There is only one assumption that doesn’t fit very well with Trump. This third Bion assumption concerns finding a compelling vision for the future. There is to be a pairing (a merger) of two major forces for and vision of the “good.” They will someday come together with the reemergence of the shining city on the hill (the new Jerusalem). “The waters will flow once again from Jerusalem to the Dead Sea and this sea shall once again come alive.” This third assumption is much more likely to be held by those holding the perspective of left-wing politics. Like the other two assumptions, it is based not on any accurate assessment of the real world. While some people are finding the first and second assumptions being “realized” by a distorted image of Donald Trump. Many other people are finding any hope of a new Jerusalem (a society of justice and freedom) to be fading rapidly from view in mid-21st Century America.
Focus on emotion not facts
As Peter Economy observed: “if facts don’t matter, you can never be wrong” (The 6 Persuasion Secrets of Donald Trump, Inc.com). With descriptions of threats that conjured intense emotions, Trump fostered anger and fear by, for example, portraying illegal immigrants as intruders taking Americans’ jobs and menacing their personal safety. He described people from Mexico as “They’re bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists”. He created fear of Muslim’s by implying they should be listed in a “registry” seemingly so they could be tracked. While other politicians speak more clinically, and many experts speak in more factual and scientific terms, Trump’s emotional – especially angry – dialogue As Aronson (2018) notes, more an emotional and scary a message is, the more likely the target audience is to take action.
Aronson (2018) describes how leaders and influencers can change people’s beliefs – some for the good and some for the bad. Machiavellian leaders use emotion! Aronson describes the difference between changing opinions and attitudes: “How easy is it to persuade a person? When “opinions” are no longer purely cognitive (by injecting an emotional component into a logical argument), it is almost certain that there will be strong feelings embedded in them, along with an evaluation as to whether the subject is good or bad.
An opinion that includes an emotional and an evaluative component is called an attitude. Compared with opinions, attitudes are extremely difficult to change” (especially once they have been formed). We would add to what Aronson has indicated, by bringing back Wilfred Bion (1961). He would suggest that attitudes are wrapped around and secured by one or more of the three basic (and unconsciously-held) assumptions. An example of this kind of attitude-opinion viewpoint that is backed up by an assumption is one of the current (at time of writing) perspectives on mass gun violence. When the logical argument of limiting availability of assault style weapons is countered with the emotional argument of “no one will take away my 2nd Amendment rights”, logical opinions become emotional attitudes which are very difficult to counter. The underlying assumption is that there is an enemy at the gate (the “socialist” government). We need the guns to fight off the enemy when they seek to become even more aggressive in their attempt to turn our beloved America into another socialist (or even communist) state.
