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Bad news: Donald Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to the District of Columbia, a stunt that may soon be replicated in Chicago and other cities , has generated one of the most harrowing, full-blown cases of Strategist Brain that this writer has ever seen.

In a nutshell, Strategist Brain is the misapplication of the kind of data that is gathered by people who create campaign advertising. Democratic operatives and elected officials who suffer from terminal manifestations of the disease take microtested information about which sound bites appeal marginally more than other sound bites to undecided voters—data that can be useful in its own limited context

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