No disagreement from me. The event was stupid. Just the accusation of holding the Bible incorrectly, that’s the only part that people got wrong.
I should also mention, there was a public event from a couple of years ago and in some photos people thought that Trump had his pants on backwards. (I mean, really, you have nothing better to do than to zoom in on photos of Trump to examine his crotch?!) But it was just the lighting, and in other photos taken from a different angle you could tell they were on correctly (the fly was visible, etc.). For some reason, that rumor seemed to have popped up again recently, about the same photos. Even my wife mentioned it a couple of days ago.
Trump has done hundreds of things in public worthy of ridicule in his life, especially during his presidency and in the years afterward. So it’s funny when people try to manufacture things he didn’t actually do, and spread them as rumors.
But is it people ‘manufacturing’ things and spreading them as rumors intentionally, or people honestly thinking trump did a dumb thing, because it’s so easy to believe it, and occasionally getting it wrong?
It seems to me that BS rumors and misinformation intentionally spread by the left against the right is negligible compared to the reverse.
The reason why people honestly think he did it is because they are lazy and don’t spend any amount of time checking it. That’s no different than someone getting some BS info on social media about Hunter Biden murdering a hooker in Brazil and then spreading it around because they think it’s definitely something he would have done.
That is absolutely true and should go without saying. And one big difference is that the folks on the right usually have to make up things far more than folks on the left, because that side of the political aisle tends to draw such fools.
I feel the same way when people quote the “man, woman, camera, TV…” thing. He took an assessment where he had to remember five words. Later, he was describing the test and wanted to give examples. It wasn’t important what the words were in the original test, so he just chose words that described things that were around him at the moment.
I still don’t like Trump, and find him to be a terrible person and totally unqualified to be president. I just find that particular incident, and Trump’s choice of words, to be largely overblown.
I agree the whole thing was stupid, but the clearing of Lafayette Square was violent and awful and that is the only thing I really think about when I think back on that day. I still think about the person with the camera who got pounded by one of those goons. I would love it if that person received justice.
That’s part of it though. It would have been somewhat impressive if he remembered the actual words, but he made it seem like he couldn’t even come up with 5 random objects without looking around the room.
I definitely get your point, and completely agree, that it’s wrong to spread a rumor around because you think it sounds true without bothering to fact-check it first. But I don’t think that’s quite as egregious as intentionally trying to “manufacture things he didn’t actually do, and spread them as rumors”. Maybe you didn’t mean it was intentional though, just that the fact it happens due to lazy fact-checking is bad enough.
They didn’t spread them by accident though. Spreading it is intentional. I don’t give someone a pass for that. And in some of these cases I’m sure that people look at it, say “it could be true”, and then assert that it definitely is, because they think it’s funny or would like to think it is. It’s not as bad as knowing for certain what you’re saying is false and it being 100% a hoax, but it’s not okay either.
I dislike when folks spread disinformation. That’s one reason why I was attracted to the Straight Dope in the first place.
Yeah, you’re right. I must admit that, try as I might not to, I’ve been guilty of it too at times, as recently as yesterday in this very thread-- when the upside-down bible thing was first mentioned in the thread yesterday I responded with a joke about it.
It’s hard for people to be truly random. There are thousands of words; I can’t just roll a d10000 in my head and look up which word that is. I might very well do just what Trump did; “pencil, book, plate, guitar, shoe” (I’m not much of a housekeeper).
My take was that it wasn’t the fact of the 5 random example words he gave that people were ridiculing, it was the fact that he used his passing a simple dementia screening test as evidence of his supposed super-duper sharp intellect.
“And you go, ‘person, woman, man, camera, TV.’ They say, ‘That’s amazing. How did you do that?’ ‘I do it because I have like a good memory? Because I’m cognitively there.’”
Riiight…‘they’, the doctors presumably, said 'That’s amazing. How did you do that?’. With tears in their eyes while they said it, I’m sure.
As a geek, I have this image running through my mind. (link because our discourse issues, but it’s a Classic Battlestar Galactica moment that’s perfect).
By Trump’s standards, that’s hardly bragging. Of the arrogant, conceited things he’s said, that’s probably not even in the top 1,000. There are so many slam-dunk condemnations of Trump that I don’t understand why people remember “person, woman, man, camera, TV” and bring it up more than three years later.
