Most of what happens in our minds occurs in our unconscious, as Freud observed. Our conscious minds can only process a limited amount of information at a time. It has been estimated that the average American sees 4,000 to 10,000 ads a day.17 When there are so many messages coming at us, often simultaneously, we can easily become overloaded. We are not as rational and logical as we think, and today’s society is further dimming our capacity for sound judgment. Due in part to the informational overload, our attention spans have become shorter. The quality of education has dipped in many areas of the country, and for a variety of reasons, students are underperforming compared with the past. With TV shows streaming at all hours and with internet access at our fingertips; with our smartphones practically an extension of our arms, we are being bombarded and manipulated, often unwittingly, by people and organizations who want to influence how we think, feel—and buy.
Critical thinking is an effortful activity—one that our 24/7 society makes very difficult in other ways. Take, for example, sleep deprivation. The average adult needs somewhere between seven to nine hours of sleep a night, though this can vary between individuals. Currently 40 percent of Americans get less than seven hours of sleep a night—the national average is 6.8 hours, down more than an hour from 1942.18 Sleep deprivation is linked to many health issues including cognitive impairment.19 Critical thinking is hard enough when you’re not exhausted. Yet sleep deprivation is not the only force eroding our mental abilities.
Consider the ease with which Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, and other technology companies are affecting our behaviors not just as a society but at a very personal level: people are addicted to their devices.20 The average American spends eleven hours a day looking at screens.21 Facebook addiction is a well-studied phenomenon22—articles with titles like “Facebook Addiction ‘Activates Same Part of the Brain as Cocaine’ ”23 are more explanatory than alarmist. Cal Newport, author of Deep Work, argues that “the knowledge economy is systematically undervaluing uninterrupted concentration and overvaluing the convenience and flexibility offered by new technologies… [If people are bombarded] with email and meeting invitations, their cognitive capacity will be significantly impeded.”24 This awareness is not just bubbling up from the rank and file; CEOs across the tech sector are speaking out and cutting back technology use in their own lives.25
Trump watches at least four hours of television daily and often much more, eats fast food at many meals, and sleeps a reported three or four hours a night. He might be able to handle it but many Americans cannot. Whether we’re looking at the effects of adverse nutrition, poor education, climate change, economic disparity, job insecurity, high rates of divorce, along with the alarming rise of drug abuse in this country—the overload of everyday stress and outside forces is affecting the cognitive functioning of our brains.
One of the most damaging factors to us, as individuals and as a society, is poor parenting, and in particular child abuse. In his book, The Holocaust Lessons on Compassionate Parenting and Child Corporal Punishment, social worker and child protection advocate David Cooperson describes the negative effects of corporal punishment on childhood development. The title of his book refers to studies by Samuel and Pearl Oliner and others on people who rescued Jews during World War II in Nazi-occupied countries, often at great risk to themselves. They found that rescuers received negligible physical punishment as children—compared to those who did not attempt to rescue Jews—suggesting, among other things, that corporal punishment may play a role in whether a person becomes susceptible to authority. Studies by Harvard Medical School psychiatrist Martin Teicher and others have also shown that physical, sexual, emotional, and even verbal abuse can produce lasting changes in the brain. It can also lead to psychiatric disorders such as anxiety, depression, bullying, and post-traumatic stress disorder.26
Add to this volatile mix the breakdown in trust between people and institutions, the rise of celebrity culture, and the explosion of social media—we’re looking at a staggering number of negative influences on our ability to concentrate, think clearly, and make decisions, both individually and collectively.
The 24/7 digital age has made us wired for manipulation—literally. But there are many other factors at work. As someone who has experienced life in a totalitarian group, I know firsthand how cults work—how they target people at vulnerable moments and use well-honed psychological techniques to manipulate and indoctrinate their members. I also know firsthand how cult leaders work—how they distort, confuse, and manipulate their followers, in their one-on-one interactions and on a larger stage. Some may think that Trump is a buffoon who does not know what he is doing when he repeats himself over and over again at rallies or goes on for hours at a CPAC conference. While I do believe that he is failing in his mental health, he is also a longtime student of influence techniques with a need for attention and control over others. He would not be where he is without that knowledge and—let’s call it what it is—talent.
CHAPTER FIVE The Persuasiveness of Trump
In the summer of 2015, more than a year before the presidential election, Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams made what sounded like an outrageous prediction—that Donald Trump had a 98 percent chance of becoming president. With a still wide-open field of Republican candidates, and almost all the polls tilting heavily toward Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton winning the general election, Adams was ridiculed and even attacked. He later admitted that he had exaggerated Trump’s chances in order to attract attention—a key method of persuasion.1 But Adams, who claims to be a trained hypnotist, did believe that Trump—with his media savvy, his fourteen seasons on The Apprentice, and his extensive experience in business—had a high likelihood of winning. What gave Trump the edge, said Adams, were his superior powers of persuasion.
