My friend the psychologist refers to people as “right-brained” or “left-brained.” Left-brained people use logic and reason more than emotion. I think he’s subtly trying to tell me something. I’m likely not the target for his occasional rants on “overly left-brained folks” but probably he means I lean toward being “left-brained.” I suspect my friend’s carping on this issue is because I’m an engineer and will lend a sympathetic ear.
Right-brained folks are more intuitive and artistic and emotional. I can’t find this characterization any place on my driver’s license or passport, so I suspect it’s quite subjective.
Now that we have this brief tutorial out of the way, how can it serve as a basis for the Trump Presidency? I never cared for Mr. Trump since I intuitively spotted his phoniness, and also because my nature is to do a lot of independent research.
People have done a lot of statistical analysis of Trump’s polling since he took office and compare it to poling of other former presidents. I have never met Nate Silver of the website fivethirtyeight.com, but I admire his work. Tom Zirpoli’s column of Sept. 25 had some facts from this site regarding Democratic candidates, but I would like to add some insights.
The fivethirtyeight data suggests most people — possibly as many as 70%, although his approval ratings are in the low 40% — “disapprove” of Trump’s actions to a considerable degree, yet a high number of Republicans support him. There seems to be an elastic range between the low 30% to the low 40% for Trump’s approval ratings. People vacillate depending on the immediate horribleness of his actions.
The question has been whether some folks who dislike him will still hold their nose and vote for him in 2020. But at the same time, there has been no evidence of a general uptick in support.
Whether he is a traitor — and I am almost certain he is after reading the Mueller Report at some length; at a minimum he is dangerous to the nation — Trump is a brilliant man in understanding the “right-brained” individuals who listen to trends and patterns and often don’t have either adequate time or the temperament to dissemble the truth. His mentorship with Fox News to systematically distort the truth and control our minds is a brilliant and lucrative endeavor.
Fox News has become the number one news agency, and I am sure their full-throated defense of Trump’s behavior and defense against upcoming impeachment will be crucial. In the end, news is a business, and Trump is their primary sugar daddy.
Trump and Fox, to some extent, have painted the Democrats into a corner. Since as much as 70% of voters, give or take, disapprove of Trump at one time or another, they have no choice but to pull the impeachment trigger. On the other hand, the “right-brained” folks and Fox will try with some success to make this acutely psychologically damaged individual into a martyr. He does have a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, and he can play this role quite well.
My gut feeling is that in the end it probably won’t matter since folks have grown a bit weary of Trump’s shenanigans and intuitively feel it’s time to move on. On the other hand, look at the mess the Brits have made of their situation regarding Brexit, and there is no coherent answer a month before the abyss.
This coming out of the closet regarding being “left-brained” is not as easy as it sounds. Not going with the flow can be a problem socially and probably has cost me friendships over the years. On the other hand, I have been happily married to a beautiful “right-brained” woman and soulmate for 47 years, and we laugh about this all the time now. Not so much at first, though. And it’s not clear who has the better batting average on decision making.
I asked my wife to review this article as I usually do, and she felt that right-brained people now were just as likely to oppose Trump’s actions on the alleged scheme to trade economic support to the Ukraine for dirt on Biden as left-brained folks were. Perhaps that is why Nancy Pelosi so quickly came out in favor of an impeachment inquiry.
It’s clear that elections are won and lost on emotion and intangibles, often before there is a good data base to go on. Our founding fathers certainly understood this — after they had thousands of years to work on this.
But it would still be nice to use the well-established polling data to date, left-brainer that I apparently am.
Dave Pyatt writes from Mount Airy.