This Little Piggy

So, I’m sure many of you saw this story about Trump saying to a reporter on Air Force One “Quiet! Quiet! Piggy!” after she asked a question about the Epstein Files.

Besides the obvious fact that this is disgusting and, yes, deplorable, I believe this is also another “issue” that will break through with voters (especially women) on a mass scale that other more wonky policy issues won’t. This should fit in along with the visual of destroying the East Wing of the White House and rising prices.

But, as @thefarce.org states,

“Nothing just happens. Walls just don’t fall in.” Messaging can get through but… it takes the right message, the right delivery, the right deliverer(s), repetition and message maintenance.

The Right Message. Ie’s hard to predict what the “right message” will be. Rising costs/prices was an easy one. The East Wing - who knew? Epstein - yeah, maybe, but as The Farce argues, it took some MAGA insiders to break with the mafia Don to truly have an effect. There is nothing wrong with throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks.

The Right Delivery and The Right Deliverers. Again, Epstein has always been out there lurking, But it took eminently sympathetic survivors and MAGA insiders to provide this issue with the impetus it has now (hard to believe pedophilia and/or ephebophilia by elected officials and “important” people needed a push to break through). Press conferences with the victims and this victims’ video were certainly the right delivery:

Repetition and Message Maintenance. This one is is both easy and difficult. Studies show that voters need to hear about a specific issue multiple times before they start to internalize their views. some studies say 3-5 times, some say more. But studies also show that after some point, adding more messaging doesn’t strongly move opinion; it more likely just maintains the effect already achieved. Type of repetition, intensity of repetition, quality of repetition - these all figure into the complex equation of how to make repetition effective.

I would argue that volume also matters. The more people contacting their representatives, being vocal in their communities, interacting with or even regularly contacting the media, the better the odds of having an impact on social/policy issues of one’s choice.

As a former entrepreneur, I called helping run a successful start-up “the art of controlled chaos”. Internal debate, discussion and even disagreement is a good thing (as long as its constructive), but the organizational view presented to the external world should be consistent and persistent. Same thing holds for politics/policy.

We all need to look inside ourselves and figure out how we can play our part in making sure that fat pig doesn’t get away with calling a Bloomberg News reporter “Piggy”.