Gaslighting America Quotes

“In 1984, Orwell’s protagonist, Winston Smith, ponders the infamous equation as the novel explores whether well-meaning people, with enough pressure from Big Brother, will buckle and compromise their most fundamental beliefs. Eventually, Winston breaks. He concedes that, yes, two plus two does equal five. Why? Spoiler alert: The benefit of embracing the lie ultimately outweighs the sacrifice required to cling to the truth. Sometimes, more often than we’d like to admit, lies are easier to believe than the truth. Especially in politics.”
― Amanda Carpenter, Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us

“Eventually, Winston breaks. He concedes that, yes, two plus two does equal five. Why? Spoiler alert: The benefit of embracing the lie ultimately outweighs the sacrifice required to cling to the truth. Sometimes, more often than we’d like to admit, lies are easier to believe than the truth. Especially in politics.”
― Amanda Carpenter, Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us

“The benefit of embracing the lie ultimately outweighs the sacrifice required to cling to the truth. Sometimes, more often than we’d like to admit, lies are easier to believe than the truth. Especially in politics.”
― Amanda Carpenter, Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us

“One question can determine whether you are dealing with either a conspiracy theorist or someone who may be able to explain some questionable phenomena: “What evidence would prove this isn’t true?” If the answer is nothing, back away slowly. You’re dealing with a full-blown conspiracy theorist! There’s no use in the conversation aside from the entertainment value. If you take it seriously, you’ll only spin around in dizzying logic circles until you fall flat on your face.”
― Amanda Carpenter, Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us

“This is one of Trump’s tried-and-true rules for handling his critics. He will not comply with their requests, even if it means refusing to disavow white supremacists. He’d rather risk being called a racist than weak and subservient.”
― Amanda Carpenter, Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us

“To this day, there is no socially appropriate way for white males to express grievance without the risk of being branded as sexists or racists. Which is why the alt-right was formed and why it continues to exist in such an ugly fashion. If someone is going to be unfairly branded as a bigot, the thinking goes, why not go all in?”
― Amanda Carpenter, Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us

“A certain segment of Trump supporters known as the alt-right believe that the more offensive Trump is, the better. They cheered Trump’s gaslighting because it represented a blow to the PC culture the alt-right hated. His gaslighting disposed of the conventional norms of campaigning, media discourse, and political rhetoric. The alt-right loved it all—the smears, the denials, the suspense, and the discrediting alike.”
― Amanda Carpenter, Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us

“Jonah Berger, a professor of marketing at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, conducted a study in 2011 to find out what kind of material goes viral on the Internet. He discovered that stories that generate physiological arousal—particularly awe and anger—are much more likely to be shared. When readers experienced those two emotions they felt much more compelled to share the story with others.”
― Amanda Carpenter, Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us

“This is why Trump can look so erratic at times. He doesn’t care about winning his arguments on the merits. He uses the media to cause confusion and chaos and get people on his turf. He will pick up and drop different fables with ease until he forces his opponents into a defensive posture.”
― Amanda Carpenter, Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us

“A 2013 study conducted by the College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia found that the risk of levying a negative attack is well worth the reward, as any negative blowback on the person launching the attack tends to dissipate while the attack takes effect. “For voters who react with disdain toward the candidate (whether or not a defensive message follows), a sleeper effect is likely to occur,” the study said. “That is, the overtime impact of the negative attack increases.”
― Amanda Carpenter, Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us

“Think of the characteristics that Trump supporters say they love about him. They praise the president because Trump “says it like it is.” He fights. He doesn’t back down. He isn’t politically correct. He exudes strength. These aren’t a bunch of distinct qualities that Trump possesses; these character qualities are necessary for his gaslighting.”
― Amanda Carpenter, Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us

“This is how he achieves the true goal of every megamanipulator: attaining complete control over his environment and the people in it. It’s enough to drive sane people mad if they don’t understand how it works and why he uses it. But now that you have this book, you won’t be one of them.”
― Amanda Carpenter, Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us

“Like it or not, we’re all living in Trump’s world now. This is a book about what happens when a politician knows he can’t win by competing in everyone else’s reality, so he creates his own. When we watch Trump start spinning his next ridiculous narrative, we often misunderstand what he’s doing. We get his motives wrong and misinterpret the results. We want to think his crazy lies are his greatest weakness when they are, in fact, the source of his strength.”
― Amanda Carpenter, Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us

“He learned that people actually love it when he lies. He loves it because he gets stories about his prowess—whether it be sexual, business, or political—in the press. The media loves it because it keeps people reading the papers, watching their shows, and clicking their links. And his enemies love it because they keep thinking that this time will really, finally, truly be the time Trump does himself in with his jaw-dropping yarns. We’re all suckers.”
― Amanda Carpenter, Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us

