Bill Cotterell: Trump aims at easy targets
President Donald Trump is using a time-honored and fairly effective rhetorical technique known as “a parade of horribles” to build public support for some of his most startling policy changes.
It’s an old gimmick. You take one or two flagrant examples of waste, inefficiency or just good old stupidity, and present them as typical of everything your opponents want to do. It helps if your “horribles” are real, but you can exaggerate, distort or just make up a few lurid tales to illustrate your point.
Both sides do it.
The left would have us believe America is stuck in time on May 16, 1954 — the day before the Supreme Court ruled against school segregation — and that no racial justice is possible without constant critical oversight by an endless array of government regulators poking into every facet of our lives.
The right tries to downplay real social injustice, political disadvantages or racially motivated crimes as isolated incidents, and insists concepts like “diversity, equity and inclusion” are just liberal talking points cooked up on “The View” and MSNBC.
The new Trump administration just gave a virtuoso performance of parading horribles. In her first White House news briefing, press secretary Karoline Leavitt said the president had courageously prevented expenditure of $50 million intended to provide condoms in Gaza. Trump himself embellished by saying the condoms were intended for Hamas.
It was shocking, appalling, even a little humorous — but not quite true. Still, it sounded like something the Biden administration might do.
Actually, the U.S. Agency for International Development made some grants to the International Medical Corps for a wide range of health and trauma services in Gaza. State Department spokeswoman Tammy Bruce wrote on X that her agency had “prevented $102 million in unjustified funding to a contractor in Gaza, including money for contraception,” as part of the pause in foreign aid.
The IMC separately stated that “no US government funding was used to procure or distribute condoms, nor provide family-planning services.”
Whether you want to believe the intended recipient of the money or the Trumpsters who cut it off, it’s easy to recognize the old “parade of horribles” tactic here. A couple of days later, as the administration moved to shut down USAID, Leavitt issued a list of expenditures which could be charitably called questionable.
Or, less charitably, they could be called nutty.
Topping the White House hit list were $1.5 million to “advance diversity, equity and inclusion in Serbia’s workplaces,” and $70,000 for a “DEI musical” in Ireland, plus $2 million for sex-changes and activist campaigning in Guatemala and $32,000 for a “transgender comic book” in Peru.
There were several more line items in the parade. Whether they were true or partly true, or just a matter of opinion, was not the White House’s concern. And certainly, Democrats in Congress, urging continued funding of USAID’s life-saving food and medicinal programs worldwide, will not leap to the defense of this sort of stuff.
That’s the tactical beauty of marching horribles. You seize upon a few stupid things an agency does — all right, a whole lot of stupid things — and use them to discredit everything the targeted agency or program does. It’s the strategic equivalent of a spoken gaffe in a political campaign, taking one dumb remark and framing it as typical of everything the opponent represents.
As gimmicks go, this one has roots in Greek mythology. Democrat William Proxmire, a U.S. senator from Wisconsin, used to announce a periodic “Golden Fleece Award” for the person or program that legally beat the government out of big money for nebulous results. Aside from making Proxmire look like a defender of the public purse, it was a clever double-meaning, combining Jason’s quest for the golden fleece with the fleecing of the American taxpayer.
Later, Republican Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina used to rail against federal funding of the arts — the sillier, the better. That always went over big in conservative circles.
We can expect to see more horribles paraded on Fox News, X and in Trump speeches as the president works to tear down the Department of Education, reclaim the Panama Canal and make other social and economic changes he promised last year.
The Democrats, not controlling either chamber of Congress, can’t stop him. But there’s one thing the federal bureaucracy might do in self-defense.
When considering a federal grant, agency officials might ask themselves, “How would Karoline Leavitt describe this expenditure in the White House press room?”
Bill Cotterell is a retired Capitol reporter for United Press International and the Tallahassee Democrat. He can be reached at wrcott43@aol.com
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