Recently an argument over Trump broke out on a friend’s FB account, and it strikes me that it presents several teachable moments. Without permission, but omitting names and FB’s fbclids from links, I’m going to use it that way. It begins with my friend presenting the recent court finding that President Trump must pay a $2 million fine for misuse of the Trump Foundation’s funds:
[Friend]: “Our petition detailed a shocking pattern of illegality involving the Trump Foundation — including unlawful coordination with the Trump presidential campaign, repeated and willful self-dealing, and much more,” https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/judge-orders-trump-pay-2-million-misusing-his-foundation-n1078306
And the rejoinder from the Trump proponent:
[Pro-Trump]: sounds like a partisan hit job.. bet it was some SDNY judge… lol.. talk about conflicted interest and corrupted legal.. that judge should be challenged and unfrocked
[Friend]: Trump can ask for an appeal but facts are facts and they will still be guilty.
[Pro-Trump]: https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/420865-judge-orders-stormy-daniels-to-pay-trump-293k-in-legal-fees [the link’s title is Judge order Stormy Daniels to pay Trump $293K in legal fees]
And we’ll pause here to note that the Pro-Trumper has provided a link of no apparent relevance. This is the beginning of a classic maneuver, which I’ll elucidate in a moment.
[Pro-Trump]: No facts are NOT facts. If they were then Trump would not be being attacked while the clintons who actually did violate foundation laws walk free
And there it is. This is the attempt to divert attention away from the topic at hand to another topic, namely the Clintons, a name which has become a trigger word for political conservatives. The Pro-Trumper continues to pound away at the maneuver:
[Pro-Trump]: And, indeed, the multitude of connections that slowly turned out became hard to dismiss as coincidental. There was the fact that 85 of the 154 private interests who’d met with Clinton during her tenure at state were Clinton Foundation donors.
Emails turned up showing how the foundation intervened to arrange a meeting between Clinton and the Crown Prince of Bahrain, a country that had been a major foundation donor. A Chicago commodities trader who donated $100,000 to the foundation got a top job on a State Department arms control panel, despite having no experience in the area. On and on it went.
[Pro-Trump]: First, the Clinton’s almost immediately shuttered the Clinton Global Initiative and laid off 22 employees.
Now, fresh financial documents show that contributions and grants to the Clinton Foundation plunged since Hillary lost her election bid. They dropped from $216 million in 2016 to just $26.5 million in 2017 — a stunning 88% fall. Throughout Clinton’s tenure as Secretary of State, the foundation pulled in an average of $254 million a year. (See the nearby chart below for a timeline.)
[Pro-Trump]: these are FACTS
[Pro-Trump]:
[Friend]: I see you are resorting to a straw man fallacy, rather than actually refuting the original argument that Trump is guilty.
The Pro-Trumper has rapidly deployed a number of facts and inferences in an attempt to turn attention away from the matter at hand. The Pro-Trumper makes one more statement, which betrays the maneuver for the careful reader:
[Pro-Trump]: I first refuted that argument… then I exposed you to facts and your strawman
Here are the points I’d like to make.
- The Pro-Trumper never addressed the facts of the matter, namely Trump being found guilty of misusing Trump Foundation funds, despite claiming he had. That’s classic.
- My friend recognizes the maneuver, and the agenda behind it, but I fear his riposte is weak because of the use of a semi-technical term, the strawman argument, which is too abstract. I prefer to use the term Buh-whataboutism! for this type of argument. As noted, the idea is to run quickly away from the topic on which one cannot win to another which, valid or not, one could possibly win, declare victory and go home.
- I’d like to note that the heart of the Buh-whataboutism! argument is not without its merits. We often use comparisons to make decisions concerning behaviors, from comparing consumer products to heroism in battle. But Buh-whataboutism! is invalid in this instance because the standard against which Trump is being measured isn’t the purported illegal behaviors of the Clintons, but the law. That is the one and only applicable standard when we’re discussing court cases. That the Clintons are brought up without reference to the facts of the matter at hand demonstrates the weakness of the fundamental argument for Trump; an honest conclusion from this court case suggests that Trump is a dishonest businessman who used a charity for personal gain. Of course, working from a single court case to characterize a man is itself intellectually dishonest, and so I shan’t do so, but point at his many other cases of lack of adherence to typical standards of American societal discourse in order to reinforce the conclusion. Just say it with me: Thirteen thousand lies….
In light of the first three points, I ‘d like to emphasize there’s no need to deal with the Clinton topic at all. However, given the weak presentation per the Clintons, I would like to present an observation or two.
With regard to evidence, it’s generally wisest to present the most generous interpretation possible during an argument[1], rather than, as the Pro-Trumper does here, come to the most harsh, yet unsupported, conclusion: impute criminal behavior. Why? It’s more believable when presenting the argument in front of an independent audience; the audience, presumably intelligent and not predisposed one way or the other, will recognize unlikely conclusions for what they are, and discount the proponent for not having facts of the proper character to rule out other interpretations.
