How Insults, Lawsuits, and Attack Ads Seduce Some Voters
By Bill Eddy / Bill Eddy’s Substack / October 22, 2026
This column builds on my prior column, Right Brain Politics.
What a week!
Yesterday, President Trump spent two hours at a rally in Michigan repeatedly insulting the Democratic Senate Candidate Abdul El-Sayed. Trump gleefully used his middle name, saying “I call him Mohamed because that is his name—his middle name.” He also calls him a “jihadist” with no basis except that he is trying to tie these words to the fact that he is Muslim. Former President Barack Hussein Obama also spoke in Michigan, pointing out that the same approach (calling him by his middle name) failed to defeat him in two elections.
Last Friday, Trump’s Department of Justice brought a lawsuit to block Alaska’s Senate Election results because there are two Dan Sullivans running and this could confuse voters. However, on the ballot one Dan Sullivan is clearly identified as the Republican incumbent. Since states run their own elections under the Constitution subject to limited rules congress can impose, the President has no power to impose such a block on a state’s election. His lawsuit will obviously fail.
Last Tuesday, the Republican candidate for Governor of Ohio, Vivek Ramaswamy, began running an ad against his Democratic opponent, Amy Acton, which features her mother calling her a liar. Apparently, Ms. Acton was raped by her stepfather and was removed from the home of her mother and stepfather when she was 12 years old. She has not spoken with her mother for the past fifty years. This ad has created a firestorm of criticism from Democrats and many Republicans, both calling for Ramaswamy to take it down.
According to the New York Times:
“many fellow G.O.P. politicians have denounced, disavowed or distanced themselves from the spot. Yet President Trump and Vice President JD Vance have defended the ad, a remarkably ruthless one even by the standards of modern political campaigns…. The outrage over the ad’s dark backstory has left Mr. Ramaswamy, a billionaire entrepreneur who exemplifies the anything-goes, attack-at-all-costs ethos of Trump-era politics, at the center of a self-created political firestorm.”
Why are they engaging in such absurd, desperate efforts? Because they work on some people—under the radar.
Right Brain Communication
As I explained in a prior Substack blog, the left hemisphere of the brain consciously processes language, facts, details, planning, applying past learning to future solutions, and logical problem-solving. The right brain, in contrast, unconsciously processes emotions and relationships, reading facial expressions, tone of voice, and hand gestures, generally watching out for danger from the environment and other people. Allan Schore, author of the book The Right Brain and the Origin of Human Nature, emphasizes “the critical role of the right brain in the human stress response and its survival strategies that operate across the lifespan, beneath conscious awareness.” The most intense emotions will shut down the left brain’s logical thinking while the right brain focuses on fight, flight, freeze, or fawn in order to survive.
Trump-era Communication
Trump, Vance, and like-minded politicians are communicating almost exclusively via the right brain. While Democrats and moderate Republicans mostly focus on left-brain facts, details and policies, Trumpist politicians aim exclusively for the right brains of their followers to unconsciously absorb their messages of extreme emotions, activating fear, rage, and love/loyalty for their leader. You will notice that MAGA people tend to be very emotional rather than logical about their politics. The facts don’t support how they feel, because how they feel comes from right brain factors, including emotional intensity, extreme words, and repetition in isolation. These were all present in last week’s extreme communications by Trump and other MAGA Republicans and has been true over the past ten years. People have struggled to understand how Trump’s different style has become so powerful. Here’s my explanation.
Emotional Intensity
Our right brains are particularly sensitive to facial expressions and tone of voice. With 24/7 cable news, network TV news, and social media, we are constantly barraged with the domineering facial expressions and negative tone of voice of Trump, JD Vance, and many others. These go straight into the right brain without conscious digestion, like advertising. People don’t know why they feel it, but they feel it strongly. Before the last twenty years or so, political information consciously came into our left brains through the written word (newspapers, magazines, books) or nightly newscasters for half an hour with mild tones of voice. The yelling, disdainful tone, tears, and glowering expressions were not present. We only heard or read about them. I believe today’s world is emotionally on edge because of the past ten years of the 24/7 broadcast of emotional messages.
In fact, when people are afraid or enraged enough, their left-brain thinking is shut down. All of us have experienced times of extreme emotions when we couldn’t think clearly and were just reacting. Right brain politics gets some people thinking this way much of the time, such as the January 6th rioters at the Capitol Building. This helps explain their blind rage even at police officers, who conservatives claim to respect. They weren’t thinking, they were following contagious emotions.
Having an estranged mother call her daughter a liar on national television and social media is an emotionally intense event that has almost never been seen before. As clearly a relationship issue, it targets the right brain and automatically upsets people one way (Amy Acton must be a terrible person) or the other (her mother must be a terrible person). Few people are neutral about this. It does not communicate any logical information, yet Trump and Vance strongly endorse it. This is why: It works!
Extreme Words
President Trump has always spoken in hyperbole—extreme words like “a terrible person,” “a wonderful person—one of the best,” “never before in history,” “he should be shot,” etc. He calls this “truthful hyperbole,” but it is actually a cover for sending right brain messages directly into his followers brains. Keep in mind that the left brain processes language, but the right brain processes extreme emotional words because their meaning isn’t logical, its emotional.
Some people refer to Trump as using “dog whistles” with his followers by the way he speaks so that only they get the racist or sexist or other disparaging message. Targeting the unconscious right brain seems to be how this works. By loudly saying that he is suing Alaska for it’s election results tells the right brain that something must be seriously wrong in Alaska, when nothing is logically wrong about their election.
Ironically, factchecking has no impact on right brain messages. What the right brain cares about is group survival, including what does the leader say, what does the group say. Trump has always said that true power comes from fear. His words are always extreme. There was the “stolen” election, refugees “eating cats and dogs,” the “immigrant crime wave,” “and so many more extreme words that activate the right brain’s fear, rage, and love/loyalty for the leader. Facts are irrelevant. Emotional words are what works.
Repetition in Isolation
When false or emotional information is repeated, it is likely to start feeling true. This is called the “Illusion of Truth Effect.” This is how our brains work. It is more efficient to accept repeated messages as true than it is to carefully analyze every single message you receive each day. Today’s partisan cable TV news, radio, and social media have made it possible to repeat emotional words and emotional intensity thousands of times with faces and voices, so that they come to feel absolutely true even when they aren’t true at all.
A major aspect of this in recent times is the loss of newspapers as a primary source of factual political news. One analysis of the 2016 presidential election found that there were lower newspaper subscription rates in counties where Trump won and that he did “worse overall in places where independent media could check his claims,” as cited in my book Why We Elect Narcissists and Sociopaths—And How We Can Stop.
In other words, when extreme words and emotional intensity are repeated in isolation from any other source of information, the result is strongly held but false beliefs. This is the foundation of Trumpism. Someday, when their manipulative use of right brain politics is exposed on a large scale, it will surprise a lot of his followers. They were seduced and were completely unaware of how it happened.
But now you know.
