But how can we know he’s ever lied? Is there any other way to receive knowledge of “facts” other than hearing words spoken by Trump?
/s
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Excellent deployment of The Flying Pig here. “Hey hey, it’s me!”
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I don’t know why this is so hard to believe. I’ve never consumed alcohol to excess or engaged in self-abuse, so why can’t we accept her word that Trump has never lied?
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So it turns out that The Donald was actually speaking the truth when he said the leadership of Puerto Rico was corrupted and lining their own pockets.
Which begs the question, if he was telling the truth about that, what else could he be telling the truth about? This throws my whole world into turmoil
trump lies about whether or not he is lying. That leads to the discussion rapidly becoming meaninglessly self referencing.
trump is a liar. end of discussion.
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Broken clock syndrome, combined with psychological projection.
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I remember a conversation from the early 70’s with an old friend, he looked at me and said “where were you when you figured out that the government lies to you?” (19 y o and just married)
I was watching TV when Nixon said"
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I think that’s being overly generous. Wildly overly generous. The opposite of weasel words isn’t utter bullshit - they’re more similar than different, really. It’s about language, as you said, that is “offending.” That is, language that is openly racist. Language that is authoritarian, blatantly partisan and bullying - willing to attack those who disagree, in ways that are wildly inappropriate for an elected official, much less president. Language that reflects back the supporters’ own baseness, rather than language that urges them to rise above it.
I remember, during the campaign when supporters would acknowledge that things Trump said weren’t true - but they didn’t see his statements as lies intended to deceive them, no, they were statements intended to “trolley the libs,” so that was just fine - great even.
It’s not about the “honesty” - as in everything else about the Trump admin, it’s about the cruelty.
Although Trump is a broken digital clock, where most of the time, what’s being displayed (if anything) isn’t even a number. Even being accidentally correct is a rare event with him (and largely when he’s talking about someone like himself, so that projection turns out to be true).
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This administration is run as an autocracy. And like autocracies, power is more about access to the leader than money per se. The suckups and sycrophants aren’t there because of the money, but pecause access to Trump is the power to make progress for their agendas.
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I’d normally agree, but Trump is more like a broken digital clock that always shows 14:88.
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I was referring to the situation of people saying they like Biff because he’s an unfiltered guy who speaks his mind (not understanding that this does not equal telling the truth).
Part of the reason they could convince themselves to believe this is that they had to listen to Bill Clinton say “it depends on what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is” and then later listen to his wife give weaselly non-explanations of what she said in a secret speech to Goldman-Sachs executives or why she never really believed in “superpredators”.
And of course because they also had to listen to lots of similar lawyerly and jargon-laden garbage from neoCons like Rumsfeld and Cheney and Rove who were afficionados of the Straussian “noble lie” (some right-wing populists, especially veterans, really regret this even though they were jingos in the early 2000s; tellingly, they still love Dubya even as they hate Poppy and Jeb).
Now certainly the factors you discuss also resulted in this situation: his “uncensored” and “non-PC” statements do reflect their bigotry and cruelty and bullying nature. However, except for a minority of gleeful sociopaths, they can’t admit that. The other factor is what gives them (and scum like this spokesperson) plausible cover to deny the root of their support for him in the context being discussed. It is at the root of their Know-Nothing anti-intellectual populism, which ends up making a gaudy multi-millionaire their supposed champion against the elites.
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Except for one, little, tiny, detail: I can delete the Nigerian e-mail and there’s nothing left afterward.
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Exactly.
Also, Alex, I’ll take “Who is Cindy Yang?” for $58,000.
trump tourism remains big business.
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Well, here’s a clue…
⊥rump: “I stand by nothing.”
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damn, jason alexander is such a good actor.
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Way back in the late 80’s Rush Limbaugh got big by willfully misrepresenting facts and figures to benefit conservative ideas. A lie of omission is still a lie. This led to a bonanza of conservative pundits writing books that used the same logic: we can prove whatever we want, just fudge the data, misquote, take shit out of context, even make stuff up completely. A big portion of the public ate it up.
This is where it’s been leading all this time.
They raged over Obama for eight years-- everything he did was evidence of tyranny, dishonesty, or incompetence, and they elect an incompetent, unintelligent liar who has no problem breaking the law to get what he wants. Of course they will lie about lying, at this point what else is there to do?
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“So you like someone who speaks their mind without worrying about offending anyone. In a couple minutes, let’s see if you still like me …” Then hit them with your unfiltered, uncensored, brutally direct opinion of them.
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Yeah, me too. You’re being highly charitable. I’m convinced it’s about the cruelty and racism. Sometimes his supporters, as you say, can’t fully admit why they like him, but saying “he speaks the truth” is for many of them simply a shorthand for “he says the racist bits out loud.” “He’s unfiltered” really means he’s openly cruel, partisan and undiplomatic (to put it mildly). Normally when asked, and people respond with the “he tells the truth”/“he’s unfiltered”/variations thereof, that’s where it gets left. But follow-up questions usually reveal what they actually mean by it.
It’s true that they may dislike normal “political” rhetoric, but that’s because, by its nature, it doesn’t allow for this kind of speech (the racism and bullying are coded and too subtle in comparison).
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Yes, but what if he is on OUR side? Seems to be the deciding factor with the right.
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