The numbers on his State of The Union Address won’t be anything like the numbers he will get for the crass and insulting things he will say over the next couple of weeks. Those remarks will be so unhinged, vile, and ill-informed that we’ll immediately forget that there even was a State of the Union Address.
Damn, proclaiming prophecies about the president has never been so easy!
One more comment, another topic. I was powerfully struck by the comments Israeli journalist Larry Derfner made in his new book, “No Country for Jewish Liberals” (about his slow loss of faith in his country’s policies over the decades) on the topic of Benjamin Netanyahu, when BN told Derfner that “you understand my vision better than any other Israeli journalist”, after just 90 minutes of acquaintance, most of it Netanyahu answering interview questions, never read anything Derfer had written:
“What sort of person tells really bad lies? A stupid person…one thing Netanyahu definitely isn’t. … [or] … one who thinks the person he is lying to is stupid … enough to believe him. I don’t think I gave Netanyahu any reason to believe [that]. … much later, when Netanyahu’s insincerity became as visible and audible as Nixon’s had been, when his reputation as a habitual teller of whoppers was cemented, that I understood why he’d tried to con me with such patent hogwash about my understanding of his vision. It was, I concluded, because he assumes that people in general are stupid - that until proven different, everyone is a gullible simpleton, and he can tell them anything he wants and get away with it.”
Since it’s a 2016 book, I’m surprised that Derfner didn’t throw in a Trump comment. But Trumps victory was probably not predictable at time of writing.
Pathological
But it’s true! “History” only started once dɯnɹ┴ was in office. He definitely has the highest SOTU viewer numbers from the last year. Also, his followers aren’t known for their fact-checking abilities.
Even that’s probably not true because, apparently, mostly it was watched by dɯnɹ┴ fans. (Which caused some weird approval ratings among those who watched it.) Hearing him or seeing his face increasingly makes a large number of Americans nauseous.
I feel I’m not engaging in unfair hyperbole with that correction. Even on the rare occasion when he accepts correct information, it’s for the wrong reasons.
I think it’s true - his life (albeit along with his sociopathy) have led him to not just be a liar, but to have a limited grasp, at best, of the idea of objective reality.
Yeah, there are a bunch of variations, probably going back several thousand years.
Man, I cannot STAND listening to that idiot. Watching him is even worse. I just never put myself through it.
The phrase “You make me sick!” couldn’t be more true in his case.
Now THAT’S an idea for an alternative history setting for a novel…
I figured that was just the pathological part of the lying…
“Why would he lie…”
May I draw your attention to a well-known and very successful propaganda strategy called “The Big Lie”?
Far too many people don’t fact check anything any more and far too many will simply assume there was no reason to lie about it therefore it’s probably true.
coupled with, Force Them to Look Petty by Makimg Them Fact Check Everything
The party of personal responsibility hates reality so much because they know if they were to accept the world as it is, they’d have to be responsible for the horrific and wanton destruction they keep causing.
I guess he must not have said anything important. Unsurprising really.
There’s an even simpler answer: it’s a rhetorical device.
As soon as you say it, you can immediately divide listeners into two camps: those who both care about whether it’s true and are skeptical that it is, and those who either don’t know or don’t care.
For the latter, it’s an effective rhetorical device. They hear it, accept it – or at least accept it doesn’t matter enough to fact-check – and move on with their lives. (Sort of like grade school, when you had those short-essay tests about a topic you didn’t see until the test. When I was in school, teachers would advise you to just make up statistics to demonstrate that you could use them effectively if you had the information. Nobody checked those, because they were all lies, and the goal was to prove you knew how to structure an essay, not that your argument was actually correct.)
For the former camp, the people who care enough to check, it’s easy to disprove. Those are probably also the people who already don’t like him. He never had their support. With a 5-second lie and zero-effort, he made himself sound a bit better to people who weren’t in a mood to fight him. The penalty is that he’s not trusted by people who already knew not to trust him, which is no real penalty. What’s it going to do, damage his previously spotless credibility? He’s a known liar, so he may as well lie constantly.
You’re all misinterpreting him. When he says 45.6 million is the highest number in history, I think he means that’s as high as numbers go. It’s literally the highest number there is.
They just don’t make higher numbers.
Obsessive compulsive
Why would Trump say it, knowing it will immediately be checked?
It’s a demonstration of power. Think of a schoolyard bully that takes a child’s lunchbox. He then holds the lunchbox in front of him saying “I don’t have your lunchbox. This is my lunchbox!”
The bullies todies would join in the fun and tease the child “Yeah wimp. Why did you forget your lunchbox?”
Lying to everyone’s face is the whole point. The buly doesn’t event want the lunchbox.
Sure, if by “the Obama years” you mean “10 seconds prior to now.”
+1 for that
Well, not anymore. Under his presidency America is going to start making much bigger numbers again.
