Slate - worth reading "How Shania Twain can possibly think Trump is "honest""

[NRaleighLiberal]

Still the One
No matter how blatantly Trump lies, voters (and Shania Twain) will see him as authentic. Here’s why.
By YASCHA MOUNK

https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2018/04/shania-twain-and-the-crisis-of-american-democracy-really.html

Shania Twain, the country singer who has sold more than 100 million records and is in the midst of attempting a big comeback, is probably wishing that she had steered clear of politics right about now. Being Canadian, she even has a great excuse for declining to comment on American debates. And yet, in a wide-ranging interview with the Guardian this weekend, she volunteered that she would have loved to vote for Donald Trump:

I would have voted for him because, even though he was offensive, he seemed honest. Do you want straight or polite? … If I were voting, I just don’t want bullshit. I would have voted for a feeling that it was transparent. And politics has a reputation of not being that, right?

So polarized is our politics—and so toxic is the president of the United States—that Twain was furiously starting to backpedal before the weekend was out. “I am passionately against discrimination of any kind and hope it’s clear from the choices I have made, and the people I stand with, that I do not hold any common moral beliefs with the current President,” she tweeted on Sunday night. But where most of the media simply saw a bizarre PR screw-up, I saw anecdotal confirmation of an important paper in the august American Sociological Review.

Let me explain.

In a recent academic article, Oliver Hahl, Minjae Kim and Ezra Zuckerman Sivan set out to figure out one of the central puzzles of the 2016 election: Why did so many people support Donald Trump even though he told so many blatant lies?

Some politicians lie about things voters don’t know to be untrue: They promise not to raise taxes, boast about their family values while shtupping their hairdressers, or claim to love babies when they would much rather not have to touch them. These kinds of lies are usually designed to go undetected. Politicians who employ them have some realistic hope of concealing their future policies, their marital infidelities, or their true views on the cuteness of babies long enough to get elected.

What’s striking about Donald Trump—and many other authoritarian populists around the world—is that he also loves to indulge in a second, more easily detectable kind of lie. “The concept of climate change,” Trump tweeted years before entering politics, “was created by and for the Chinese in order to make U.S. manufacturing non-competitive.” Barack Obama, Trump claimed during the 2016 campaign, had “founded ISIS.” Trump’s win in the Electoral College, he boasted a few weeks after the election, was “the biggest since Ronald Reagan.”


snip - more at the link. I just don't understand our current situation....simply bizarre.

[Major Nikon]

1. The obvious answer is smarts aint her strong suit

Should have stuck to putting cliches to music.

[NRaleighLiberal]

2. that's obvious - but the article discusses how many think similarly

It isn't just Shania.

[Major Nikon]

3. Goes for the rest of them as well

[LuvLoogie]

4. They voted for a grifter bigot because he promised to treat like shit the people they hate...

or they didn't give shit if he did as long as it wasn't them and they got a tax cut.

[Freddie]

5. At least she didn't vote for him

She's Canadian.

[GWC58]

6. Hmm, did she vote for Justin

Trudeau? I wonder!

[pansypoo53219]

7. brain farts are authentic?

[Cha]

8. She fucked up her big comeback. "trump honest"?

her stupid lack of knowledge pisses me off.

[uponit7771]

9. K&R, "most Trump supporters are perfectly happy to acknowledge that the president occasionally lies"

The occasional lie makes him "authentic" to them, more real

They've not meet people who are authentic and moral, to them those two things don't go together.

Going after Benedict Donald's authenticity is probably the best way to get his enablers to look at who he really is.