Amanda Carpenter > Quotes

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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

“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 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

“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

“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 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

“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

“Ideally, members of the media should resist the temptation to speculate about what the promised information may say or be and let the story expire. (Unlikely.) But, Trump’s narratives would be more effectively countered if voters and the media mounted heavy pressure on Trump to deliver the goods. He rarely does. Boxing him in at this step and making it well known that he cannot prove his allegations to be true offers the best chance of mitigating Trump’s gaslighting.”
― Amanda Carpenter, Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us

“Next, stop asking Trump to retract or apologize. He never will. Ask him to explain himself. That’s where he struggles. No interviewer should waste his or her breath attempting to get Trump to take back something he said or did. He will always double down and reap the benefit of demonstrating to his supporters, yet again, the strength of his convictions, however misguided they may be.”
― Amanda Carpenter, Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us

“STEP FOUR Whenever anyone poses some kind of threat to Trump’s contention that [INSERT CLAIM], he will take to Twitter to discredit them. His favorite adjectives include, but are not limited to, “loser,” “sad,” “weak,” “dumb,” “failing,” “overrated,” “phony,” and “crazy.” Name-calling will be repeated in interviews, at rallies, and in other public forums as desired. The verbal assaults will cease only when and if the target of the insults recants and pledges support to Trump.”
― Amanda Carpenter, Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us

“Take it from me, I’ve been all the way down the rabbit hole of this curious and curiouser world of politics. And just like Alice in Wonderland, I met both fantastic and frightening characters along the way and fought the Jabberwock firsthand. Now I’m out of the tunnel and ready to tell you the unbelievable tale of how a man got elected president by telling people as many as six impossible things before breakfast.”
― 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

“As Dan Ariely, a behavioral economist at Duke University and author of The Honest Truth About Dishonesty, said, “[I]t turns out that people want their politicians to lie to them. People view politics as a means to an end, and if they care about the ends, they’re willing for the means to be a little bit more crooked.”
― Amanda Carpenter, Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us

“We’re going to win so much, you’re going to be sick and tired of winning,” while in the next breath, “The whole system is rigged.” He constantly advanced the idea that he was a winner, but that he never had a chance because of the unfair media coverage he was getting. As he tweeted, “This election is being rigged by the media pushing false and unsubstantiated charges, and outright lies, in order to elect Crooked Hillary!”
― 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

“A poll conducted by Fairleigh Dickinson University in May 2016 found that 77 percent of those who supported Trump believed President Obama was “definitely” or “probably” hiding important information about his early life. Birtherism, without question, put Trump on the political map; Republican voters liked how he needled Obama.”
― Amanda Carpenter, Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us

“To start, I need to talk to you about how we, as people, need to adapt to this environment. Then we have to consider how candidates who compete directly in this new political world Trump created will need to change, too. First, us. The people and the media. Let go of the outrage already. It’s too exhausting to keep up and it plays right into Trump’s (imaginarily large) hands anyhow. Pushing people to the point of hysterics is the goal of gaslighting. Don’t give in to it. Be concerned, be engaged, be vigilant but don’t flip out. Take another deep breath. Take many.”
― Amanda Carpenter, Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us

“For some inexplicable reason, Trump supporters hanging out in political chatrooms began using a green cartoon frog named Pepe as their symbol, pumping out pro-Trump memes with the image. Many of them were also World of Warcraft fans who have long used the word “kek” in place of “lol” for reasons too obscure and nerdy to go into. Then, oddly enough, they found out that there actually was an Egyptian god named Kek who was depicted as a man with a frog’s head. Some thought it was a mystical coincidence that shouldn’t be ignored, or at least should be made into a delightfully kooky storyline. They decided that Trump was a living version of Kek, hence the nickname “God Emperor.” Mostly for fun, a canon was created around the Cult of Kek. Adherents claim heritage to an ancient kingdom called “Kekistan” that was overtaken by “Cuckistan” and “Normistan.” They created their own flag, inspired by the German Nazi war flag, which is sometimes spotted at pro-Trump events.”
― Amanda Carpenter, Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us

“Russia’s fake news story about Incirlik didn’t move markets or start a war, but it did infiltrate the highest levels of the Trump campaign. Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort repeated the falsehood during an August 14 appearance on CNN’s State of the Union. When host Jake Tapper asked Manafort about controversial comments Trump had made, Manafort asked Tapper why he wasn’t covering other, more important news, such as “the NATO base in Turkey being under attack by terrorists.” Well, because that attack never happened. Where did Manafort get that information? That wasn’t hard to figure out. The only places it appeared were on Sputnik News and RT.”
― Amanda Carpenter, Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us