Subject: What does "totally destroy" mean? It depends who you ask.

[edelsont]

My previous post presented four possible interpretations of President Trump's phrase, "totally destroy North Korea."  I refused to tell you, at the time, what I thought Trump actually did mean.  But now I will tell you that.

My first reaction was that he meant that the US would physically destroy the country: kill most of the people, and/or leave the place so radioactive that nobody could live there, or something like that.  In fact, at the time, that was the only interpretation that even occurred to me.

The same day, I had lunch with a friend -- let's call her A -- who understood it a different way.  She thought that it was much more likely that he was talking about regime change, or re-unification of North and South Korea; still something involving military force, but a lot less of it.

Here's one of the reasons why she thought this was more plausible: Trump wouldn't kill most of the North Koreans, because he knows that such an all-out nuclear attack would harm his own people, as well as the enemy's.  I took this to be based on the following: radioactive fallout doesn't stay put.  The winds spread it around, and, if there's enough of it to begin with, there's likely to be a measurable increase in cancer deaths all over the world.

I agreed with the underlying point: I thought she was correct in saying that a massive nuclear attack on any one country would be likely to cause deaths in every country.  But I wasn't so confident that Donald Trump knows that.  And even if he does, I wasn't confident that he would remember it at the moment of decision.  I see him as impulsive: prone to act, especially when angry, without thinking things through.

This woman, A, is a Trump supporter (which I, emphatically, am not).  She agrees with many of his political positions, and has much more faith in his stability and rationality than I have.

So she and I agree on one thing, and disagree on another.  We agree that an all-out nuclear attack would be a bad thing to do.  We disagree on how likely Trump would be to do it.

(Or, more precisely, on whether, in his speech, he meant to say that he would do it.  Whether he actually would do it is a separate question.)

After this conversation, I was very curious as to whether most people had understood him the way I had ... or the way she had, or what.  I did a number of things to gather information on that.  One of them, of course, was to post the question here on DW.  But I also talked to some more people directly, and went and looked at a number of other Web sites.  So what did I find?

As far as talking to people one-to-one, I have only a small sample.  For what it's worth, all but one of them shared my way of understanding Trump's phrase.  The one exception was another Trump supporter.  Let's call him B.

I'm pretty sure that this man, like A, agreed with me that the US shouldn't launch a massive nuclear attack on North Korea.  He didn't say that in so many words, though.  What he did say was "I'm sure that there are lots of good people in North Korea."  But that seems to me to be a pretty good indication that he didn't approve of the idea of trying to kill them all.

So this situation seems to me to be pretty much parallel to the one with A.  B and I, like A and I, agree that "nuking 'em 'til they glow" would be a bad thing to do.  We disagree, actually, on two things: in our general attitudes toward Trump (his favorable, mine unfavorable); and on how likely Trump would be to do this bad thing (he thought this less likely than I did).

Now let's look at the results of the other main part of my (highly unscientific) "research": looking at a bunch of Web sites.

I was about to say: most of those Web sites agreed with my reading of what Trump meant.  But on second thought: I don't know that.  Most of them just repeated his words, and gave no direct indication of how they understood them.  So if I just assumed that they understood him the same way that I did, that would be nothing but cognitive bias on my part.

Some Web sites -- a smaller number -- did give some indication of what they thought he meant.  Some of these agreed with my interpretation (my first interpretation, that is).  And some of them indicated some uncertainty about Trump's specific meaning.  For what it's worth, I didn't come across any that (so far as I could tell) definitely read Trump's phrase the way that A or B did: that what Trump was threatening to do was something comparatively mild, like "mere" regime change.

I'm almost finished reporting on my data (as opposed to analyzing it).  I just want to mention a special subset of what I found on the Web, namely, comments that were left by readers of Breitbart News.

These people were not unanimous in their reaction to Trump's proposal to "totally destroy North Korea," but they were close.  Almost all of them, like my friends A and B, made clear that they supported Trump, in this matter at least.  But unlike A and B, they interpreted his remarks the same way that I originally did: as meaning that ... under vaguely specified conditions ... he would attack North Korea with multiple nuclear weapons.  (One of them helpfully added, "I hope he uses really dirty bombs, too.")

So, to recap, here's the contrast between the two groups of Trump supporters within my overall "sample."  For the two people I talked to in person:

• they like Trump;
• they don't like the idea of his nuking the NoKies until they glow;
• and they don't think Trump was saying that he would do that.

For (most of) the Breitbart commenters:

• they like Trump;
• they do like the idea of nuking the NoKies until they glow;
• and they do think that Trump was saying that he would do that.

Now contrast that with where I stand on those same three points:

• I don't like Trump;
• I don't like the idea of his nuking the NoKies until they glow;
• and I do think that Trump was saying that he would do that.

Now what about all the other people who, like me, don't approve of Donald Trump?  Unfortunately, I don't have much data at all, on them.  Or rather, I don't have the kind of data which I would need, for my purposes.  I would need to know all three things:

• That they don't like Trump (which is given by how I defined the group); and
• whether they would approve of his nuking the NoKies; and, independently of that,
• whether they think that he was threatening to do so.

As I said, there are very few people, among the Trump non-supporters, for whom I have actual evidence on all three points.  For what little it's worth, for the few people for whom I do, they all seem to agree with my own take on the situation: they don't think he should go the big nuclear route, and they do think he is threatening to do so.

Okay.  That's it for data; it's time for me to tell you what I think it all means.  But -- surprise! -- I'm not going to do much of that; not in this post, at least.  That's partly because this post is already pretty long; it's also because I like leaving people in suspense.

There's only one thing that I do want to give you, in the way of analysis, right now.  And that one thing is a straw man: an analysis that you might expect me to believe in, but which I actually don't.

Namely: the Trump supporters are not being honest with themselves.  The consistency between the two groups of Trump supporters is this: whatever they think Trump should do (nuke the NoKies, for one group, and not nuke them, for the other group) ... that is also what they they think he will do.  (Or, more precisely, what they think he meant to say he would do.)

The two groups can't both be right about what he meant.  So we conclude that, whatever they think about what he meant, that doesn't come from any actual evidence.  It comes, instead, from this: because they like him, they let themselves assume that what he meant is the same as what they would want him to mean.

Given the data ... and given that I, myself, am strongly anti-Trump ... it would be natural to think that this is the conclusion I would draw.

It would be natural to think it, but it would be wrong.