I was just watching Real Time, good episode this week with Bully Bush. The panel has some great lines and Bush talks about how Donald was bullshitting all the time about his ratings, nowhere near the top for years, just endlessly saying he was though he had not been near number one for 4-5- years in any demographic. Donny just replied, look, you just tell them and they believe it.
Atleast Donnie is intelligent enough to know when he is bullshitting and has figured out to con the sheep.
The thing is he got away with it because he was one of only a few doing it with that intensity. We all expect a guy selling Rolexs out of a suitcase in the park to be a bullshitter and we have mental filters for that but even then we are vulnerable to little mental hacks. This even varies through our lives. Donny is one of the rarer born rich one has has no dignity, no qualms whatsoever. I remember once in Thailand deciding to buy a CD/MP3/VCD Walkman that were around in 2001. It seems like a small thing to but I realised I was willing to pay more for the Chinese piece of junk with "Sony" printed on it than the blank ones sold in most stalls, I actually walked back to where I was 10 minutes before to the guy with 'branded' ones. The guy even gave me a spare 'SONY' emblem badge sticker in case mine fell off (Panasonic was the other option). I recall strongly feeling 'WTF is happening in my brain that I actually can't dismiss the irrational desire to buy this one". Lies work, not much on me any more, especially since I became a trader (half the mouthy cons here are not) as I have much better filters. I see the lie and the truth at the same time, not one or the other. If however everyone is lying like Trump, his game would be done, the worm is turning on him as the novelty wears thin. "Lets get back to normal" as they mentioned one Real Time could be a winning slogan.
Just on that point, I have noticed that people who trade, particularly chart traders who scalp successfully have a change in their visual processing. I have tested this a lot at the university where I teach a class sometimes. I used to see a duck, then a rabbit like anyone else and back and forth, after thousands of hours screen time, I see both in parallel. My brain is clued up about deceptive patterns now from trading. The same with lies I hope, people will mature across society thanks to Trump. Until a generation passes of course. Then Trump II.