Brian L. Ott

Opinion contributor

In the late 1800s, Georges Seurat and Paul Signac developed an innovative painting technique that came to be known as pointillism. The technique involves placing thousands of individual dots of color on a canvas, which when viewed from a distance, form a cohesive image. When viewed up close, however, all one can see is individual, brightly colored dots of paint.

Trump’s rhetoric is like a pointillist painting. Each tweet (along with the occasional TV sound bite) is an individual, brightly colored dot of paint. Unfortunately, the dots themselves are so colorful (read: an affront to the rule of law and/or basic human decency), so numerous, and so frequent that it is often difficult to discern larger patterns and to make out the full picture, which paints the destruction of democracy by attacking our most cherished and fundamental norms, principles, and institutions.

I am acutely aware of the fact that the preceding sentence ‘sounds’ alarmist and hyperbolic. This, I have found, is the chief challenge in writing about Trump’s rhetoric ... commentary about Trump’s discourse, much like a Trump tweet itself, often sounds like an exaggeration. But it only sounds like an exaggeration because of the way Trump packages his rhetoric, namely in the form of 280-character dabs of paint.

Trump's tweets obscure the big picture

Because Trump tweets and speaks in micro-messages, it is easy for his defenders to dismiss their significance (no matter how tortured those defenses may be; remember “alternative facts”), not to mention exceedingly difficult to grasp the full weight of their collective destructive power.

The president’s tweets are structured as a “feed,” so one can only see a handful of them at a time on the screen. Moreover, his most destructive tweets are picked up in the media and amplified many times over, which distracts from his previous tweets. In other words, the very form of the messaging (Twitter plus the rapid and continuously shifting news cycle) makes it exceedingly difficult to achieve the perspective needed to see the larger picture. Increasingly, there are voices pointing to this bigger picture, but those warnings are themselves often drowned out by the latest news cycle.

Trump tries to break the rules... again:Trump calls foreign intelligence 'oppo research.' I call it illegal, and I should know.

The intense news focus this month on Trump’s comments about accepting aid from a hostile foreign power to win an election, while truly disturbing, distracts from his truly disturbing discourse about his political opponents, which distracts from his truly disturbing discourse about authoritarians like Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-un, which distracts from his truly disturbing discourse about white nationalists, which distracts from his truly disturbing discourse about the mainstream news media, which distracts from his truly disturbing discourse about our intelligence agencies, which distracts from his truly disturbing discourse about immigration.

And lest one forget, all of this rhetoric has real, material consequences. His immigration language, for example, led to inhumane policies and practices that include separating children from their parents, locking children up in cage-like conditions, and in a few cases even death.

But, and I can’t believe I’m writing this sentence, it’s easy to forget about the migrant children who have died in U.S. custody because the president admitted on national television his willingness to accept foreign intelligence to win an election.

Trump's treason claim:It comes as leaks show Washington is desperate — about him

Sadly, two weeks from now we won’t be talking about the president’s open admission of his willingness to commit crimes to be re-elected just like we’re not talking now about deceased immigrant children because he will have tweeted or said something equally horrific.

America after Trump will be unrecognizable

That bears repeating: Two weeks from now, we likely won’t be talking about the president’s revelation that he’s willing to break the law or his racist discourse on immigration, which has led to the deaths of migrant children in U.S. custody, because he will have tweeted or said something equally offensive, cruel, and undemocratic.

Almost immediately, in fact, the president’s open admission of his willingness to commit crimes to be reelected was driven out of the public view as the news cycle transitioned to new rhetorical horrors (accusing The New York Times of treason, announcing the mass deportation of “millions of illegal aliens”) and, on Thursday, tweeting that "Iran made a very big mistake!"

This is the power and extraordinary danger of Trump’s rhetoric. While it may look like little more than dabs of paint, coming as it does in colorful microbursts on Twitter and TV, it is more accurately described as precision-guided bombs, bombs that are dropped on American norms, principles, and institutions week after week. But we never see the full extent of the destruction wrought by these rhetorical bombs because we don’t see them as bombs at all, and we certainly don’t see them all at once.

By the time that we can see the full picture of the U.S. that Trump has created, I fear that it will be nearly unrecognizable to us.

Brian L. Ott, a professor of communication studies and director of the TTU Press at Texas Tech University, is co-author ofThe Twitter Presidency: Donald J. Trump and the Politics of White Rage.