Comply with Me: Trump's Hypnosis Toolkit Exposed

Morgan, Lisa

Chapter 5: Unconscious Power

Trance Logic and Intuition

  • Page 94 Trump's communication is honed, perhaps obliviously, but most likely coached to some degree, to be understood by people's unconscious minds. He avoids complexity, keeps his words simple and recognises that people make decisions, at least most of the time, based on emotion rather than fact.
  • Page 95 The intuitive mind leaps to a solution without a step- by- step process of deduction.

    Chapter 6 His Hypnosis Toolkit

    Rapport, Trump Style

  • Page 99 A way to appear to be in agreement with someone without agreeing with their beliefs is to mirror their style of language. If they are lovers of cars, use automotive metaphors and jargon. If they work in fashion, then you may not be cut from the same cloth, but you can talk about the 'fabric' of daily life, how something is or isn't your 'style'.

    More Than His Touch

  • Page 106 Research on ways to touch people reveals that if someone is touched with artful skill, they become more compliant and likely to agree to requests. A successful touch is fingertip light, barely perceptible and ideally, though not exclusively, delivered to the outside of the upper arm. When giving this touch, it's important the toucher simultaneously looks into the eyes of the receiver. Research by two French academics revealed that two touches are even more likely to achieve agreement to a request. 94
  • Page 107 Listen to Trump. His voice is even toned. It has no edges. You could call it smooth, like brown suede. When he shouts, it doesn't have that sharp rasp we associate with anger. His fortissimo is more of an exasperated outburst. His voice stays narrowly in the middle of the scale. He accentuates his points with arm and head movements while the voice stays level. There is fluctuation, or as he would say, different tones, but he is not going far up and down the register.
  • Page 108 Trump has a regular rhythm in his speeches. You can hear the stress coming and going; not necessarily in sync with the meaning of the words he is speaking, more like the flow of wavelets, moving back and forth on a shore. His delivery rocks, lulling listeners into a dreamy state.
  • Page 108 A technique Trump uses, especially when delivering a prepared speech, is to drop his voice at the end of each sentence in tone and in volume. It makes listeners glaze and they can drop into a hypnotic state quickly.

    Trump's Fluff

  • Page 108 In order to get past their inner critic, which is alert to any factual persuasion and interrogates the detail, be vague and emotional in what you say.
  • Page 109 think or what they should feel. They want to make up their own mind. So, the key to making a successful hypnotic speech that brings people round to your way of thinking is to stay ambiguous: fuzzy in grammar and imprecise on facts. Listeners are given the mental space to create their own version of what you have said. Once they do that, they feel that they made the choice themselves.
  • Page 110 Trump suggests he's sharing a secret with the crowd. That draws them towards him.
  • Page 110 Trump was using confusional repetition to embed a suggestion that his supporters vote for him. Why?
  • Page 110 he's actually kept far more promises than he made'.
  • Page 111 Repetition is an element of Trump's fluff that is more powerful than most people realise.
  • Page 111 Called the Illusory Truth Effect, it is a tendency we all have to think information is correct the more often it is repeated. 98 Our minds check if something is true by assessing its familiarity. The more familiar something becomes, the more we believe it to be true.
  • Page 111 The many times people have heard it, over years now, the more they believe it.
  • Page 111 'There is no smoke without fire' is a widely held belief and gives people even greater confidence in Trump's accusations.
  • Page 112 Trump's skills mean he is memorable. His audience may not remember exactly what he said, but they remember him and the claims he repeated many times as the likely truth.
  • Page 112 Hillary Clinton comes from the school of speakers who are under the mistaken illusion that the people who are listening to her are processing her speech with their conscious minds. She uses a wide and fairly advanced vocabulary. Rather than repeat her points, she packs in lots of ideas and skips through them swiftly.
  • Page 112 Clinton misses a key principle of communication, concerning stimulus and response: that there is a gap between what you say, the stimulus, and what the listener thinks when they hear you. It is no good saying, 'I am funny' or writing GSOH and expecting people to like you. If you crack a joke and people laugh, it's then they think you're funny.
  • Page 113 The response people had to Clinton's speech depended upon whether they were already on her side and prepared to join her in her style of thinking. Clinton talked to the analytical brains of her listeners far more than to their unconscious minds. She used complete sentences and left little space for people to create their own internal responses to her. ... But most people aren't analytical in that way. They are not listening to her like judges hearing evidence or professors assessing a student. ... She did win more votes than Trump after all. Even so, it is likely she was most in rapport with those who share her analytical mindset. ... Her political messages were not designed to move them; they were designed to convince them. ... Two weeks after this speech, Clinton called Trump's supporters a "basket of deplorables". Her opponents pounced on that one emotional metaphor with glee, adopting is as their nickname.

