The absurdity of Donald Trump

[slang]

Yes, he's a lot of things. That's a pretty good list there.

I believe what I would like him to do next is to declassify incriminating documents that clearly show the soft coup that Obama allegedly orchestrated in the final days of his presidency. And how ass hats like Comey and McCabe tried desperately to assist in that.

Or maybe I'm just mad as a hatter. It's possible.

[Happy Monkey]

Originally Posted by slang

I asked him something about NATO and he goes “Why do we have NATO?"

And someone who is a cold war kid I go “I like NATO”, thinking to myself.

“The Soviet Union fell in 1991. Wasn’t the point of NATO to keep them
from Invading Western Europe? But they don’t exist any more, why
do we still have them?”

They do exist and they have invaded neighboring states. Recently.

[henry quirk]

"That's a pretty good list there."

Just coverin' all the bases.

#

"declassify incriminating documents"

I'm thinkin' he's holdin' back on all the good stuff till mebbe true shit comes down the pike (i.e. 'I'm takin' all you motherfuckers down with me!').

##

"They do exist and they have invaded neighboring states. Recently."


And NATO did what exactly in response?

[Happy Monkey]

They weren't NATO members.

[Undertoad]

(which is why the states could be invaded)

[tw]

Originally Posted by Happy Monkey

They weren't NATO members.

Neither were Poland, Czechoslovakia, Austria, Libya, Greece, etc members of a defense alliance when Hitler decided to invade them. So clearly neither Britain, France, nor Russia had anything to fear.

Same people who wanted to 'wreck shit' also recommended letting Hitler have all of Europe. Using defeatist concepts that The Don also uses to promote himself. He even believes everything Putin has told him while saying American generals and intelligence agencies are not as smart as he is.

We are already seeing a recession beginning.

[henry quirk]

And if they had been, what woulda happened?

I reckon nuthin', nuthin' and more nuthin'.

##

"We are already seeing a recession beginning."

No, we're not.

[Happy Monkey]

reckon away

[henry quirk]

I do.

NATO is *worthless: it does nuthin' 'cept make 'us' responsible for (and to) all of 'them'.

To hell with that.









*just like the U.N.

[Gravdigr]

Reckon hell, it almost killed 'em.

[BigV]

Originally Posted by Undertoad

Outcome won't change things: precisely;

And it's funny: no candidate would ever suggest touching Social Security and Medicare... in the time I've watched, they remain pretty untouched... but every election season I've paid attention to, the sides work out how to suggest the other side will fuck them up. It's all about the sides!

Y'know, when it comes to examples of why Trump should not be President, we're all spoiled for choice. Literally spoiled, he's made his behavior so loud and so incessant that it's just impossible to sustain the outrage it deserves, much less keep up with all the shit this guy says and does. The fashionable term is "normalized". I'm not normalized to his ... everything, but I am fucking tired of it.

Here's a textbook example. You say,

no candidate would ever suggest touching Social Security and Medicare...

and you're well advised to say such a thing, what self-destructive idiot would ever suggest such a thing?!?!


what? We have a caller on Line One? Ok, patch him through.

Trump’s remarks came in the context of a discussion about the national debt, which has ballooned to historic levels under his presidency despite his 2016 campaign promise to eliminate it entirely. After Trump claimed that cutting the debt would be a focus of his second term, host Martha MacCallum pointed out that “if you don’t cut something in entitlements, you’ll never really deal with the debt.”

But before “you’ll never really deal with the debt” even escaped MacCallum’s lips, Trump interjected to agree with the first part of her statement — that cuts to programs like Social Security and Medicare will be necessary to get the debt under control.

“Oh, we’ll be cutting,” he said. “We’re also going to have growth like you’ve never seen before.”

Yeah, that guy.

A couple of hot takes on why this is bad and should be avoided.

1 -- It's a dumb thing to say because nobody wants their entitlements cut.

2 -- It's dumb because he opens his mouth before his brain's in gear.

3 -- I'm sick of having The White House, and god knows how many apologists tell me what Trump meant. The man really should be able to speak for himself.

4 -- Scandalously, the walk-backs, the re-interpretations, the corrections and clarifications are often 180 degrees from what Trump actually said. Listening to him trying to do it for himself awhile ago when he was *explaining* what he said about his understanding of Putin's position about election interference. First he said "why would it be?" then a minute later, and by a minute, I mean one brutal news cycle, he said "why wouldn't it be?", just exactly the opposite.

Originally Posted by Trump

“The sentence should have been, ‘I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia,’” Mr. Trump said. “Sort of a double negative.” “So,” he concluded, “you can put that in. And I think that probably clarifies things pretty good by itself.”

Riiiiiight. He probably thinks I'm as stupid as he is, or worse, that he's as smart as I am. He's wrong either way.

So, back to your point UT, what do you think about this politician pledging to cut entitlements?

[Undertoad]

It's fine. Trump doesn't parse the word "entitlements" like vox.com does; and in the context of the conversation, he doesn't parse it at all, before he's on to his answer.

Everybody who was watching understood that, too.

See, the game where Trump's words are carefully parsed for the least charitable take is a LOSING game. Here's the secret, if you want to know how Trump's supporters listen to the interview:

Stop parsing words and just listen for the emotional appeal.

I know how much you enjoy parsing, and how much the media enjoys it. You get to read vox.com articles and get your dopamine fix. The media gets their "Trump bump" of clicks and ratings. It seems like winning. But the words are not the important part. Pay attention to the emotions. The emotions of vox.com are negative, loser emotions. The emotions of Donald Trump are winner emotions.

Furthermore, you should parse a conversation like a conversation, and a joke like a joke, if you want to understand. That's the part of Trump that is immediately appealing; that's how he expects to be parsed. Old-school politicians speak slowly, carefully, measured, studied, stiff and teleprompted, facts at the ready, so that nothing they can say can be parsed incorrectly. The problem is, nobody in our everyday world talks like that. If they did, we wouldn't trust them!

[xoxoxoBruce]

Words have meaning, don't you think the leaders he talks to around the world parse what he says when he's representing the US?

He's running the country like he ran his businesses... run up a huge debt, pocket as much as possible, then walk away.

[Undertoad]

Well that's the biggest problem with the Trump Presidency - foreign policy works along a different game theory than the game theory he uses. The techniques that worked being a Manhattan real estate bro, also worked on television audiences, and on the electorate. What's needed on the world stage is significantly different, I think.

[xoxoxoBruce]

Putin needs a cold war, an enemy he can blame for any unpopular moves and shortages at home.
Also to convince as many leaders between him and the Mediterranean as possible that he is from their hood, and will always be close by to be their savior not us. He can coerce them into thinking my friend's enemy is my enemy, when Trump blusters.