“Honest” in the same way that 10,000 monkeys penning the collected works of Shakespeare are “auteurs”… occasionally the nonstop stream of bullshit pouring out of that man’s head will align with what’s true.
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This reminds me of the observation that in the US, the far left and the far right often agree on certain facts (like that white settlers committed cultural and literal genocide) and only disagree about whether it was good or bad
What’s described here isn’t so much unusual honesty as a repeated series of Kinsley gaffes (“A gaffe is when a politician tells the truth – some obvious truth he isn’t supposed to say.”) He doesn’t know or doesn’t care about what a politician isn’t supposed to do or say (unless it bites him personally in the ass)
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Or if you’re Trump you just blame both sides
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Thanks for posting this! It’s so edgy, I can use it to carve the turkey. But as with all such keen, sharp, incisive things, I will have to be careful not to cut myself on its edge. Or burn myself on it, as it is such a hot take.
you basically see where I’m going with this
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Isn’t this what cats are supposed to do?
Unfortunately, he is also the epitome of the stereotype of The Ugly American…
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I’d go a bit further, actually. He’s also honest because for as horrifying as he is, he’s only maybe 20%-30% worse than most Ameircan presidents. The key difference is that his fascism doesn’t wear a nice suits or couch itself in grace phrases. He is the American Empire caught without its costume.
Honest might not be the word, though. ‘Unpleasantly Revealing’ might be the word.
My big wish is that America doesn’t forget itself just hating the Orange One (it’s fun, I’m sure) and assumes that once he’s gone (soon) it’ll all be made better. If things go back to usual very little will be made better but it’ll all be a hell of a lot of more photogenic. Lucky us.
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But he has no regard for whether those things are true. Characterizing his IDGAF approach as “honesty” because he occasionally happens to hit on a factual statement is like praising the marksmanship of a person who has been randomly discharging a shotgun because one of their pellets hit a bullseye.
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Continuing the theme of Trump’s accidental honesty…
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I support The Intercept and donate to them regularly. However, the article by Jon Schwarz is complete nonsense. (I started to write a stronger word than “nonsense,” but let’s be nice.) Trump has told in excess of 5,000 documented, fact-checked lies since taking office. Schwarz cited less than a dozen truths. Sure, these were big truths, but how exactly does that in any way counteract the thousands of large and small lies between which the truths were interspersed? This piece doesn’t even work as hyperbole or sarcasm – it’s just too misleading.
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It seems to me that Trump doesn’t have self control, self discipline, or morals. He just blurts our whatever fancies him at any moment. He wants to be liked, but he has chosen to be liked by the “deplorables”, and he tries to pander to their worldview whenever he speaks.
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Katie Halper interview with the author:
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I’ve mulled over the headline, and obviously, “most honest” is total nonsense. Who is more honest than who has to either be a qualitative measure of character or a quantitative measure of how often you lie, and on both Trump is the least honest.
What the article means is that Trump is the most weird president in history. We sit and wonder: You lie nearly 100% of the time, why the hell are you telling the truth on national television about firing Comey because of “the Russia thing.”
That someone who lies so consistently about things that don’t matter in the slightest, it’s super weird that he would choose not to lie on many occasions when it seems like lying would have been by far the better thing for him to do. We associate admissions against the interests of the speaker with honesty. But Trump isn’t doing that because it is important to him to tell the truth. He’s doing it as a way of sorting people who are zealously faithful to him from people who are willing to question him. That’s not opposed to honesty the way that lying is, it’s anathema to honesty.
If honestly were to look back and catch a glimpse of Trump as it was fleeing from him, it would surely spend the rest of it’s life in an institution, gibbering insanely.
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But most of the things Cory paraphrased Trump as saying are not open secrets to most Americans, especially those related to foreign policy. Most of them instead think of U.S. foreign policy as a benign, goodheated, if occasionally blundering force for world stability. And certainly not as a primarily elite-serving empire.
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I suspect part of his appeal to the Right is that many of them do in reality know the emperor has no clothes, but when anyone they perceive as liberal pointed it out to them, they denounced the truth as anti-Americanism. In contrast, because he embraces all of their turpitude, when Toadstool points it out they take it as lease that they no longer have to pretend to care about maintaining the facade that the emperor is elegantly dressed.
Willful self-delusion that the emperor is clothed seems to be more common among the center of the American political spectrum. Maybe Cory’s hoping that will change with a politician who doesn’t bother maintaining certain fictions and he might be correct, but I’m skeptical.
It could be a silver lining, but I’m wary of sharing Jon Schwarz’s thankfulness for it given the cloud to which it’s attached. It’s possible I’m being overly cautious. Sometimes I feel like people treat Trump as a useful fulcrum the way some Xtian Eschatologists treat the anti-Christ as a necessary evil. That just doesn’t seem like a good idea to me.
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The first US president to admit that going into Iraq was a big mistake?
@doctorow, did you just lose track of what it was you were saying? Because that’s preposterous.
Then again, sometimes it is nice when a horrible synopsis perfectly encapsulates the fault in the argument for us.
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You are giving him credit for “honesty” about things that are manifestly obvious to anyone who bothers to look. These lies he doesnt bother to participate in, are typically refered to as, “tact”. So if tact is the opposite of honesty, sure. He is certainly the least tactful president ever. As for truthfully revealing things that are in the public’s best interest, it can be argued that this is not a presidents job. (Just ask Ralph Nader or Bernie Sanders)
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Yes. Just wish his truth telling were more reliable. No one should be forced to research or guess.
If he would just chase his family out, start talking and cutting deals with Democrats - things might get done.
Would be wonderful if both the Dem and Republican parties could be split - leaving practical people with the clear majority. He could do it - if he’d just quite lying and pissing normal people off.
We need a good housecleaning in DC. Color me unimpressed by two years of twitter 
Shut up and DO something! Even if it’s a televised deathmatch between far left and right 
He’s doing exactly whta he came to DC to do - profit himself and his family. Period. He doesn’t give a shit about the corruption in DC, he just wants to profit off of it.
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