Almost every day, Trump comes out with another embarrassment. His Tweets. The porn star scandal. Need I go on?
And then there are those “leaks”. They are even more embarrassing. Bob Woodward of Woodward and Bernstein fame wrote a book. So did another.
The allegations made in these books, op-ed’s and so forth are shocking and scandalous. They say the guy is about to start World War III, but for the restraining influence of aids around him. His staff is thinking of invoking the 25th amendment to remove him from office, because he is unfit. The story goes on and on.
These things would be shocking if true. But are they?
Aids almost immediately deny the veracity of these claims. Ironically even the disgruntled ones do.
My question is simply, Could these leaks be no accident? They may all some day be proven to be false. Is that no accident? I mean, could someone in his inner circle be manufacturing them, in an attempt to protect his reputation by discrediting the media?
They do supposedly come from an elite inside source. But as I said, they are unproven, and almost always promptly denied.
Could I be right about this? And what are the implications for things like national security and Trump’s reëlection if I am?
What exactly would be the benefit of deliberately looking like a buffoon with all the self-control, attention span and statesmanship of a particularly annoying 5 year old ?
Trump’s Prsidency is almost an open book. He proudly puts his foibles on display. Cohen has sworn under oath to Trump’s criminal involvement in the porn star scandal. Do you think Cohen might be lying?
You can set Google to only show articles about Trump from before 2016, when no news source gave a fig about his political ideas and he was still voting Democrat and contributing to Hillary, and you can read his legal depositions from his many legal suits.
It’s very obvious, reading his depositions, that he’s stupid.
Ben Sasse (R) gave a radio interview where he talked about the anonymous op-ed and his take was (to paraphrase), “This is news? Everyone already knew this.”
There are two basic reasons why people think that Trump is anything other than - and I genuinely don’t mean this in the sense of an insult, just as accurate a description I can give from reading his own description of himself and his lifestyle from his legal depositions - an idiot that has been babied and leached off by an entourage for so long that he’s basically forgotten what reality is or how to navigate it.
His financial success.
The belief that everything negative written about him is false.
But as far as #1 goes, I can fairly well guarantee you that he’s in massive debt.
For example, here is him claiming to be completely solvent and off the hook from any business failure:
On the day that he was filming that segment, someone called a lawyer representing people who Trump owed **$1.25 billion** to, and said (compositing the police and FBI reports):
Presumably one doesn’t commit Overt Extortion because he feels free and off the hook.
Trump made similar claims earlier about his casinos, but yet his dad had to bail him out from completely wiping out 12 years earlier by illegally sneaking him $3.5m:
One suggests that your average successful business isn’t being bailed out by his father at age 45, nor threatening lawyers at age 58 because of their keen business skills. It is true that a wise businessman doesn’t invest his own money and skips town when things look scary, without having taken on any personal risk. Trump has clearly failed to do so, despite saying otherwise.
Trump would tell us that he refuses to pay bills that he owes because that particular contractor did shoddy work and he’s man enough to tell them to get lost and fight it out in court.
Well his personal lawyer, who knows all about his exploits in self-dealing, has flipped on him and is currently ratting him out just as vigorously as his lungs will squeak out the words. And the cause of that seems to be because the Trump Foundation stopped covering his legal costs.
It’s really important that the Trump Foundation protect this guy and keep him from flipping on them. And yet…just halfway through him being squeezed by the Feds, the Trumps decide, “Nah, let’s stop sending money over.”
This is a guy who swore to take a bullet for Trump, who dealt with all his most secret and private affairs for something like a decade. This isn’t a contractor that did shoddy work. So why did they stop paying?
I would posit: For the same reason they don’t pay most of their other bills. They don’t have any money.
He is not a success, and all of these links are real.
“Of all kinds of credulity, the most obstinate and wonderful is that of political zealots; of men, who being numbered, they know not how or why, in any of the parties that divide a state, resign the use of their own eyes and ears, and resolve to believe nothing that does not favor those whom they profess to follow.”
– Samuel Johnson, Idler#10 (June 17, 1758)
Anybody who doesn’t know by now what kind of person Trump is - from his on words and actions - is seriously deluding himself. Unfortunately, there are plenty of people who are seriously deluding themselves.
And it’s pretty naive to believe the denials of people around Trump. What else can they possibly say or do?
Most of his scandals have, as their primary source, things that Trump himself said or did on live cameras. The only person who could have manufactured them is Trump himself, and then that’s a scandal in itself.
Seems real to me. Compare to Benghazi: 7 congressional investigations, never a charge filed. That, friends, is a fake scandal.
With Trump, it seems the people closest to him keep pleading guilty and testifying against him. Or they are not guilty and write a book or go on TV to say what an idiot he is. How does one fake all of that? Are they all actors? Including the former head of the FBI, former CEO of Exxon, lots of high credibility, high responsibility people? No way.
The only use for it all I can think of is as a distraction. Like chaff the Navy fires to confuse incoming missiles. Hopefully someone will post a video of that to illustrate.
The only way I would buy into this is if Pence is involved. Since he can be seen as a “safer” alternative to Mr Trump, a conspiracy to “set the President up” for impeachment, leaving him in a very secure position to continue far right agendas, would make more sense. Even with Democratic control of Congress, Pence could use the various departments to continue to dismantle regulations
I do not believe this is happening, but I fear the President’s behavior my lead to it without outside assistance.
