These faint memories bedevil me. Are they real? How accurate are they? I’ve searched around online but not substantiated them. I do occasionally have clear memories of things I can definitely confirm are NOT true, so I don’t assume – at all! – that these are correct.
1: Jared Kushner telling some reporter in an interview, some time around 2016, that Donald Trump switched parties because only Republicans would be dumb enough to vote for him, or, somewhat equivalently, that Democrats would be too smart to vote for him.
2: Somebody in the first Trump administration, speaking for the administration, telling some world leader(s) that the United States was “switching sides”, meaning aligning with more or less W’s “Axis of Evil”, Russia, China, and other previously adversarial powers.
3: A political analyst or pundit writing what I thought was a very persuasive article explaining how Bernie Sanders was very similar to Donald Trump. I think the gist was that both were very good at criticizing and disrupting, and not very good at real progress.
Help me out! Are any of these valid? Or perhaps do you recognize them as twisted and confused versions of real stories? Or am I imagining things again?
Which suggests it once got enough traction online to be worth debunking. Which explains that the OP’s subconscious wasn’t inventing things from scratch, just forgetting whether he got it from a reliable or an unreliable source.
One hell of a lot of everyone’s memories are increasingly like this as unreliable third- through thousandth-order sources become where most of us get most of our ideas about the world.
Not Kushner, and not exactly the same, but trump did say 'I love the poorly educated" in 2016, regarding primary votes he was getting. Which I always took to be a “saying the quiet part out loud” style acknowledgement that Republican voters tend to be dumb and/or ignorant. Confirmed by Snopes.
Though, I’m afraid it’d be more accurate, at least so far, to say “wasn’t inventing this particular thing”. It’s still a pretty open question, how untrustworthy my memory is.
I think one of the significant side effects of all of us writing stuff here is noticing just how crappy our own memories are. Not that things are utterly forgotten, although that happens too. But just how often we believe we remember event or fact or … accurately, but by golly we’re wrong about that.
One of my middle school teachers had a saying he used a lot: “Hmm. I was sure until you asked me.” I didn’t recognize it then as a mere kid of age ~12, but later in my own middle age I realized there is a lot of wisdom in that one.