General Discussion

The Atlantic
How to Beat Trump in a Debate
Unprepared and weak-willed opponents continue to play right into his hands.
By Mehdi Hasan
February 16, 2023

Donald Trump is probably unaware that he’s an avid practitioner of a debating method known among philosophers and rhetoricians as the Gish Gallop. Its aim is simple: to defeat one’s opponent by burying them in a torrent of incorrect, irrelevant, or idiotic arguments. Trump owes much of his political success to this tactic—and to the fact that so few people know how to beat it. Although his 2024 campaign has been fairly quiet so far, we can expect to hear a lot more Gish Galloping in the coming months.

Let’s take as an example the first televised presidential debate of the 2020 election campaign. The Fox News host Chris Wallace invited Trump to deliver a two-minute statement. And he was off:
snip

Trump’s statement was the oratorical equivalent of the media-management approach famously summed up by Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon—“flood the zone with shit.”

As one pithy tweet—now known as “Brandolini’s law”—put it, “The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.” The Gish Galloper’s entire strategy rests on exploiting this advantage. By the time you’ve begun preparing your rebuttal of the Galloper’s first lie, they’ve rattled off another dozen. They want to trick the audience into believing that the facts and the evidence are on their side. (They have so many examples!) The technique is based on delivery over depth. Some call it “proof by verbosity.”
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