know that as you’ve reported, it is bigger than anybody could ever see.” “Yes, it is.” “Your administration is doing the best it can with these things.” “Yes, it is.” “Mr. President, this IG report has brought some numbers here and since your administration is doing such a good job, how are you going to cover these shortages that are showing up in these areas?” “There are some shortages? Mike Pence, could you take over from here?” He will turn it right over to Mike Pence. He doesn’t have to, “Vice President Mike Pence, could you tell us how you’re going to deal with it?” His job is supposed to be running Congress. He’s abandoned that. He doesn’t even do his job.
I thought appointing Mike Pence to lead the COVID-19 response from the White House was the President being shrewd, realizing there is not going to be any good political outcome from this virus pandemic. He wanted to set Mike Pence up to be a fall guy. The President isn’t behaving like that quite honestly with all he is doing here. Bill, it is interesting how you laid out if you are reporter, what you could do to try to get at the truth or certain truths anyway. I want to tell you what I had been thinking I would have done in that press conference. I don’t know if it would be ultimately helpful or if what I was thinking ultimately allows the President to walk out on a plank and then I’m going to have my White House press credentials revoked.
To me, as the President started to say, “What’s his name? Who is it? It’s a Barack Obama appointee.” He was defensive and showing contempt and trying to put doubt and skepticism in Americans’ minds saying that it’s a bias report. Don’t believe it. I was thinking, I would say, “Mr. President, you are feeling that because the Inspector General served in the Barack Obama administration, that the report cannot be trusted. Is that right?” Have him say, “Yes, of course.”
It is stating the obvious about where the person is, whether it’s Donald Trump or anybody else. Even if it is your mother-in-law or father-in-law or your parents, you’ve still got to take them where they are because their beliefs are where they are. Their mindset is already where they are. I can’t argue with somebody that believes that the earth is flat because their perception and their perspective have woven together to create a belief that, “I’m only going to trust what I can see. All I see is the horizon and the horizon looks flat to me.” “Why can’t they see the curve?” “It is because it’s a big disk.” “It’s not a disk, it’s a round circle.”
Would it not be helpful then? I was thinking of a series of questions, that one being the first where I would then say, “Mr. President, the numbers that the hospitals reported to the survey from the Inspector General’s office that they have a shortage of masks, tests, ventilators, and other personal protective equipment is not to be believed?” I’m not saying this right, but to say that, “That information is not true because of the Inspector General that’s biased. Is that right?” Get them to either say, “The information might be valid,” and then you can have a real question about, what are you doing to help the hospitals get what they need or have the President sit there hanging out there by himself, saying, “The hospitals are not truthful. They’re Democrats also or whatever.” Further, get him to walk out on a plank. That’s going to call the President out without you having to do it. He’s biased and he’s ignoring facts. At the end of the day, you probably won’t get to ask the President another question and another briefing, I would imagine.
If you get him to walk the plank, he’ll ask you a question again because his challenge narrative is so strong that if you get him once, he’s coming right back at you.
He can’t let you have the last word.
No, he can’t. He’s going to say, “He kicked my butt last time, I’m coming after him.” He’s going to try to find the flaw. It’s always about finding the weak word or some angle to prove wrong, so my self-worth, my respect, my identity is propped up by how sharp I am. He is sharp about finding biases and playing in it because that’s what branders or marketing people do. They got to find the thing that is next to the person’s habit. You want to find, “Here’s the person’s habit. This is the type of person,” and then you want to set your product or service next to it. You don’t want to develop a brand new, innovative product that saves the world. Who cares about that? You’re thinking to yourself, “What do you mean who cares about that? I care about that.” No, because that product won’t sell unless it’s set next to the person’s belief.
It’s all about positioning language so it sits next to his voters, not, “Here’s what the truth is, and let’s face it together.” That’s what a real leader does. “Here’s the truth and let’s face it together. It’s complex and there are mistakes and will be made as we navigate through the force. Sometimes we’re going to take a left turn and send all of the ventilators over here and three people are going to die over here. We’ve made that choice because this is where the bigger danger was. If I don’t save these ten people, then I’ve got 100,000 people over here later or 10,000.”
It’s interesting when you talk about the marketing message and putting this next to that. We’ve talked about Purchasing Truth and this President in many of our episodes, how the language of communication is used to purchase truth, and how to purchase it back. It seems to me that this President and this administration’s purchasing of truth has reached a whole new level that life and death of average Americans are at stake here. It’s different when you’re talking about Iran, halfway around the world or South Korea, Little Rocket Man or whatever, you’re playing theoretically with Americans need for safety and protection from the threat of a potential nuclear missile being created or hitting us. When you’ve got people dying in the hospitals on a daily basis, this is a different situation than anything that this President has encountered before.
At different times of the country’s history, there are groups of people that rise up called isolationists. “We want America to be just America. We want to keep Americans inside America.” It’s fanatical racism, loyal towards the country. Its nationalism. It’s like, “Our nation is better than anybody else, and therefore, we don’t want to play with anybody else.” The only problem is it’s a worldwide economic game. The game is a worldwide game. It’s not, “How many refrigerators can we make for Americans in America? How many Ford cars can we make in America?” Everybody’s got a car. It’s a worldwide market and we’re depending on other people for lower costs. Everything from human rights to whatever, the labor rules, and everything else where we’re trying to compete. As other parts of the world get in the game, the price fluctuates because we’ve got somebody that is bidding down the price. It is because our country will do it cheaper than that other company that did it cheaply. We’re going to do it even cheaper because we want some food for our people and we’re going to cut you a deal.
It’s a race to the bottom and capitalism does that a little bit. It doesn’t put stability in those other countries we’re not as interested in, but it also trickles to us and goes like, “Stability isn’t in our country either.” It’s going to be interesting to see where we can take this next time because it’s not going to be a shortage of press briefings over the next month. We are going to be in and out of press briefings. That’s the challenge or the suffering that was sitting in front of us a little bit. I think that we’ve got to return to narratives of safety, protection, and support for the frontline people and getting the accuracy of information. We’ve got to return to those language narratives and watch. Don’t chase facts with this guy because he isn’t going to help you.
You can’t chase facts, but what they should be trying to do is to help bring the truth to the American people. It’s ironic that they can’t get it from him. They get tripped up by him, asking them for more facts.
I hear you would like greater awareness of people that are unconscious about what’s happening, which are the reporters. They’re unconscious about how they have to prepare for these meetings. They think it’s normal. They think they’re talking to an adult up there. They aren’t. They’re talking to a person that is skilled in this one mindset.
They need to change their approach.
There are more to come on this, Tom. We can talk about how when the press corp makes a question that creates a soundbite. That soundbite then is taken to the media individuals that weave it into their broadcast, whether it’s Rachel Maddow, Jake Tapper or Fox News. They’re taking this soundbite and they’re going to spin it and fill it out their way. Whoever the person that the information or soundbite is moving up to, they have an opportunity to reframe it right there. They do not have to say, “The President is not telling the truth. I don’t want to hear that sentence anymore. I would like to hear the sentences where the President is being optimistic and is looking to be encouraging.” Regrettably, what the information is showing us is that greater support is needed in these three cities.
“Let’s go to the people at the frontline of these three cities.” Take it away from him.
It’d be nice seeing somebody like Chris Cuomo do that after he’s healthy and back on the air or any of these major news anchors. If the reporters in the press briefing room are not able to do that, at least the big news personalities at the different networks, CNN, NBC, ABC or whatever can play that role. That would be helpful.
Thanks, everybody for reading.
Thanks for indulging me, Bill.
You’re welcome. Take care, Tom.
Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share!
