Wow I messed that whole sentence up.
Just to clarify what i was trying to say:
“This is the exact same s*** he was pulling during the run up to, and during the time after, the 2020 election that led up to Jan 6th”.
Trump predicts ‘bloodbath’ if he loses election and claims ‘Biden beat Obama’
Republican candidate insists at Ohio rally that Biden had beaten ‘Barack Hussein Obama’ in elections that never took place
Joe Biden tore into Donald Trump’s mental stability at a dinner in Washington DC on Saturday – just as the former president was making verbal gaffes at a campaign rally in Ohio as well as predicting a “bloodbath” if he met defeat in November’s election.
Trump, the presumptive Republican presidential nominee, confused the crowd at an appearance in Vandalia by insisting that Biden had beaten “Barack Hussein Obama” in elections nationally that never took place.
Freewheeling during a speech in which his teleprompters were seemingly disabled by high winds, Trump – a frequent critic of the 81-year-old Biden’s age and mental acuity – struggled to pronounce the words “bite” and “largest”. And he left the crowd scratching their heads over the reference to Obama, whom Biden served as vice-president from 2009 to 2017 before taking the Oval Office from Trump in 2020.
trump is losing it.
You really have to wonder if there is any limit at all to what MAGA people will explain away (or simply ignore) about Trump’s increasingly erratic performances.
If he actually goes the usually-metaphorical underpants-on-head route, will that be okay, too?
The more erudite among them will brag about how the Intel Community deemed TFG fit to receive the traditional candidates’ briefing.
[Yeah. I’m sure I could have helped myself. I simply chose not to]
Well, I laughed.
(But then I started wondering how many of Trump’s fans would understand a pun involving “briefs”…)
They aren’t really at the rallies to hear a speech. They are there to be in Trump’s presence and to wallow in the comfortable embrace of their like-minded deplorable brethren. They enthusiastically respond like Pavlov’s dogs to certain associated phrases but are otherwise oblivious to the word salad coming from Trump’s mouth. Unless he actually fell down on the stage, I don’t think they would notice that anything was wrong.
Yeah, everyone knows it was actually Michelle.
“Following Trump’s Use of Language”
By George Lakoff
Distinguished Professor of Cognitive Science and Linguistics, UC Berkeley (retired)
My problem with the thread:
– What Professor Lakoff writes above is true for Trump this year
– Lakoff published the above in 2016
Read this if you don’t believe the Lakoff/Libit analysis still applies:
Trump Georgia Rally Speech, March 9, 2024
Could coherence have gotten worse in the last eight years, with Trump more often making statements where even his most devoted followers cannot fill in the blank? Yes. Would I trust myself to objectively measure that? No. So who would I trust? Some sort of legitimate expert applying a statistical approach. And I haven’t seen that.
So – Is Trump confused? Rarely. Less rarely than four or eight years ago? I don’t know. If I had to guess, I’d say he’s a little more often confused than in the past, but it still is rare, and it’s not enough to matter.
Holy fuck, all you have to do is listen to Trump speak. It doesn’t merit a study.
What do you suppose he meant by saying that Biden beat Obama by the largest margin in history?
Without the full transcript, I have no idea what he meant. However – just guessing – he might have been riffing off of this:
Joe Biden breaks Obama’s record for most votes ever cast for a U.S. presidential candidate
Biden did run for the Democratic nomination in 2008, but he never got any traction in his campaign, and withdrew after the Iowa caucus (i.e., the first nomination contest), in which he finished in fifth place, with about 1% of the total vote.
That, as far as I know, is the only time that voters ever chose between Biden and Obama on the same ballot.
Note, he’s been saying Biden outran Obama since the 2020 election.
I think he means
- Biden got more votes in the election than Obama did in a previous election,
- that’s not believable,
- therefore stolen election.
I literally do not have the patience to listen to a two hour rally speech, much less a whole bunch where I go back and forth between old and new. (Trump rally speeches are far longer than typical in American politics. You know what kind of leader makes speeches that long? Communists. I’m not kidding.)
Transcripts – those I can read. And reading the first half of the Georgia speech I previously linked, it matches up perfectly with the techniques George Lakoff – my new favorite Donald Trump expert – identified, including repetition and drawing in the audience with the fill in the blank technique. I’m up to here:
Is he always that coherent? No, but he doesn’t need to be.
And – note to any lurking conservatives – Trump is almost as much for reverse discrimination as Biden.
As far as meriting a study, now that I think more about it, I am halfway to agreeing with you. The problem is that before you can do a study, you need to have criteria for rating speech confusion. Suppose Trump’s speeches were shown to be using more sentence fragments, simpler vocabulary. increased repetition, and more spots than ever where the listener has to fill in the blank. With the same data, you might say he is getting confused, and I may see more skillful demagoguery than ever.
Look how bored the people behind him look.
That’s not what he said, though. He said that Biden ran against Obama and beat him in every swing state.
I don’t understand why liberals are making excuses for Trump or trying to rationalize his comments when he spews word salad and calls for violent uprisings on his behalf, when MAGAs know exactly what he’s telling them and what he wants them to do and it isn’t about historical comparisons or the auto industry. He’s right out there saying that immigrants aren’t human and I half-expect a thinkpiece from the New Yorker about how he’s referencing the Bene Gesserit philosophy of sapience in the Dune franchise.
But I have a question- who is doing those transcripts and are they cleaning up stuff?
Yeah, trying to rationalize what trump meant leads to insanity.
Do these people not understand that population growth is an actual thing? Jeez Louise.
I don’t think that’s what’s happening, though. Trump is constantly vomiting out lies, dangerous ideas, word salad, mispronunciations, stammers, and weird sighs. In my view, those missteps are ranked in order from most to least importance (first two are tied, probably). Who cares about the occasional flubbed word when he is telling outright untruths and promoting ideas that destroy democracy, dehumanize migrants and the LGBTQ community, and wreck the environment? I see no evidence that liberals are defending Trump against those frightening and consequential statements. Anyone who is doing so is not, by definition, a liberal.
If a liberal individual or news outlet presented with a clip showing Trump stumbling over a word, or even making a “senior moment” misstatement shrugs and wants to move on to something, I agree. Why get all fussed over a leaky faucet when in the next room, the house is catching fire? It just makes you look stupid.