Was it my imagination, of did trump complain about the press for taking down his every word verbatim, rather than whatever the gist of what he was saying? He didn’t dwell on it, probably because even he knew it was idiotic.
This, maybe:
You know, the one thing about the press that I learned, don’t be sarcastic. When, because I’m a very sarcastic person and I get sarcastic, and most people know that. But you have some bad people that will write it exactly like I say it.
If you can remember any specific words, you can try searching the transcript.
https://www.realclearpolitics.com/video/2026/07/24/watch_president_donald_trumps_white_house_correspondents_dinner_speech.html
Based on what I saw as I did a few CTRL-F searches, wow, that whole thing is just unhinged.
Yeah, that was it. Thanks.
He’s sarcastic in retrospect. He says something unhinged, his base eats it up, then he meant it. He says something unhinged, gets some pushback, oh, he was being sarcastic.
We have, or used to have, posters here who would try to weasel out of their posts that way.
I’ve posted this before:
Trump has taken every conceivable position on every possible issue. He has both affirmed and disavowed every position he’s ever held. He was simultaneously both deadly serious and totally kidding.
The strategy? No matter the outcome, he can point to ‘evidence’ that he called it right from the beginning.
Spineless, soulless, immoral, amoral, incompetent, gutless flip-flopper.
Oh, so it’s fake news to report verbatim on what he says? OK, I got it. So in true ‘1984’ style:
ACCURATE REPORTING IS FAKE NEWS
Yep, after he made the ‘drinking bleach’ comments during trump 1.0, at first his supporters tried to fight the ridicule backlash by spinning it as some really outside the box, 4D chess-style spitballing. Then a news cycle or two later trump came out and said he was just being sarcastic (Ron Howard narrator voice: he wasn’t), throwing his defenders under the bus.
The funny thing is, back in his first term, one of his press secretaries (Kayleigh McEnany maybe) would try to get in front of some of his stupider comments by telling reporters he was joking/exaggerating/sarcastic. But Trump, not understanding this, would push back and say that he never makes jokes. He never understood that part of a press secretary doing damage control, really anyone doing this kind of damage control for a public figure, involves some amount of under cutting what you said and you have to roll with it if you want it to work.
On a similar note, he’ll float some stupid idea on Fox News, then wait to be asked about it later so he can say “lots of people are saying that”, when, in the reality, the “lots of people” was just him, a few hours earlier. ie Lots of people are saying I should be Speaker Of The House, no that was you, you said that, no one else. But with the media and half the government licking his boots, they run with it.
Around that time, there was a Fox News talking point that “He’s doing the best he can with the information he has” that I’d hear pop up from time to time. Once or twice I did try to explain that, no, he’s not. When Dr Fauci says we should wear masks and Trump says we don’t need to wear them, that’s not working with the available information, that’s actively doing the opposite of what the information is suggesting.
Ayup. Reminds me of Dick Cheney (and/or his staff) giving a quote to the NY Times, and then – a few hours or so later – citing the NY Times as a source for the bullshit quote.
HIS bullshit quote.
It was about the Iraq War “Intel.” Others in the administration also cited the Times as their “source.”
Evil phuques.
ETA: CBS News’s Bob Simon summarized the play thusly:
You leak a story to the New York Times, and the New York Times prints it, and then you go on the Sunday shows quoting the New York Times and corroborating your own information.
Not quite. He’s consistently, always, racist.
Oh, I have no doubt he is consistently a racist, but he does regularly make statements in which he claims that he is not racist – for example, “I am the least racist person you have ever met.”
No, see, his defenders are fine because their defense was sarcastic.
It’s sarcasm all the way down, eh?