So in the case of the Clintons, the presented facts are not incongruent with the conclusion of illegal behaviors, but they are not nearly dispositive, meaning that there are other possible and reasonable interpretations of the facts presented. Take, for example, the cited chart for the Clinton Foundation. I’ll stipulate to the numbers, as I researched a couple of them in Charity Navigator and they appear to match, but not to the conclusions the Pro-Trumper wants everyone to believe. In fact, there’s probably a couple of dozen alternate interpretations, but I shall only list a few to get the reader’s juices flowing:
- Operational incompetency. I do not mean the Clintons were skimming money off the top, because Charity Navigator actually places the Clinton Foundation in the top category for efficiency. I mean that perhaps the donor class perceived the Clinton Foundation as not being effective at its work, and chose to direct funds elsewhere.
- Disagreement with goals. Donors discovered that the Clinton Foundation’s goals were incompatible with their own goals as philanthropists.
- Major donor priorities changed.
- Major donor funds dried up.
- The Clintons are geriatric. No doubt about it, the Clintons are celebrities, but their advancing age is almost certainly making them less effective as fund-raisers. The diminishment of old age can be quite surprising, as I’ve found out recently.
- This is not a complete picture. The chart is for the Clinton Foundation and, by implication, covers all such charitable organizations linked to the Clintons. This is wrong. There appear to be quite the number of charitable foundations connected with the Clintons, most of them focused on precise problems or goals, and I don’t know, being a working dude with limited resources, if all of their numbers go up and down in concert – or if they don’t, meaning donors are shifting funds from one charity to another. The chart looks nice and authoritative, but having done a bit of research, I actually have my doubts.
I came up with the above on the spur of the moment; I’m sure a thoughtful reader would come up with even more interpretations. But a conservative who has already fore-doomed the Clintons is probably snorting in disbelief, because it’s hard to go against preconceptions, and in a sense, the above list is weak – because it doesn’t assert the Pro-Trumper is out and out wrong, it’s merely a presentation of alternative interpretations congruent with the presented facts.
So let’s move on to bigger hurdles.
First of all, let’s consider the behaviors of President Putin. If the Clintons were sleazeballs who could be bribed by donations to their foundation, then why did Putin end up taking the far more risky route of meddling in the 2016 Presidential election in order to ensure that Hillary Clinton, who as Secretary of State worked to roll back the illegal Russian invasion and annexation of Crimea from Ukraine, was defeated by Trump? This was all documented by Republican Special Counsel Mueller, by the way, which gives it far more weight than a non-Republican Special Counsel.
It’d be far more efficient and certain to have simply dumped $50 million into the Foundation. If a President Clinton then tried to work against Putin’s European plans, he’d have that lovely bribe, to use the unvarnished word, to hold over her head. But he didn’t, and I don’t take Vladimir Putin to be anyone’s fool. It’d have been cheap and certain, so why didn’t he?
Second, Why aren’t the Clintons in jail? Because they’re so smart? Nyah, it’s a rare person who can engage in such public hijinks and get away with it, and with the enemies the Clintons have made, the possibility seems zero.
But a properly cynical conservative will proclaim it must be corruption, the judge and/or prosecutors are taking bribes. Our Pro-Trumper actually did that in the thread above. But does this really make sense?
Look, I’m no lawyer. Most of us aren’t. But we all have a grasp of human nature. Do any of us think that prosecutors, who are traditionally highly ambitious lawyers, looking for that next step up the ladder or the big article in the newspaper, are really motivated by mere money and could be bought off not to prosecute?
Ignoring the problem of obscuring the bribe, that’s not how a prosecutor secures advancement. Can you imagine the improvement in the reputation of a prosecutor who put the Clintons behind bars? Similar to my favorite Benghazi incident argument, where I prominently and very sincerely thank the Republicans for publicly clearing former Secretary of State Clinton of any wrong-doing in that tragic episode, not just once, but a half dozen times, I conclude from the lack of prosecution that either the Clintons are fantastically master criminals who will never be caught for their crimes, and in fact should be given the Presidency on a permanent basis because their immense smarts makes them the best politicians to run the country[2], or … they’re not guilty of anything more than occasionally speeding.
The fact they’ve not even been indicted, despite the professional inducements for prosecutors, suggests that their criminality is either extremely well hidden, or non-existent. As an independent and a non-lawyer, I always hold the possibility out that they’ve committed horrendous crimes, just like maybe my next door neighbors could possibly do – but at the moment it doesn’t seem likely.
In the end, Trump was found guilty of misuse of funds. Indeed, he admits to it, as my Friend’s link emphasizes:
The settlement also included an admission from Trump that he personally misused foundation funds and called for mandatory training requirements for the now-defunct foundation’s directors — Donald Trump Jr., Ivanka Trump and Eric Trump.
It remains to be seen how often Trump’s supporters admit to this blotch on his reputation. For most other folks, I’d just shrug and say they were ignorant but then I might make the same mistake. But for the “… most stable genius in the world”?
1 However, investigators should take the most cynical view of the facts at hand, and then seek more facts to either prove or disprove that family of hypotheses. Why bother with a charge of bank robbery when you can jail someone on a murder charge? But a dishonest investigator is a dangerous thing.
2 This is an example of logical sarcasm, wherein what I just said actually makes a certain appalling sense, but I would never countenance the actual conclusion because it’s bad policy. Besides, Bill Clinton always makes my skin crawl.
