Thomas Friedman needs a copy of SJWs Always Lie:
Donald Trump is a walking political science course. His meteoric rise is lesson No. 1 on leadership: Most voters do not listen through their ears. They listen through their stomachs. If a leader can connect with them on a gut level, their response is: “Don’t bother me with the details. I trust your instincts.” If a leader can’t connect on a gut level, he or she can’t show them enough particulars. They’ll just keep asking, “Can you show me the details one more time?”
Trump’s Republican rivals keep thinking that if they just point out a few more details about him, voters will drop The Donald and turn to one of them instead. But you can’t talk voters out of something that they haven’t been talked into.
Many have come to Trump out of a gut feeling that this is a guy who knows their pain, even if he really doesn’t. Many of his supporters are from the #middleagewhitemalesmatter movement, for whom the current age of acceleration has not been kind and for whom Trump’s rallies are their way of saying “Can you hear me now?” and of sticking it to all the people who exploited their pain but left them behind, particularly traditional Republican elites. They are not interested in Trump’s details. They like his gut.
Scott Adams calls Trump a Master Persuader. That’s hypnotist jargon for being a master of rhetoric. Donald Trump speaks to the emotions more effectively than the other candidates, most of whom are also speaking in rhetoric, albeit less effective rhetoric.
That’s why them suddenly switching to dialectic – or sometimes, pseudo-dialectic – is so off-putting. In essence, Trump’s critics are losing the argument in English, so they’re abruptly switching to Chinese to try to convince English-speakers to change their mind. It should be no surprise to anyone who has read and understood either Rhetoric or SJWAL that this has not been effective for them.