The Ideal In the Gaps
Trump’s best gifts are imagined.
NOTE: Within this text, wherever gender is not key to the explanation, I am using the Elverson ey/em construction of the Spivak Pronouns.
Donald Trump and the various Project 2025 conspirators are well-known for their skilled use of messaging. They produce messages that clip easily into “sound-bites” for mass dissemination across the MAGAsphere. They answer questions with a unique catty hubris that demands finality without providing substance. One aspect of this messaging is called strategic ambiguity. It refers to that technique wherein various words are strung together into an answer-like response while leaving the important information aside. Reporters complain that these are non-answers and see the problem as one of deception by omission. Unfortunately, that understanding ignores the unacknowledged strength of strategic ambiguity. It is not actually ambiguous. It is filled with wonders.
I recently read another article about Trump followers and the inscrutable behavior of Republican dupes. It made reference to several excellent sources in scholarly literature including Pedagogy of the Oppressed in order to explain various stimuli to which Republican followers respond and the behaviors that tend to result from those responses. People concerned with those behaviors are concerned primarily because they lead to loss of liberty, loss of options and a rise in oppression and discrimination. As with so many such essays, the problem is explained thoroughly but the solution is left to the reader.
In order to consider solutions, the reasons for the behavior require some considerable detail. There are many theories regarding specific aspects of the call to the cult. Certainly, parental errors seem to be very popular in these explanations. An authoritarian father may lead to a juvenilized father worship accounting for some of the MAGA followers. “Spare the rod and spoil the child” is a Biblical phrase which, when practiced with vigor, results in a personality craving unproductive suffering and the attentions of the angry hate-driven parent figure. A fundamentalist upbringing wherein the suffering of penance is praised as a route to virtue reserved for the exceptional person, may yield a personality preoccupied with the person’s inadequacies and predisposed to give up the benefits of freedom in hopes of laud from the political parent who demands the penance. Living a childhood of constant criticism, one may yearn for any excuse to preserve dignity: “Suffering to succeed must be sufficient so others must have cheated and taken advantage in order to overshadow my greatness.”
These suspected causes of Republican authoritarian behavior all focus on the deficiencies in the character of the targeted dupes, without much interest in the precise behaviors of the conspirators and their propagandists. Whether or not these are the correct reasons for the susceptibility of the Republican authoritarian follower, Republican propaganda seems to expose the weakness of our culture at these touch points. It exploits the threat of ruin at the hands of the “nefarious other” by decrying the invading immigrants. It demands suffering to please the deity by depriving the struggling farmer of essential support. It glorifies the punishing father who exacts needed discipline against the struggling needy. It praises the abject obeisance to the dominating father in “Trump was right about everything”.
So many excellent books examine in great detail the What, in summary the Why, and in no way whatsoever the Solution. What’s the Matter With Kansas, goes deep in its review of the slow transition of the midwest of the United States from Socialism to Capitalism. Trump and a Post-Truth World examines the post-modern factors behind Trump’s success, How God Becomes Real the faux religious factors, White Trash the class factors, and Escape From Freedom the psychological factors. They all provide excellent background, but how can this problem be solved?
Freedom of Mind by Stephen Hassan demonstrates how cult members become ensnared and actually explains how they may be restored through an intensive, months-long intervention which is useful for an individual, but is not practical for a nation of cultists.
As I have explained more fully elsewhere, there are only two roles in the Republican Organization: conspirator and dupe. In order to understand how the dupe is duped, the strategy of the conspirator must be explained. One important part of that strategy is the partial message.
Strategic Ambiguity
I have been writing for some time about the sparse messages of Republican leaders and how those messages work. What I didn’t know until recently is that there is a term of art for those sparse messages: strategic ambiguity. In reading various articles that use this term, the focus seems to be on the fact that by being ambiguous, Trump appears to answer whatever question was posed although an analysis of the answer indicates no intellectual content. In other words, he mouthed a response but it was not an answer. The mechanism that the term strategic ambiguity describes is consistent with the sparse messaging that I have been describing over the past few years. Unfortunately, the effects of strategic ambiguity have not been properly assessed.
The writers who use the term seem to understand it simply as a way to avoid a full explanation. True enough, Trump often rambles through a word salad rather than answer and that should be called out, but strategic ambiguity is not just intentional blustering buffoonery. It avoids the undesired answer but it also strengthens the devotion of the MAGA devout. It is not incomplete, it is a complete template for a complete and perfect answer: a strategically sparse template that the MAGA minions may fill in with their deepest desires.
In my essay, The Truth Caricatures of Fake News, I go into some detail trying to explain why different devout Trump dupes ascribe completely different attributes to the man and his policies. Some approve of Trump’s ruthless deporting of the communist hoards; some praise his love of the hard-working immigrant; some laud his exceptional business acumen; and, some deeply respect his character and family values. In formal studies and Youtube man-on-the-street interviews, each MAGA follower seems to be describing a completely different man.
Strategic ambiguity is a strategically sparse template. Its purpose is not to fail in answering a reporter’s question. Its purpose is not to misdirect the sincere and curious citizen. I believe that its purpose (intentional or not) is to provide a multitude of perfect and completely different answers one-by-one to each MAGA follower.
A Multitude of Perfections
Maybe Donald Trump is a psychological genius or maybe a life of experience has unwittingly evolved a brilliant psychological model. The real genius of the Republican template lies in the natural desire of the human brain to fill in the blanks. A friend may describe her uncle as a bald man with a paunch, but you do not envision a bald pate with a disembodied pot-belly. No one does that. Instead, your brain automatically fills in a generic human male form and then superimposes bald and paunch. With no more information than that, you form an image of a complete human and, for now at least, call that image your friend’s uncle.
