According to a tape obtained by The Washington Post, Trump admitted to a closed fund-raiser in St. Louis that when talking about trade with Justin Trudeau, he had made up the “fact” that the US had a trade deficit with Canada. When Justin pointed out to him that it was the other way round, he continued (and continues) to maintain that that figure didn’t include lumber and energy (it did according to Trump’s own trade agency). What is amazing is that he didn’t bother lying; he just made up whatever facts he wanted.
Another example I am guessing is that when Trump declared that it was important to elect Rick Saccone in PA because he knew more about North Korea than anybody, I infer that he had two things on his “mind”, Saccone and NK and simply conflated them.
BTW, where do you post things that are neither mundane nor pointless but you must share?
What is somewhat interesting to me about this incident is, in spite my seething disgust with Trump, as a policy direction, renegotiating international trade agreements to get a better deal is entirely reasonable for any President from any party. If Trump had come out and framed his policies in that way, nobody, and I mean absolutely nobody would have had a negative word to say about it.
But instead, he has to Trump all over it, using his usual hyperbolic language “disaster!” “they’re the worst!” and making up stuff about trade deficits. OK, I get it, it’s a negotiating technique. But at some point everyone is going to finally start seeing (one can hope) that the emperor has no clothes, that he is NOT an honest and reliable negotiating partner, and frankly ignore him (and the US).
I don’t think he just made it up as a calculated “negotiating technique”. My assessment would be that he assumed it was actually true because his gut instinct and common sense told him that it’s true, so he just asserted that to Trudeau without recourse to actual facts. (He probably still thinks he’s right about it.)
We do have a Trade Deficit with Canada, as we do with almost all countries (some of them massive). P.M. Justin Trudeau of Canada, a very good guy, doesn’t like saying that Canada has a Surplus vs. the U.S.(negotiating), but they do…they almost all do…and that’s how I know!
That’s how he knows! Whatever the fuck that means. He should’ve thrown in a covfefe to clear things up.
Further proof he’s totally unqualified for the job. A sensible chimpanzee would have had a briefing with people in the State Department prior to meeting a head of state and been brought up to speed with any issues with that country. That way you would walk into a meeting knowing what you want to talk about and what might be possible to get from the other leader. But no, Space Cadet Bone Spurs just imagines that facts are whatever he wants them to be.
Well, I don’t know about the US, but here in Canada, just about everyone but our home-grown Trumpeteers have already concluded that.
There’s a lot of hate on Justin Trudeau up here, but his handling of the massive curve ball that is Trump that the US threw him last election has been excellent. He’s been holding his ground against Trump’s worst sorts of stupidity (as seen in this instance) without overly antagonizing Trump (no mean feat!). Meanwhile, his government has been quietly working around the edges of both the Trump administration and the US federal government to try to secure Canada’s interests via means other than trying to get Trump to be reasonable.
He hasn’t won every time, but hes been doing pretty well.
That’s pretty redundant by this point, if you ask me. This is far from the first manifestation of Trump’s weak grasp on reality.
I would guess Trump had a briefing with the people in the State Department (by their initiative if not his). But it doesn’t make any difference what they told him. Trump knows better. Trump built a lot of buildings and his TV ratings were great, plus he won a great landslide victory, so obviously he knows better than all these so-called experts.
To be fair, there is no lack of ‘making it up’ in the history of politics. John Kennedy campaigned to the White House in no small part due to his claim of a “missile gap” between Russia and the United States that, if anything, was opposite of what was claimed, or the “No taxation without representation” rationale for the American revolution which conveniently ignores that Americans weren’t actually paying the taxes levied by the Crown (which was pretty indifferent to collecting them). Making up a story is such an American tradition in politics it has become a cultural joke (e.g. Wag The Dog). Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, Bush 41 & 43 have all been dissementators of carefully manufactured untruths used to guide public opinion and justify policy.
However, Trump is kind of unique in making up things off the cuff regardless of whether they correspond to anything in the public perception, insisting that they are true without providing any rationale whatsoever, and then just walking away while everyone else is arguing about it. He’s like the idiot would-be class clown that walks on stage during a pageant, takes a dump in the middle of the stage, does a fist pump, and then exits left while wooing, thinking he just got away with something while leaving a trailed of smeared shit behind him. The shocking thing isn’t that he is doing this—it is literally what he has done across his entire career as a self-promotional asshole—but that people on every part of the political spectrum are giving him any credibility in assuming that it means something more than a shit-flinging troll doing the only thing he knows how to do. All of the news ‘analysis’ about what Trump’s latest fart-gargle means about his plans just adds to the unsupported thesis that somewhere beneath that terrible combover is an actual plan for how things are supposed to go.
Of course Trump is just making it up as he goes along. Anyone suprised about this, or suprised he would even incidentally cop to it, has not been paying any attention.
And this is why he’s at such great risk if/when he gets interviewed by Mueller. An intelligent thought out liar would lie when it’s necessary and based on some sort of rational assessment that the benefits outweigh the risks. A guy like Trump would lie without really thinking about it, based on whatever pops into his head at the moment, and without any understanding of what the implications might be.
I disagree. Lying (at least in my personal lexicon) is saying something you know to be false. I would lying if I said that most members of the SDMB love Trump since I know that to be false. Trump cannot be bothered to know the facts and just makes it up.
But my reason for the post is not that he made it up, but that he admitted to that group he was raising funds from that he just made it up. I wasn’t sure he was aware he was doing that and even more surprised he admitted to doing it. Of course, he has now doubled down on the claim. Meantime the Canadian government is also hedging in its way by saying the balance on goods and services favors the US. I know what goods are; I am less clear on services. I think it includes tourism, foreign students, and maybe a few other items, but maybe the goods part goes the other way. In any case the surplus is tiny compared to the amount of trade and by any rational accounting the trade between the countries is well balanced.
Not only does he lie, not only does he make up stuff, but he self-contradicts, including claiming he didn’t say stuff that he said. Which shows that he has lost touch with reality.
I think they should replace “Hail to the Chief” with “They’re Coming to Take me Away, Ha Ha.”
As pointed out on one of the MSNBC talk shows, there’s no apparent evidence that Trump even had the conversation with Trudeau that he claimed. In other words, he may have made up the story about making up the trade deficit story.
