Linguistic meta-strategy, that is.
Most of us have heard by now that one of Trump’s lawyers, a man by the name of John Lauro, offered up—on live television—a “defense” of Trump’s actions leading up to January 6th that actually confirms that Trump committed the crimes in question.
Why would Trump, through Lauro, his proxy, do this?
Consider that in every propaganda attempt, there are two persons: a sender and a receiver. Someone sends a signal to another person in the hopes that the receiver will be influenced by the communication. (Indeed, “a signal is any act or structure that is designed to alter the behavior of other organisms,” according to Soler, Batiste & Cronk.) This is the basis of an entire subfield in evolutionary anthropology, and it is directly relevant to what we’re witnessing here.
Soler et al., in their article “In the Eye (and Ears) of the Beholder: Receiver Psychology and Human Signal Design” (Evolutionary Anthropology [2014], Vol. 23, p. 141), say this:
A receiver-psychology perspective may be particularly illuminating in arenas that involve conflicts of interest. Whining by children has been shown to capture increased attention from listeners and cause physiological arousal in both parents and nonparents…. Infant crying may be an honest signal of vigor or need, but it also has the potential to exploit parents and others into exceeding levels of investment that are optimal for themselves.
This has strong implications in the Trump criminal cases. Consider that he is using his lawyers to whine about his clear criminal misconduct. The lawyers are using lawyerese, very legalistic and thus rational-sounding language, but that language is being used, instrumentally, to whine.
Lauro: President Trump wanted to get to the truth. He desperately wanted to get to what happened during the 2020 cycle. He did it in the courtroom; he did it in lobbying legislatures (that’s all First Amendment); and then, at the end, he asked Mr. Pence to pause the voting for ten days, allow the state legislatures to weigh in, and then they could make a determination to audit or re-audit or recertify.
This is a classic whine in linguistic structure.
Trump himself whines a lot, and this may be due to the psychological wound he suffered at age 2 ½, when (according to Mary L. Trump in Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man) his mother suffered catastrophic health problems and became unable to regularly care for him. So he’s still using the emotional and linguistic repertoire of a 2 ½-year-old. This certainly includes whining.
We, the audience, are not used to hearing such high-pitched, high-frequency pleas from an adult, especially not an adult male old enough to be an elder. The communication, however, may still elicit that “increased attention” and “physiological arousal,” causing us audience members to consider cutting him some slack if it reduces his whining. This is what he’s learned over the years as a psychopath / antisocial individual. This can be seen in young children with conduct disorder: they leverage their irritating behaviors to get people to bend into leniency, just to get the behavior to stop. Trump, now in scalding legal water, means to do the same to us.
But we have nothing to gain by letting him escape his due punishment. Not as a society.
The increased physiological arousal almost certainly has currency in his established constituencies (fundamentalist / evangelical circles, lower-middle and lower class [white] voters, etc.). The whine may serve as a signal indicating his need to be rescued or protected. In that light, it’s not surprising to see people rise to defend him, even though the evidence against Trump indicates an open-and-shut case.
To counter this, we need to call attention to what he’s doing. He’s whining, and we need to say that very plainly.