Trump has the odd impression that if he just says things many times, they will become true. Not that people will believe them because they have been repeated often, but that they will actually start somehow being true. And yet as has been (erroneously) ascribed to Lincoln: You can fool all the people some of the time, you can fool some of the people all of the time, but you can not fool all the people all the time.
How many times does Trump get to say that China is paying the tariffs against products when that isn't how tariffs work? (They also haven't done anything to improve the trade deficit, which has only widened.) He lied about Obama wanting to meet with Kim Jong Un. He continues to use a weird, fake "2 million dead" number about COVID-19 deaths to congratulate himself on "saving" people from a hypothetical worst case scenario, instead of properly comparing his response to all the other countries actually existing right now. Trump lied an awful lot during this debate, and any kudos people want to give him for lying with a better "tone" are actually, well, stupid.
Words mean things and facts matter, and Trump is in an entirely different reality from the country he's pretending to be president of. And when the Fox News President goes off on windmill cancer or spouts an unproven conspiracy theory about Hunter Biden, he doesn't make sense to people unfamiliar with that unique alternate fact universe.
I think partially the sense some people got that his performance was not that bad is a) some people do speak fluent RW media wharrrrgarble and for them, his talking points, if not strictly factual, hit the right "notes" and b) Trump did manage to do something with his stunt earlier today in posting his "60 Minutes' interview with Leslie Stahl: he lowered expectations. All he had to do was seem less cantankerous and whiny, more inclined to answer "hard questions", and he came out looking like he was on his best behavior! He even complimented Kristen Welker! (Who did do a fine job.) Wasn't Donny a good boy!
But he still would have had to do better than...this, for it to have actually helped him any in the election. And I hope when "60 Minutes" does go to air the very awkward interview, the give him a good fact-checking.
2 comments:
I wish people would leave Abraham Lincoln and let him rest in peace. I do wonder what he would say. But that was a different time. Nowadays they just use him for whatever thing.
Probably he would give us some mushmouth about loving our neighbors and family and country. Probably he was a socialist.
There is some evidence that Lincoln was reading Karl Marx. But just like people trying to force MLK's words into some current frame, it's awkward when Lincoln is brought up because the people doing it don't even care what the man actually would have thought--they just want the glamour of using a famous name. It's like abuse of the dead.
Post a Comment