Here is just one story from my life that demonstrates the human brain’s exquisite power to fill in the gaps:
My left arm is only half as long as a normal arm. It has no working elbow and is curved so that the small, nearly immobile hand with only two fingers points backward when it hangs to my side. I was, at the age of eighteen, a DJ at an Oklahoma AM radio station. I sat in a sound studio facing a large picture window that looked out into the lobby with our secretary’s desk near the center and the front door of the building to the left as I saw it. To my right was the door leading from the studio into the hallway. Kim, an engaging and effervescent sales person with brown hair, would occasionally walk through that door into the studio, sit in one of the chairs and talk with me while I worked.
The various switches and knobs on the “board” in front of me controlled what was on the air and how loud it was. While talking with Kim, I would use both of my appendages, depending on which device was active. I adjusted knobs on my right side with my normal hand in the normal way and on the left side by leaning forward and touching the left side of the knob with the palm of my smaller hand and sliding it up and down to set the proper amplitude. These visits went on for a few months.
One day, while a thirty-minute taped program was playing, I walked out into the lobby and sat on the right side of the plush white sofa talking to Caroline, the stocky, business-forward secretary. Kim entered the room to hand Caroline a contract. She turned to see me in that unusual spot and smiled. Suddenly her face jerked into an expression of shock. “Julian!,” she exclaimed, “What happened to your arm!?” Caroline looked at me and then Kim and then back to me trying to take in what had just happened.
For two months, as I leaned forward only for left-side controls and pulled ad carts and spun records, her brain had completed the impossibly shaped limb on my left side. It had provided her perceptual system with a complete articulated forearm and five fingers on a normally shaped hand. Now that she was on my left side, confronted with the now unquestionable phenomenon, her brain could not fill in the missing pieces and my full deformity was suddenly revealed.
There was nothing wrong with Kim. She was a skilled, intelligent person and her brain did, in a somewhat extreme fashion, what all brains do — it filled in the gaps.
Nature abhors a vacuum and the brain abhors a gap. Give a needy, craving adult 12-year-old a partial message from Daddy and that person’s brain will fill each gap with the perfect response they would assume from their ideal parent. In this way, each MAGA dupe assigns Donald Trump the precious and unique image of their perfect parent and commits eir unalterable fealty to that most concrete of fictitious worshipful objects — the perfect father. The MAGA dupe does not receive an ambiguity. The MAGA dupe receives the complete and perfect answer, the answer that eir perfect Daddy would provide. Life may be hard but Daddy knows best. Daddy is such a comfort.
The Whole Picture
How, then, would we devise a solution that may address the true effects of strategic ambiguity? It is the responsibility of journalists to ask the questions and report the answers. The Republican deformity is exposed for all to see if only the actual message were ever revealed in full. Instead, reporters fill in the gaps themselves and reveal what they imagine to be a complete message. We may hear Stephen Miller belch out a sequence of non-sensical words but the reporter is always there to “explain” what he “means”. In other words, the typical reporter does exactly what the MAGA follower does except that the reporter makes sense of the message within the context of the reporter’s world view and not that of Trump World. A journalist, we might imagine, would report very differently.
Journalists, like those at ProPublica, or Zeteo or even Some More News, report on the messages of the current coup with minimal embellishment and sometimes even expose the gaps, but that kind of reporting never makes it into the more popular news venues. Fox “News”, knowing every back alley and seedy chicken shack of Trump World, fills in just enough to help their viewers finish the greasy, dog-eared picture. The more mainstream news tries to make sense of each message either sane-washing it into the normal world or mumbling through the inconsistencies leaving the rational audience member mostly confused.
Journalists need to learn the lesson that my colleague Kim taught — the incomplete message must be reported as an incomplete message. The deformity must be shown for the deformity that it is. The job of the journalist is to provide context and not meaning. If the message is meaningful, the context alone is sufficient to convey it faithfully to a news consumer. If the message is sparse, then the real message must be an exploration of the raw and unadulterated gaps. When the journalist reports on the strategically ambiguous answer, ey must never say, “What can this mean?” but instead, “Why was this left to your imagination?”
Rather than struggling with the delusion that Mr. Trump must have meant something, it must be reported as, “The President tossed a salad of words today and what meaning was there does not appear to be relevant to any serious issues. Instead, we will review the actions of the administration and identify their effects on current programs and policies.”
My body, the conversation and the complex of dials, switches and lights on my board obscured enough of my unusual limb that Kim’s brain could construct a complete arm. The flood of federal kidnappings and political retaliations and international bluster provides enough distraction to facilitate the unconscious translation of a Republican meme into a message of love and wisdom. While Fox “News” and OA“N”N will continue to spoon feed the infinitely adaptable Joyous Trump World to their viewers, if the full unprompted and unobscured message is being presented widely enough, one-by-one members of the cult will begin to see that the gaps are not amenable to any story about a consistent world.
We can help to weaken the effects of strategic ambiguity by exposing friends to organizations that support journalism, by contributing our money to those organizations and by repeating, in conversation, our full view of the latest message without attempting to make sense of it. These messages should be understood not as communication but as noise, a strategic and dangerous noise that a desperate cult minion may form into a special message from Daddy.
Julian S. Taylor is the author of Famine in the Bullpen a book about bringing innovation back to software engineering.
Available at or orderable from your local bookstore.
Rediscover real browsing at your local bookstore.
Also available in ebook and audio formats at Sockwood Press.