In his classic 1936 book, How to Win Friends and Influence People, Dale Carnegie outlined six principles of persuasion: smile, listen, show genuine interest in people, make them feel important, remember their name and use it frequently, and talk about their interests. Carnegie’s principles sound almost homespun. In fact, they still work, but the science of persuasion has moved far beyond his insights. First, with mass media—radio and television—and then the digital age, influence techniques have become much more sophisticated. According to Adams, Trump has masterfully exploited many of these techniques to his advantage.
In his book Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don’t Matter, Adams describes one of the fundamental principles of Trump’s rhetorical style. “Persuasion is all about the tools and techniques of changing people’s minds, with or without facts or reason,” Adams writes. When Trump claimed that Mexican immigrants are rapists, we may have recoiled in disgust but we remembered it. And we talked about it. Adams would argue that Trump didn’t mean all Mexican immigrants—he was intentionally exaggerating. He was using hyperbole, a persuasive tactic that provokes controversy and captures people’s attention and emotions.
“An emotional speaker always makes his audience feel with him, even when there is nothing in his arguments; which is why many speakers try to overwhelm their audience by mere noise,” Aristotle wrote in his classic work on persuasion, Rhetoric. By his own account, Trump seems to know what he is doing. “I play to people’s fantasies,” Trump says in The Art of the Deal. “That’s why a little hyperbole never hurts.… I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration—and a very effective form of promotion.” According to Adams, even at his most blustery, Trump has a strategy, one that should not be underestimated. He is a master manipulator of the media and of people’s minds.
A LITTLE MORE ABOUT MIND, LANGUAGE, AND HYPNOSIS
The human brain has been described as an incredibly complex and sophisticated biocomputer, one that is designed to learn survival patterns. It is remarkable in its ability to creatively respond to a person’s physiological and psychological needs, as well as to their environment. Our brains filter out the floods of information that com
e our way every second so that we can cope with those things that we consider important. The latest research describes how the right hemisphere of our brains takes in the big picture and the left hemisphere concentrates on details.2
Our minds are filled with enormous reservoirs of information—images, sounds, feelings, tastes, and smells. All this information is systematically connected in meaningful ways and stored as memories. These memories help develop our sense of self. Our beliefs about ourselves in turn serve as a filter for processing new information. They also help to determine our behavior. Yet only a small part of our behavior is under our conscious control. The unconscious does the rest, including regulating our bodily functions. Imagine having to tell your heart to beat seventy-two times every minute—there would be no time for anything else.
In addition to controlling our bodily functions, the unconscious plays a large role in shaping our conscious minds. It is the primary manager and keeper of information. It’s where our multitude of beliefs, judgments, feelings, and behaviors are processed and stored. Think of our conscious mind as the tuner on an AM/FM radio. You can put your attention on one “station,” but all the AM/FM frequencies are going all the time in the human mind. We’re just not aware of it. We’re working off what Nobel Prize–winning behavioral economist Daniel Kahneman calls “unconscious heuristics.”
It is our unconscious that allows us to make mental pictures and experience them as real. Your perceptions of the world are “simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain,” to quote the classic movie The Matrix. Try this experiment. Allow your mind to transport you to a beautiful beach—bask in the warmth and brightness of the sun, the cool breeze, the smell of the ocean. Hear the sounds of waves crashing, feel the grit of the sand between your toes. Did you go somewhere else for a moment? Imagination can be a powerful tool. Top professional basketball players learn to visualize the ball leaving their fingers and going through the net before they shoot. We all do it: imagining what we will say at a presentation, or when we meet the “one” and fall in love.
Trump does it, too—he is a master of getting our attention and manipulating people’s imaginations. You can see it in his use of hyperbole. His exaggerations are simply vivid images designed to scare or delight—usually both at the same time. In his 2017 inauguration speech, he spoke of abandoned factories, failed schools, rampant crime, and a decrepit military that only he could fix. “This American carnage ends right here and right now,” he claimed. “I’ll be able to make sure that when you walk down the street in your inner city or wherever you are, you’re not going to be shot.” Over the course of Trump’s first year, 112 people died in ten separate mass shooting events.3 The following year, the number of fatalities reached over 300.4 Even his insults—Lyin’ Ted, Pocahontas, Crazy Bernie—play upon our imaginations, conjuring up images and associated emotions that, once heard, can be triggered over and over again at a mere mention.
The mind is powerful but it has its vulnerabilities. It requires a stream of coherent information to function properly. Put a person in a sensory deprivation chamber and within minutes they will start to hallucinate and become incredibly receptive to another person’s suggestions. Likewise, put a person in a situation where his senses are overloaded with contradictory incoherent information and the mind will typically go numb as a protective reaction. It gets confused and overwhelmed—critical faculties no longer properly work. In this overloaded state, people can become vulnerable to hypnotic suggestion and trance.