“In extreme cases, membership and loyalty become more important than the function of the group; it becomes the purpose. Some people apply these descriptions to Trump supporters, but the GOP had gone tribal long before Trump came along.”
― Amanda Carpenter, Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us

“Going forward, all GOP candidates, from those running in the biggest, most expensive races to the ones in the smallest Podunk places, will have a choice to make. Will they endorse and mimic the sleazy but effective precedent Trump set in his stunning 2016 win, or will they risk sticking their necks out to demand something better for America? If you think that’s an easy choice, let me dissuade you, much as it saddens me to do so.”
― Amanda Carpenter, Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us

“A lot of people will tell you yes, winning cures all. I’m not one of them. Winning is great, but if it doesn’t bring real, positive change, it’s not worthwhile and most likely won’t last long, either. That’s proven true already. Trump’s victory hasn’t united the party; it’s corrupted it.”
― Amanda Carpenter, Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us

“In fact, the idea of the paranoid style as a force in politics would have little contemporary relevance or historical value if it were applied only to men with profoundly disturbed minds. It is the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant. . . . Any historian of warfare knows it is in good part a comedy of errors and a museum of incompetence; but if for every error and every act of incompetence one can substitute an act of treason, many points of fascinating interpretation are open to the paranoid imagination. In the end, the real mystery, for one who reads the primary works of paranoid scholarship, is not how the United States has been brought to its present dangerous position but how it has managed to survive at all.”
― Amanda Carpenter, Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us

“One embed reporter later reflected: Perhaps I’d been naïve, but it only now dawned on me, in the final week of the campaign, to my great horror, that the real reason they put us in the pen was so they could turn us into props. We were a vital element in Trump’s performance. He never once failed to invite his crowds to heckle us. He was placing us on display like captured animals. And it worked. . . . When the crowds lustily booed us, we’d sit there impassive and stone-faced, and this only further served to convince the rally goers that we were snobby, superior pricks. The pen was an amazingly efficient means of othering us. Behold, Trump said to his fans, I’ve rounded up a passel of those elites you detest. And I’ve caged them for you! Allow me to belittle them for your delight. Here, now you take a turn—go ahead, have at it! Do it again, don’t be shy!”
― Amanda Carpenter, Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us

“What are the benefits of gaslighting? For starters, when Trump does this, no one has time to talk about his tax returns, his business failings, or even why he told Howard Stern it was okay to call his daughter, Ivanka, “a piece of ass.” He keeps people buzzing with gossip, innuendo, and conspiracies about his opponents.”
― Amanda Carpenter, Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us

“Oftentimes, Trump says something so long and so confidently—and with so much outside support—that you can’t help but wonder if he isn’t right. That’s gaslighting.”
― Amanda Carpenter, Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us

“Gaslighting” is a psychological term for what happens when a master manipulator like Trump lies so brazenly that people end up questioning reality as they know”
― Amanda Carpenter, Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us

“Questioning everything is exhausting. Eventually, we let some misinformation slip in. We are even more biased toward the information if it happens to be something we would like to be true, like the promise of a great American success story.”
― Amanda Carpenter, Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us

“Two plus two equals five” was a slogan used in the Soviet Union that was later famously incorporated by George Orwell in his dystopian novel, 1984. Joseph Stalin used the phrase to convince his people that the government would complete his ambitious Five-Year Plan in four years.”
― Amanda Carpenter, Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us

“Tell me, is this what Republicans waited for years in the political wilderness for? To babysit Trump’s Twitter account and compete in a never-ending tournament of mental gymnastics to defend Trump from one self-manufactured crisis to the next?”
― Amanda Carpenter, Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us

“TO THOSE WHO, AS RUDYARD KIPLING WROTE, “CAN KEEP YOUR HEAD WHEN ALL ABOUT YOU ARE LOSING THEIRS AND BLAMING IT ON YOU.”
― Amanda Carpenter, Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us

“WIN: Trump declares victory, no matter the circumstances. This step usually takes a long time to reveal itself, and Trump will often engage it when he is ready to drop the matter.”
― Amanda Carpenter, Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us

“DISCREDIT THE OPPONENT: If critics gain traction, Trump attacks their motives and personal character.”
― Amanda Carpenter, Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us

“CREATE SUSPENSE: He says evidence is forthcoming that will soon get to the truth of the matter. Trump can remain in this mode for weeks, months, or even years.”
― Amanda Carpenter, Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us

“ADVANCE AND DENY: Trump casts the issue into the public realm without taking direct responsibility. He does this by raising questions about or discussing what other people are saying, reporting, or thinking. Tabloids, YouTube videos, tweets from unknown origins, and unverifiable Internet news stories are often used as sources.”
― Amanda Carpenter, Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us