Analysis Of White House Red Scare By Maureen Dowd

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Précis Response In the article "White House Red Scare" (7 January 2017), columnist Maureen Dowd affirms her current political opinion that the United States government is overridden with anxiety and bewilderment due to the callous and perhaps "malleable" newly elected president, Donald Trump. Dowd justifies her stance of the cumbersome issue by the use of anecdotes (her own personal encounters with Donald Trump), past incidences of Trump's rapid stance-changes (being skeptical of the Russian leader Gorbachev, until Gorbachev's imposter glorified Trump Tower), as well as quotes from the reactions of various senators and congressional members. In order to persuade with this opinionated standpoint, Maureen uses an enthymeme--the election's …show more content…

Her choice to persuade with primarily pathos is clever, as this year has been fueled tremendously by provocative fervor. Now that I have veered away from sole pathos from my impulsive viewpoint, I would more likely trust unbiased reports, or at least a columnist who can somehow find the "middle-ground," as Jay Heinrichs, author of Thank You For Arguing, puts it. From Heinrichs, I also detected some fallacies within Maureen's argument; the fact that it appeals to the [left-winged] popularity, and the instance of the "fallacy of antecedent," where Dowd uses her past interview with Trump, one conducted back in 1987, to label the president as "gullible" and "malleable," quickly assuming that Donald Trump will behave about the exact same thirty years later (141). However, I can clearly see how persuasive and effective her tactics can be on her target audience; Liberals tend to trust pathos much more than logos, which is vice versa for the opposing party. These short, permissive sentences could temporarily fire me up albeit my position: "The capital has never been more anxious about its own government . . .This guy is really going to be president" (Dowd, Maureen). It is always effective to make the reader or listener feel