Reader question:

Please explain “hot button” in this description of Donald Trump’s campaign style, “his insult-flavored style of infotainment politics and his hot-button remarks about immigrants.”

My comments:

Trump’s hot-button remarks about immigrants?

That means what Donald Trump, the Republican candidate for President of the United States, says about immigrants makes people angry.

He said, among other incendiary remarks about different people, that immigrants from Mexico are criminals – “They’re rapists”, etc.

Those are the type of remarks that are not true. Cannot be true. Those are remarks anyone with decency just doesn’t make – certainly not in public. Certainly, those are remarks that someone who wants to be President doesn’t normally make.

But then Trump is not just another normal candidate. He’s rich (“very rich”, as he reminds his supporters every so often) and he’s famous and he doesn’t have a large vocabulary. And it sometimes feels like this man (whose language, to use a cliché, makes a sailor blush) is in the race for the White House just to be more on television (that’s why they say his is a style of infotainment, a combination of politics and entertainment).

Anyways, what we will focus on is the term “hot button” as an adjective.

“Hot button” is literally the red knob we see on some electric water boilers. That’s the red button and there’s, usually, a green button. The green button is the control for cold water. You hit it and cold water flows out. You push the red button, or hot button then hot water streams out.

If the water is boiling hot and you hit the hot button inadvertently, you may get yourself burned.

Hence as a metaphor, when people talk about things like “hot button issues” in current politics, they mean issues that are emotionally charged, that make people angry and riled up.

Gun control, for example, is such a hot button issue in America that if someone talks about banning it on TV, it is not hard to imagine that some gun loving farmer in the countryside may shoot his rifle into the sky by way of showing his displeasure – and position.

Or something like that.

Hot button issues, in short, are not mundane issues that taste bland and blasé, things that don’t arouse any emotion in people. When, for example, another politician gets up and talks about the American Dream, people shrug their shoulders. It’s too vague and general in concept and, what’s worse, they’ve heard it before.

If, on the other hand, someone talks about banning abortion, we’re certain that many women will get upset.

Likewise, if someone talks about gay rights or banning Muslims (more than a billion of them worldwide) from entering the United States, people get touchy. They get hot in the face. Blood rushes to the head. Tempers flare.

All right, here are media examples of hot buttons, touchy and divisive current-affairs topics that people feel strongly about:

1. The U.S. Supreme Court term that begins Monday brings a return of hot-button issues that have divided the justices along ideological lines, including the proper place for prayer in government settings, the latitude states should have in restricting access to abortion, and the influence of big money in politics.

“This is the year of the sequel,” says Kannon Shanmugam, a Washington, D.C., lawyer who argues before the court.

For the first time in 30 years, the Supreme Court will decide whether starting government meetings with a prayer violates the Constitution when the message is almost exclusively Christian.

Two women, one Jewish and the other atheist, filed a lawsuit claiming that the practice of the Town Board of Greece, N.Y., to start its meetings with a Christian prayer, amounted to government endorsement of a single faith.

“I don’t think you should have to endure religious indoctrination in order to participate in your own town government,” says Linda Stephens, one of the challengers.

But Town Supervisor John Auberger says the practice has long been upheld by the courts. “We have a rich tradition, back to our founding fathers, of opening legislative meetings with a prayer.”

- Supreme Court returns to hot-button issues in ‘year of the sequel’, NBCNews.com, October 6, 2013.

2. President Barack Obama will head to Silicon Valley on Friday to a summit aimed at connecting about 1,200 entrepreneurs from 170 countries with the biggest and brightest players in the U.S. tech sector and venture capital community.

Hot-button political issues that the White House and tech sector normally grapple with, such as the use of social media by extremists, the desire by law enforcement for a way around encryption, and cyber security, will not be on the agenda.

Obama is using the summit - the seventh in a series which have reached a total of 17,000 people mainly in Muslim-majority countries around the world - to help bolster his foreign policy legacy as his time in offices draws closer to the end on Jan. 20, 2017.

- In Silicon Valley, Obama to Keep Hot-Button Tech Issues off Agenda, Reuters, June 23, 2016.

3. Despite the frequent occurrence of touchy subjects in the medical practice, ethical guidelines rarely dictate what routes docs should take when such sensitive stuff comes up. Preparation for the tough questions is often the best protection. Consider how you’d handle it if these taboo topics came up in your office.

Politics

With the recent Supreme Court ruling on healthcare reform still making headlines and presidential election campaigns in full swing, it may be hard to avoid the presence of political talk in your office. Nonetheless, it serves you well to keep it to a minimum.

In a recent CareerBuilder survey, 36 percent of workers said that they discuss politics at work, and 23 percent of that group said such discussion turned heated or into a fight – the last thing you want patients seeing in your practice.

You’re legally allowed to ban politically charged employee conversation. That may be too restrictive a policy to implement preemptively, but should hot-button talk get out of hand you can nip it in the bud simply by changing your office rules. You’re more limited, however, when it comes to patient discussion. What to do when a patient puts your politics on the spot?

Directness and common sense should guide your dialogue. An interested question asking your opinion on healthcare reform may be worthy of a chat; since it so directly impacts your profession, your thoughts on the ACA are akin to shop talk. But if you sense that a patient is bringing up election talk or other partisan issues in a way that’s argumentative or hostile, cut it off. Tell your patient that aggressive political debates are bad for his health and inappropriate for the healthcare setting.

- Politics, Religion & Probing Questions: How To Handle The ‘Touchy Subjects’, CareCloud.com, October 23, 2016.

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About the author:

Zhang Xin is Trainer at chinadaily.com.cn. He has been with China Daily since 1988, when he graduated from Beijing Foreign Studies University. Write him at: zhangxin@chinadaily.com.cn, or raise a question for potential use in a future column.

（作者：張欣 編輯：丹妮）