    Just Suggesting

  • Page 114 If a hypnotist is good at their job, clients often leave the session thinking they are the ones that have done all the work, whereas much of the magic lies in the hidden suggestions that were made when they were in trance.
  • Page 115 Here is a starter guide to making successful suggestions,
  • Page 115 spotted. 'Democrats produce mobs' is a negative suggestion, moving your affiliation away from the Democrats. 'Republicans produce jobs' is a positive one,
  • Page 116 imagery, easy to remember rhyme and how often they are repeated.
  • Page 116 Misdirection
  • Page 116 He ambushes the media by saying or doing something so polarising that it becomes the main topic of the news. This trick has become commonplace as his power is threatened.
  • Page 116 If you have ever wondered how a hypnotist can get someone to do something without obviously instructing them, it's because, within what seems to be an unconnected conversation, they plant key words that tell the subject what to do or what to think. This is known in the trade as Embedding. For example, you might hear Trump say: "Can you believe that?" and not recognise that his question is a command in disguise.
  • Page 117 If I want someone to go easily into a trance, I might develop a yes set, saying:
  • Page 117 The yes set format is to make a number of suggestions (three works a treat) that are verifiable, followed by your key suggestion that is unverifiable and not necessarily true.
  • Page 117 This is how Trump does it: he gets the crowd affirming his statements, proverbially nodding their heads, 'yes' with each repetition of 'great' coal miners (three times), plus 'brave' [' yes'] and 'lot of courage' [' yes'] for good measure. Trump then drops in the idea of coal being 'clean', an obvious untruth [yes! Our coal is clean].
  • Page 119 Trump often claims that others have said something to him that he wants people to believe or he wants to occur:
  • Page 119 This is his equivalent of a hypnotist saying: "lots of my clients tell me that they go easily into a comfortable trance in that chair…"
  • Page 120 Notice how Trump talks about himself in the third person, perhaps because he is adopting a regal stance or even that it makes it easier for someone else to repeat what he is saying verbatim.
  • Page 120 Bad Grammar is Good In order for people to do what you want them to do, you have, on occasion, to appear ignorant or foolish.
  • Page 120 but each time he makes a grammatical error, his statement and particularly his tweets get widely shared.
  • Page 121 make a mistake grammatically so that your client corrects it in their mind.
  • Page 122 by getting certain words wrong, you get the message noticed.
  • Page 122 Double Binds to Win One of the most effective hypnotist's suggestions is the Illusion of Choice, also known as the Double Bind. Mums use this often to gain compliance from toddlers: "Are you going to run up the stairs to bed or shall I carry you?"
  • Page 122 Double binds like these are the stock in trade of salespeople as well as parents.
  • Page 123 Trump works in the realm of illusory choices, using a form of the double bind regularly. His
  • Page 125 To resist a double bind, break out of rapport and shift the playing field of the dialogue. That means refusing to argue about the content of the verbal contract that contains the
  • Page 125 double bind and also ignoring that Trump's insults dance around the issue of race.
  • Page 125 planted in voters' minds. It takes a cool head not to be sucked in by a derogatory double bind challenge. First you have to recognise the bind for what it is. Refuse to give the hurt or angry emotional response that the bind aims to achieve. Hurt and anger are signs of weakness that can be pounced on with glee by your attacker and capitalised upon. Once you refuse to play the game, your opponent has the wind taken out of them. They no longer have you to goad.