So he’s either sending deliberately stupid tweets, or letting someone do it? And someone is purposefully leaking false information to make Trump look stupid? And this is all done to protect his reputation? I don’t understand how this is even supposed to work.
But how did Shakespeare ever manage to predict Trump? :)
“A most notable coward, an infinite and endless liar, an hourly promise breaker, the owner of no one good quality.” - All’s Well That Ends Well, Act 3, Scene 6
“Thou sodden-witted lord! Thou hast no more brain than I have in mine elbows” - Troilus and Cressida - Act II, Scene i.
“Thou clay-brained guts, thou knotty-pated fool, thou whoreson, obscene, greasy tallow-catch!” - Henry IV Part 1, Act 2, Scene 4
“He has not so much brain as ear-wax.” - Troilus and Cressida Act 5, Scene 1
“There’s no more faith in thee than in a stewed prune.” - Henry IV Part 1, Act 3, Scene 3
“Your abilities are too infant-like for doing much alone.” - Coriolanus, Act 2, Scene 1
“More of your conversation would infect my brain.” - The Comedy of Errors, Act 2, Scene 1
“Away, you three-inch fool!” - The Taming of the Shrew - Act III, Scene iii.
That’s just proof of how clever he is! Trump is playing chess in dimensions uncountable and beyond human comprehension. His logic transcends space and time. He is, among gods, a being from a higher eternal plane whose eminence is expressed in our reality as a slightly puffy orange glow. His scheme is so powerful even Dr. Steven Strange couldn’t foresee it, and his powers so vast that the God of Thunder himself could not hold it back.
Or he is just the bloviating ignoramus that he gives every impression of being to anyone not under the sway of believing all things labeled “Conservative” are good, even if they are not by any measure actually correponding with the supposed ideals and values of that movement. It is left up to an exercise for the reader to determine which is most applicable.
The Bard saw deeply into the weaknesses of human nature. Trump is just the nadir of that, hence why all criticisms apply.
If this administration is doing this, it should know better. It violates a basic principle they know well and have frequently used; a big lie takes on a life of its own.
If you tell a lie and keep repeating it, people will begin to believe it just because they’ve heard it so many times. And once they’ve committing to believing something, many people will dismiss evidence to the contrary and continue to believe what they already believe.
So suppose the Trump administration had a secret master plan to discredit the media by spreading stories of how disorganized and incompetent they are, going all the way up to Trump himself. And then after they lured the media into reporting this story, they would reveal the truth; that these stories were all lies and the media fell for it. The media would be discredited and the Trump administration could go on to do whatever it wanted without having to worry about media oversight.
That’s the theory anyway. The reality is that if the Trump administration did create a false impression of how bad they are and convinced the public it was true, then the big reveal wouldn’t work. They would have their ta-da moment and reveal that it had all been lies - and most people would ignore them and continue to believe the supposedly discredited reports.
Trump has proven he is dangerously incompetent since long before he was president.
The idea that all these leaks and insider stories verifying that he is dangerously incompetent are all just part of an elaborate conspiracy are very unlikely, and would require a good deal of evidence to justify.
Sure, all of this is fake. From kids in internment camps to trade tariffs to telling boy scouts about sex yachts, it’s all fake. Goldman-Sachs is doing it to keep the American electorate distracted enough to prevent them from flying into a rage over policies Goldman-Sachs has arranged for the benefit of Goldman Sachs. This is something I am told. Everything is part of the plan. Why was a clown like Pruitt put in charge of the EPA? Part of the plan. Okay, so why was he then fired? Part of the plan. A person has wondered aloud to me how much Goldman-Sachs is paying Paul Manafort to take the fall to keep Goldman-Sachs executives out of the headlines and from hanging from lamp posts. To at least one person, all that is easier to believe than that the American public would put someone like Trump in power and continue to allow him and the Republicans enabling him to remain there.
What possible reason could the republicans have to pretend to support things like internment camps for children or mining in the Grand Canyon? I’m no politician, but it seems to me the secret to holding onto power in an authoritarian state - which is what Republicans are crafting no matter what the pollyannas say - is to keep the serfs fat and happy, not divided, angry and broke. Faking being this way for the sake of sowing chaos or passing a few pieces of legislation they could easily pass due to their current level of power anyway would be monumentally dumb. Hypocrisy and Religious Freedom Task Forces are what Republicans really are like, in all their glory.
Another video I enjoyed was the comments from the linguist John McWhorter on Trump’s speaking style. I’ve read a couple of McWhorter’s books on linguistics and while I don’t always agree with him, he does sometimes make some insightful observations. His view is that Trump’s speech pattern is exactly that of an illiterate, or someone from a backwards tribe that has not yet acquired a written language. Most of us learn in school to speak in a more precise and formal register in the appropriate circumstances; in McWhorter’s view, although Trump apparently went to school, he appears to have learned nothing.
Trump’s Prsidency is almost an open book. He proudly puts his foibles on display. Cohen has sworn under oath to Trump’s criminal involvement in the porn star scandal. Do you think Cohen might be lying?