A Reminder: Trump Shows Zero Signs of Cognitive Competence to Execute the Office of President, Faithfully or Not
I do not have VAR here on all that comes through my feeds that is bizarre whitewashing and normalizing of what Donald Trump says in his interactions with human beings. But, still, it is something you
I do not have VAR here on all that comes through my feeds that is bizarre whitewashing and normalizing of what Donald Trump says in his interactions with human beings. But, still, it is something you all do need to be reminded of, again. Your feed may well minimize and look away from this. But Donald Trump shows absolutely zero signs of being cognitively competent to be a president of anything at all…
Thus you really have to value your upper-income tax cut a lot and set the value of keeping the country from decline at naught, or you have to think that having a Trump-headed administration do chaos and thus own the Libs is of great value in itself, in order to even think about voting for him.
As nobody has no excuse for not knowing, a huge chunk of the American media infosphere puts both elbows on the scale via their frantic normalizing of Donald Trump.
Duncan Black has been making the truly obvious point over and over again since a time the memory of man knoweth not to the contrary:
Duncan Black: If you were from a foreign country, and had never heard of this "Mr. Trump" before, and opened up the local newspaper to read up on the latest political happenings, would this [New York Times Haberman story] in any way be a helpful characterization of what happened [at his Wednesday press conference]?…
“Former President Donald J. Trump tried on Thursday to shoehorn himself back into a national conversation that Vice President Kamala Harris has dominated for more than two weeks, holding an hourlong news conference in which he assailed Ms. Harris’s intelligence and taunted her for failing to field questions similarly from journalists. Throughout the event, held in the main room at Mar-a-Lago, his private club and home in Palm Beach, Fla., Mr. Trump assailed the state of the U.S. economy, described the country as in mortal danger if he did not win the presidential election and falsely described his departure from the White House—which was preceded by his refusal to concede his election loss in November 2020 and the violent attack on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, by a mob of his supporters—as a ‘peaceful’ transfer of power.”
Even if you saw this as an entirely good faith rendering by Mag Habs and the gang, you can imagine they could write up the appearance by a toddler who ran up on stage and pretended to be running for president in precisely the same style:
“Little Johnny Jenkins tried on Thursday to shoehorn himself into a national conversation that Vice President Kamala Harris has dominated for more than two weeks, holding a ten minute news conference in which he assailed Ms. Harris's failures and taunted her for failing to solve the nation's hunger problem.”
Transcript of Little Johnny Jenkins: I WANT ICE CREAM!!! I WANT ICE CREAM!!! KAMABLA NOT GIVE ME ICE CREAM!!!!…
<https://www.eschatonblog.com/2024/08/reading-news-makes-you-dumber.html>
DUNCAN BLACK IS NOT ENGAGING IN HYPERBOLE HERE. NOT AT ALL.
Here are three randomly selected pieces of what Trump said. Randomly selected. Not “gotchas”. Not out of context. Not mis-punctuated, or with half-phrase diversions and filler words kept in to make the speaker look bad. This is the transcript “lightly edited for coherence and clarity”.
Extract 1:
Trump: ‘ I think that the people of January 6th were treated very unfairly, and they were—they were there to complain. Not through me—they were there to complain about an election. And you know, it's very interesting. The biggest crowd I've ever spoken to—and I said “peacefully and patriotically”, which nobody wants to say, but I said “peacefully and patriotically”—the biggest crowd I've ever spoken to, and you've seen it, Maggie.
I was at the Mall, I was at the Washington Monument, I was at the whole thing. I had crowds—I don't know who's ever had a bigger crowd than I have, but I've had it many times. The biggest crowd I've ever spoken before was that day. And I'll tell you, it's very hard to find a picture of that crowd. You see the picture of a small number of people relatively going to the Capitol, but you never see the picture of the crowd—the biggest crowd I've ever spoken to.
I've spoken to the biggest crowds. Nobody's spoken to crowds bigger than me. If you look at Martin Luther King when he did his speech, his great speech, and you look at ours—same real estate, same everything, same number of people, if not more. And they said he had a million people, but I had 25,000 people. But when you look at the exact same picture, and everything's the same—because it was the fountains, the whole thing—all the way back from Lincoln to Washington, and you look at it, and you look at the picture of his crowd and my crowd—we actually had more people. They said I had 25,000, and he had a million people. And I'm okay with it because I liked Dr. Martin Luther King...
Extract 2:
Trump: ‘Some of the most brilliant people on Wall Street that are saying that if President Trump doesn't win, you're going to have a depression. I happen to agree. I think that's true because I know how bad these people are. You know, they like to say that they did this and that. You saw the $7 trillion that they said it was me—for $7 trillion. It wasn't me. It was them. They said that I had inflation. They took over 9% inflation. No, no, I had 1% inflation. I had actually no inflation because if you look at the categories, we had just about no inflation.
But I had a very minor—I, I actually had positive inflation. It was a perfect number because you don't want zero. I mean, I'm not going to give you a whole course on economics, but you don't want zero. 1%, 1.4% is, is great. You want a little bit because you don't want to have deflation. Deflation is, in many ways, even worse.
I had a perfect number, right around the 1% number. It was perfect. And to show you, it stayed there for two years. And then he did all of the different borrowings that he did. And then he did so many things wrong. Every time he would do it, I'd say, ‘Big mistake’. And don't forget, they sell hats and they sell stories—“Trump was right about everything”. I had been right about a lot...
Extract 3:
Trump: ‘Why is it that millions of people were allowed to come into our country from prisons, from jails, from mental institutions, insane asylums? Even in South America, that's a—it's a mental institution on steroids. That's what it is when you see the people that are coming into our—these are institutions that are being emptied out, not in South America—all over the world, including South America—all over the world, prisons are being emptied out into our country…
The video:
The full transcript:
Fiona Hill’s book “ There is nothing for you here” has a chilling account of her time on the NSC with an account of Trump and his acolytes behaviour reminiscent of a crazed Roman Emperor in the later days of the Empire. How the Republican Party allowed itself to become enslaved to this Pied Piper is beyond understanding.
Heather Cox Richardson's newsletter of August 9th started with a potted history of access journalism in American presidential election coverage ("The idea that presidential campaigns should drag on for years is a relatively new one" etc.) Here is how she concluded:
"Yesterday, apparently chafing as the Harris-Walz campaign turns out huge crowds, Trump called reporters to his company’s Florida property, Mar-a-Lago. Those determined not to miss any twist of the campaign—and who had enough advance notice to make it to Florida—listened to him serve up his usual banquet of lies [...]. The journalists there did not ask him about the recent bombshell report suggesting that Egypt poured $10 million into his 2016 campaign.
[...]
In contrast, as presidential candidates, first Biden and now Harris have not appeared to bother with access journalism or courting established media. Instead, they have recalled an earlier time by turning directly to voters through social media and by articulating clear policies that support their dedication to the larger project of American democracy.
Yesterday, after journalists had begun to complain that they did not have enough access to Harris, she came to them directly on the tarmac at the Detroit airport and asked, “What’cha got?” All but one of their questions were about Trump and his comments; the one question that was not about Trump came when a journalist asked when Harris would sit down for an interview."