    Chapter 7: Telling Stories

    A Dead Cat Lying on the Table

  • Page 127 If people are told not to see something, they have to see it first before they can make any attempt to erase it.
  • Page 127 We don't mention the addiction, 'smoking' because immediately brain cells fire and produce smoking images in our mind's eye. Instead, we find other descriptions of their desired behaviour. 'Not smoking' becomes 'tobacco free'.
  • Page 130 It was Hitler who proposed using what is known as the Big Lie as a tactic to convince the masses.
  • Page 131 The current king of falsehood has to be Donald Trump. "Lying is second nature to him," Tony Schwartz, his ghost- writer claimed. "More than anyone else I have ever met, Trump has the ability to convince himself that whatever he is saying at any given moment is true, or sort of true, or at least ought to be true." 118
  • Page 132 A lie is justified in hypnosis if it achieves the client's goal. It is a form of misdirection and part of the toolkit of magicians and as well as stage hypnotists.
  • Page 132 throw a dead cat on a table. Useful when losing an argument, if you throw a dead cat on to a table, everyone will shout "Jeez, mate, there's a dead cat on the table!".
  • Page 132 how diverting it would be to suggest buying Greenland.
  • Page 132 A professor of philosophy, Quassim Cassam, identified what he calls vices of the mind.
  • Page 132 One of them is not caring if something is true or false. He gave this trait an academic label: Epistemic Insouciance, or in plain English, not giving a fuck about facts.
  • Page 133 Lying is one of an array of techniques used by those who want to achieve control of another through coercion.
  • Page 133 When you are regularly lied to about what's going on, you start to question your own view of reality. This is called gaslighting.
  • Page 133 receiver. We know that creating confusion is a useful tool if you want to put someone into a trance. What does the brain do with a lie? The brain is doing its best to adapt to the false reality that has been suggested to it and loses touch with what is real.
  • Page 133 The more a person lies, the more their brain adapts to the lies. They become desensitised to their own dishonesty and their lies grow bigger. 128

    Help for Future Farmers

  • Page 134 Trump has been criticised for talking to crowds about people they've never heard of, or situations that are irrelevant to them.
  • Page 134 The purpose of Trump's stories is not to be truthful or factually relevant but to bring the audience into his world.
  • Page 134 when Trump talks about what's going on for him, his audience feels part of their president's life.
  • Page 135 Identifying his goals with theirs:
  • Page 138 His vague claim of 'going in the right direction' is not true, but it is so vague that the listener can only wonder which statistics he is basing this claim on. Most listeners are likely to respond by feeling reassured, rather than question the factual basis of his boast.
  • Page 138 false equivalence.
  • Page 140 Vague and vast numbers
  • Page 140 no detail
  • Page 140 Listeners would have given up trying to make sense of his logic. They would instead ponder the 'billions and billions of dollars' sent in cheques written by Trump
  • Page 140 himself 'all over the world'. It is a homey image, as they say stateside: their president sitting down with his black felt marker pen and writing out all those cheques.
  • Page 141 Note Trump's taste for hyperbole;
  • Page 142 The story within the story holds another set of suggestions. It acts to confuse the listener so that the earlier suggestions get embedded while the conscious mind follows the fluff. In this nested story, the endurance of palm trees which are blown over but come back up upright serves as a metaphor for the endurance of farmers and, as we see later, a metaphor for what Trump expects of farmers and how they might behave if help is offered.
  • Page 142 While telling this, Trump humblebrags about his property portfolio through his seemingly throwaway mention of Palm Beach, Florida and Miami 'where I have a lot of stuff'.
  • Page 144 they won't need his help to achieve success. If you want to take this investigation of Trump's suggestion techniques further, you can find his speeches on the web and explore for yourself his repetition, stories, hyperbole, rapport builders, varieties of suggestion and perhaps even hypnotic tools that I've not mentioned. Make up your own mind whether Trump's speeches are unconsidered and merely tricks of rhetoric or the end product of years spent using hypnotic suggestion in his business dealings.

    Chapter 8: Building Control

    Emperor Chic

  • Page 152 We are not only influenced by ads, news, fashion and opinion that we've seen and heard, but also by things that we didn't consciously notice.

    Chapter 9 Through a Glass Darkly

    The Trumpet Shall Sound

  • Page 163
  • Trump has used the 'it's a joke' tactic plenty of times when he is testing the waters with a new thought.

    Chapter 10: Glamour in Action

    Converted and Compliant

  • Page 170 NLP; building rapport based on mirroring body language, matching their values, and 'confiding' in them to make them feel special.

