Moses says, "The problem was that for all the facts that journalists mustered as evidence of Trump's lack of fitness for the presidency, the outcome of the race [in the Electoral College] said those facts didn't matter."
In other words, the facts about Trump gathered by journalists envisioned a certain ethos that Trump did not represent.
Trump's major campaign strategy was to make outrageous remarks that he could depend on the news media to report free of charge. The enormous amount of free coverage that he received shows that he understood what would get him free media coverage.
Trump's outrageous remarks also show that he was attacking the spirit of so-called "political correctness." Put differently, "political correctness" involves advancing certain proposed value. Trump's attacks on the spirit of "political correctness" are evidence of his debate with it, so we are in effect discussing pro-and-con debate about certain value and dis-values -- the domain of what Aristotle refers to as epideictic rhetoric.
Now, in the essay "Reversing the Counter-Position: The Argument ad Hominem in Philosophic Dialogue" in the annual periodical the Lonergan Workshop, volume 6 (1986): pages 195-230, Lonergan scholar Mark D. Morelli in philosophy at Loyola Marymound University calls our attention to the circumstances under which Aristotle approves of the argument ad hominem in philosophical discourse.
In Aristotle's treatise on civic rhetoric, he is silent about the argument ad hominem.
Nevertheless, epideictic rhetoric involves public and perhaps also personal values, just as the branch of philosophy known as ethics does. For this reason, the argument ad hominem may have a place in epideictic rhetoric.
In any event, Trump's repeated expression "crooked Hillary" is an argument ad hominem.
In effect, the facts about Trump advanced by Hillary and by journalists also involve an argument ad hominem.
Despite the facts advanced by journalists, Trump used an ethos-appeal of his own making effectively -- effectively enough to win electoral victories in a good number of states. Because the audience he was aiming to appeal to bought into his ethos-appeal, he was Teflon -- the facts journalists advanced just bounced off him without damaging him in the eyes of the audience he was aiming to appeal to.
No doubt the audience Trump was aiming to appeal to was deeply motivated by desires for revenge. I use the expression "desires for revenge" (plural) to suggest that Trump was, in effect, appealing to a diverse coalition of voters. There was not just one target for revenge, but more than one.
No doubt Trump's voters' desire for revenge had been stoked by anti-60s conservative rhetoric. See Philip Jenkins' book Decade of Nightmares: The End of the Sixties and the Making of Eighties America (Oxford University Press, 2006) and Bill Press' book The Obama Hate Machine: The Lies, Distortions, and Personal Attacks on the President -- and Who is Behind Them (Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin's Press, 2012). By virtue of being an African American, President Barack Obama is a symbol of the black civil rights movement of the 1960s, just as Hillary is a symbol of the women's movement that emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s.
Ah, but was there perhaps a common denominator, so to speak, in the targets of the Trump's voters' desire for revenge?
Your guess is as good as mine. But my guess is that the most likely common denominator in their targets for revenge involved a perceived lack of humility among the people targeted for their revenge.
Of course neither Trump nor Hillary is famous for humility. But Trump succeeded in winning electoral victories in more states than Hillary did. As a result of his decisive electoral victory, Hillary's voters can now nurse their desire for revenge against Trump's voters.
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