A while back I described the second-hand information handed down from the Never Trump Ouija Board to us by our betters among the compliant rationalizers of the Soft Center Right this way:

…someday I would like to get a peek at the Never Trump Ouija Board that instills so much cocksurety into all of the mind-reading proclamations that are so generously provided to us in that familiar condescending tone.

Along with that I provided the following medley of Ricochet Member Feed comments from January of 2024 as some prime examples of the phenomenon:

This isn’t an ad for Joe Biden. Grandpa Badfinger doesn’t even have to be on the ticket. Every single Democrat – for the House and for the Senate – is going to make this election a referendum on Donald Trump.

…your insistence in renominating Donald Trump has assured that you will fight this battle on the terrain of the enemy’s choosing.

You want power but you don’t want to earn the power through the system bequeathed to you as an American. You want to invest it one man with 4,000 lawsuits, 2 impeachments and 92 indictments shackled to his ankles. And you can think that it’s bull, and you can think that your fellow Americans are stupid for caring about it. Good luck with that. It’s a bold strategy, Cotton. Hope it works out for you.

He can’t win, and your loyalty has blinded you. I’m about to be a third time voter for him, but the writing is on the wall, plain as day.

They want to face Trump, because they know they can beat him. They already have. And they know felony convictions will hurt him in the general…Republicans marched right into the meat grinder on this one.

I bring all of this up again because of a common undertone with a wonderful essay that Instapundit directed me to earlier this week that began this way:

Of Trumpets and Trump – An easy, sure-fire technique to make your correspondence irrelevant, ignored, and irritating

Allow me to offer an Iron Law of Oratory:

“You may stand in the most inspiring edifice on earth, delivering the most soaring and poetic eulogy imaginable, for the most beloved figure of our era—but should you fart audibly during your oration, that low-register, low-altitude trumpet blast will be the only thing mourners recall of the entire event.”

An analogous law holds that if a trumpeter performs Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the Common Man” flawlessly, save for one off-key BLAAAT!!!, it is the errant BLAAAT!!! that will linger years later in the listeners’ memories.

This brings us to an equivalent Iron Law of Correspondence:

“You may craft the most literary email possible, waxing lyrical on art, music, literature, aviation, astronomy, botany, quantum physics, artificial intelligence, and the achievements of your children—but should you insert a single fleeting, gratuitous mention of Donald Trump, that reference will be the only thing your reader will recall of your missive.”

We shall label these equivalent phenomena “Trumpet Blasts” and “Trump-et Blasts.” (ADDENDUM: I must note that one especially clever reader suggests that “Musk-et Blasts” are now a parallel phenomenon.)

Now properly introduced, the money quote:

Trump-et Blasts are never offered as hypotheses, opinions, or topics for discussion. Rather, they are always stated as Euclidean postulates—self-evident Truths that we surely agree upon and which warrant no discussion.

That seems to line up rather well with the “condescending cocksurety” delivery mode of “the mind-reading proclamations” about Trump mentioned above. From my experience, it is this somewhat harsher strain of the same phenomenon that appears in that rather unique form of “correspondence” that occurs in on-line community comment section. You would be surprised at how much both the “condescending” and the “cocksurety” aspects of that get amplified among those with even the tiniest bit of editorial, moderation, or other ill-defined power in such arenas. But that is a story for another day.

Go read Of Trumpets and Trump in its entirety over at Bastiat’s Window.