You may associate hypnotism with a bearded doctor dangling an old pocket watch in front of a droopy-eyed subject, or a stage hypnotist who makes people believe that they are a chicken or Elvis Presley. While those images are stereotypes, they point to a central feature of hypnotism: the trance. In trance, critical thinking and other mental processes are diminished, leaving the highly suggestable unconscious imagination more in control.5 People are less able to critically evaluate information received in a trance than when in a normal state of alert consciousness. The altered state does not need to be deep or long-lasting. It happens to all of us multiple times a day—when someone says, “pass the salt,” do you analyze the communication, or do you just pass the salt while your focus remains on the meal or who you were speaking with?
The mind needs frames of reference in order to structure reality. Beliefs, past experiences, or points of information provide the filters. Change the frame of reference and the information coming in will be interpreted in a different way. If someone approaches you in the mall and says, “You look like an adventurous person who likes to try new things, a real free thinker who doesn’t let conventions constrain you. Would you like to try some chocolate covered ants?” you’re much more likely to agree than if that person approaches you and says, “You look like a sensible person who thinks carefully before acting.”
When people are subjected to a systematic mind control process, most do not have any frame of reference for the experience and will often unconsciously accept the frame given to them by the leader or the group—for example, that they are special, chosen, or smart, and therefore deserving of what you are about to impart to them. Trump does that when he greets his audiences at rallies and tells them how much he loves them, as he did at a rally in El Paso. “I love this state. I love the people of this state. We’ve had a great romance together, you know that.”6 What they also know is that the love extends only to his supporters. One of Trump’s favorite lines when meeting powerful men is to tell them how “handsome” they are. In 2017, when interviewing Kevin Warsh as a possible chairman of the Federal Reserve, the first thing he said was, “You’re a really handsome guy, aren’t you?”7 He has even used it on himself. While campaigning in April 2016, he addressed the crowd, “Do I look like a president? How handsome am I, right? How handsome?” These may sound like harmless compliments or the endearing—or laughable, depending on your perspective—ravings of a vain and superficial narcissist but they are highly strategic. He is telling the audience—whether it is an individual or a crowd—that they are “worthy” of attention and that they are in this together. By framing the audience’s experience from the outset, Trump makes it much more likely that they will lap up whatever he dishes out. As behavioral scientist Robert Cialdini shows in his book Pre-Suasion: A Revolutionary Way to Influence and Persuade, when a frame is set first, audiences become receptive to a message before they even hear it.
When we make decisions, we usually base them on information we believe to be true. We don’t have the time or ability to stop, think, and fact-check every observation or statement that comes our way. We often trust what we’re seeing and being told. If we distrusted everyone, we might become debilitatingly paranoid. If, at the other extreme, we were to trust indiscriminately, we would open ourselves to exploitation. Most people tend to maintain a healthy balance between skepticism and trust. Destructive mind controllers and con artists try to upset that balance to their own advantage.8 Their goal is to size up their mark, tell them what they want to hear, give it to them—while picking their pocket—and then move on, says Pulitzer Prize winner David Cay Johnston, author of The Making of Donald Trump and It’s Even Worse Than You Think. According to Johnston, Trump is “the greatest con artist in the history of the world, by conning his way to the White House.”9
NEURO-LINGUISTIC PROGRAMMING (NLP)
In the 1970s, Richard Bandler and John Grinder developed a systematic approach to dial into another person’s worldview—to understand how they make sense of reality—in an effort to help them be more effective. They called it Neuro-Linguistic Programming, or NLP. Bandler and Grinder developed the approach based on the revolutionary work of psychiatrist Milton Erickson—in particular his process-oriented hypnosis—and of others such as therapist Virginia Satir, anthropologist and linguist Gregory Bateson, and the body awareness expert Moshe Feldenkrais.10 Bandler and Grinder saw how therapists like Erickson and Satir were achieving great results—what they called therapeutic “magic”�
�with their clients and set out to model them and discover how they were so effective.
They realized that people experience the world subjectively, through their five senses—vision, hearing, touch, smell, and taste. When we perform mental operations—recall an event or anticipate or rehearse a future one—we do so in terms of visual images, sounds, tactile sensations, smells, and tastes. Some people are more visual, while others might be more auditory. The goal of the therapist is to understand how their client subjectively experiences the world. Bandler and Grinder found that by using a set of techniques—mirroring a person’s posture or vocal patterns, responding to eye movements, as well as observing nonverbal behaviors—they could elicit greater trust, which allowed them to get to the heart of their client’s mindset, thereby helping them to change. They did this by creating a set of experiences for their clients, which often included imagining future states of being, that would help them be more effective—make teachers better at teaching, salespeople better at selling—as well as helping people in conflict or pain.
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