Almost exactly a year ago, I proposed that all communicators should fear and loathe Donald Trump, just on the basis of being communicators.
Now that he's President Trump, I feel the same way, only stronger. Why? The American military journalist Thomas E. Ricks just said what I'd have said if I could have laid tongue to it.
Ricks has a new book out, Churchill & Orwell: The Fight for Freedom.
The last words of the book articulate my deepest disquiet about the Trump presidency.
Ricks believes that Trumpism is a threat to “a long but direct line from Aristotle and Archimedes to Locke, Hume, Mill and Darwin, and from there through Orwell and Churchill to the ‘Letter from Birmingham City Jail.’ It is the agreement that objective reality exists, that people of good will can perceive it and that other people will change their views when presented with the facts of the matter.”
As a communicator, I fear the loss of that agreement in the same way I imagine other vulnerable populations fear the loss of their own rights and powers.
As a communicator without that agreement, I would have no power to persuade.
As a communicator without that agreement, I would have no reason to listen.
As a communicator without that agreement, I would lose what scant influence I have.
Which would be a horror. And which, many days, already is.
If you're a communicator and Trump and the swirling information turdnado that surrounds him doesn't make you feel this way, I am truly all ears.
Because I'd dearly like not to feel this way myself.
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