Thread by @AlexandraErin

So interesting stuff in the audio of this #TrumpTapes release, in the part (phone call?) before the conversation with Michael Cohen.

You know I spend a lot of time studying Trump's communication style and there's something he does in there that doesn't get a lot of attention.

Now, we've all been told by the experts that when you repeat a lie, even if your purpose is to debunk it, you wind up reinforcing it and spreading it further.

Though to be clear, that's not something special about lies. It also works for the truth.

In fact, there's not a thing in nature or the human brain that separates a lie from the truth. We write lies with the same letters. We convey them with the same sets of sounds. The sound waves are the same. We hear them the same, process them the same.

Donald Trump may not exactly be a "stable genius" but there are a handful of facts he has mastered perhaps as well as anyone alive, and the fact that there is nothing special about the truth -- that it doesn't ring any clearer in your ears or shine any brighter -- is one of them.

So at the start of the recording, Trump is reassuring someone that something is going to go away very quickly. "And it's so false, by the way, what they're saying."

This kind of clumsy construction, he uses it a lot. "It's so false what they're saying."

Today in front of the VFW he said "What you're seeing and what you're reading is not what's happening."

It sounds clunky and clumsy and awkward as all get out, it sounds *fake*, like an alien or poorly programmed robot is trying to emulate a politician, but do you notice the very important thing Trump *doesn't* do, when he denies something?

"It's so false, what they're saying."

"What you're reading is not what's happening."

He's not repeating the thing he wants to debunk.

He refuses to say it.

Now, part of this is, no one can later contradict him. If he's caught out, no one can say that he specifically denied anything.

But part of it is, he's making sure that -- to as great an extent possible -- he is not spreading anyone else's story using his platform. Only his.