    Converted and Compliant

  • Page 170 Our experience of life is State Dependent, a phrase meaning that what we experience depends upon our physical and emotional state at the time. If we are in a good mood, we will see the world through the lens of good mood.

    The Celebrity Effect

  • Page 173 An authoritarian personality is content with the status quo, seeks order rather than change and prefers discipline to creativity. They dislike the unknown, especially outsiders. In short, they are scared of uncertainty. They seek predictability and anything that threatens the life that they know is their enemy. They can hate democracy because that suggests more uncertainty and threats from people with values they do not share. When the status quo is threatened, they choose a strong leader to take control on their behalf.
  • Trump's suggestion - rich rhetoric.
  • an auditory confusional technique.

    Chapter 11: Lessons We Learn

  • Page 186 As the unconscious mind thinks in symbols and is alert to emotion, it's the significant words that make an impression.
  • Page 188 Research published in August 2018 analysed Trump's tweets and came to the conclusion that he tweeted an average of 1.65 insulting tweets per day. The researchers, not surprisingly, discovered that the more he insulted, the lower his approval ratings were. His base was the exception to this disapproval. Their view of Trump stayed the same.
  • Page 189 Adolf Hitler's speeches were full of strong emotion and the repetition of key phrases, the foundation stones of any hypnotic speaker's technique. These skills didn't come naturally to Hitler; a hypnotist and psychic, Erik Jan Hanussen trained him in mass psychology and how to speak to crowds.
  • Page 190 It was publicly acknowledged that the Leave.EU campaign group used hypnotist, Paul McKenna, to advise them on their promotional videos and social media messaging.
  • Page 192 luxuriates in the warm bath of faux nostalgia.
  • Page 193 often fails to convince because he is too fond of his own erudition,
  • Page 194 Johnson's biography of his supposed role model, Winston Churchill, published while he was Mayor of London, goes into hypnotic techniques in some detail. He analyses Hitler's speaking style and refers to the Nazi leader's methods as having a hypnotic quality. Johnson observes:
  • Page 194 "First the long, excruciating pause before he speaks; and then see how he begins so softly - with his arms folded - and how he uncoils them as his voice starts to rise, and then the awful jabbing fluidity of his gestures, perfectly timed to intensify the crescendos of his speech."
  • Page 194 "Listen to the way [Hitler] brings them all to their collective climax: with short verb less phrases– grammatically meaningless, but full of suggestive power. It was to become a highly influential technique, copied among others by Tony Blair."
  • Page 195 Artful vagueness is so effective because voters make their own sense out of the speeches, filling the gaps in logic with their own opinions and beliefs.

    Spotting Manipulation

  • Page 200 Obvious pointers to look out for are repetition, especially of chants, slogans and rhymes, confusing figures of speech that catch your attention, but which don't appear to make sense, rhythmic speech tones that lull you and exaggerated facts that sound too good to be true. Be alert for large numbers masquerading as statistics and unimaginably vast amounts of money. Be aware of questions that stimulate you to agree with them, especially when they appear as a series.

    Chapter 12: Take Control of Yourself

  • Trump knows he is good at this game of soundbite to soundbite combat.
  • Page 206 The people who are best at communicating with you use simple words and emotions to capture your heart.
  • Page 206 Simple doesn't mean stupid. Big words, except for academic and legal environments, don't cut the mustard. Metaphors do.
  • Page 207 Be aware of the suggestions that you are making as well as receiving. Much of the time, people are communicating with each other through their emotions in untutored ways, making suggestions that have unforeseen impact.
  • Page 208 Metaphors are useful if you want to better understand how you feel about anything in your life. If you ever feel stuck about something, ask yourself: "if this feeling were a thing, what would it be?"

    Call Your Own Shots

  • Page 210 Every time you heard 'should' or 'ought', it was a clear sign somebody else's belief was being given to you as a truth.
  • Page 211 Being brainwashed by other people's beliefs means that your actions are shaped by them. You are not in charge. Most of us are brainwashed to a larger or lesser extent.
  • Page 211 Be suspicious of any person or organisation who proclaims that it knows better than you do how you should behave, what your priorities are, and even who you are.

    Cultivate Discernment

  • Page 213 If you feel angry, then your thoughts become primitive: