I keep coming back to two questions on Trump:
1. Does he just lie to make himself look good with the assumption that his followers will believe him (or forgive him) and who gives a damn about anyone else?
Or does he really believe what he says is true (be it through delusion or willful ignorance)?
2. Which is the more dangerous situation?
Minute by minute at Donald Trump’s rambling Ohio ‘infrastructure’ speech | Toronto Star
Among other things, the president of the United States boasted about the ratings for “Roseanne,” explained he doesn’t know what a community college is and threatened South Korea over upcoming nuclear talks with North Korea.
46 view(s)
Either way, his speech reinforces the fact that we cannot believe a word that comes out of this POTUS' mouth.
IMO it really seems D has only one reality, that of whatever happens to be in his mind at any moment and only what he wants to believe. His has no regard for truth, accuracy, real life nor the expert advice of others. It explains why he thinks he can run a country without the need of any reporting/intelligence or even reference information.
For question 1, I lean toward the latter assumption.
I was searching for an argument along the lines of "Trump isn't really that dumb," and I ran across an article quoting Dan Rather. The article had the headline "DAN RATHER EXPLAINS WHY TRUMP IS SMARTER THAN HE SEEMS." But when I read the article and got to Rather's actual quote, this is what he said:
"In his own way, he has a real intelligence. It’s a shrewdness. Cunning, if you will. Dumb people do not get elected president. I can certainly agree he’s not widely read. He knows very little about foreign policy. There’s a certain intelligence about Donald Trump and we saw it in the news conference. It was a smart performance politically on his part."
There's a difference between being shrewd and cunning and being…strategic. I suspect that +su ann lim is correct, and that Trump only lives in the moment – which would explain his seeming daily policy flip-flops.
In a way, that itself has a certain power. If you don't care about what the reality was yesterday, and if you have undisputed communication skills that let you issue any message at any moment, you can perform better than someone who worries, "I can't say item A today after having said item B yesterday."
https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2017/01/dan-rather-donald-trump-news
Now that I'm reading the article, forget DAILY consistency. How about sentence-by-sentence consistency?
"NASA, space agency, all of a sudden it’s back, you notice? It was dormant for many, many years. Now it’s back. And we’re trying to have the private sector invest the money. Why the hell should we do it, right? Let them invest."
So is federal funding of NASA a good thing, or a bad thing?
I think he's spent too long rich and in the business world, where acting dominant makes people think you're successful, so you are successful. He has no coping strategy for a world where not everyone respects you just because you're rich, and some people insist on facts and truth as being more important than being bossy.
+John Bump Or, put another way, he's existed in a subset of the business / glamor world, where acting like he does simply identifies him as a "character," someone you can tell funny stories about, someone who has rabid lawyers so be careful who you tell those stories to, a guy with enough connections that he can afford to trash relationships and treat people who cross him (or are of no more use to him) like shit and act like an asshole, because he knows he can get away with it.
He's used to being large and in charge and not having anyone who can tell him no.
Those are not the attributes of a successful or desirable president.
It's also worth consideration that Trump is 71 years old. His mental elasticity and cognitive abilities simply aren't going to be what they were ten, twenty, thirty years ago when he got himself into the celebrity status he achieved. But he can put up enough of the fire that, as long as you don't actually read what he says, sentence by sentence, he still can come across as someone powerful and at the top of his game.
Reality free is the exact oxymoronic description of reality TV. And this is a reality tv president for a reality tv world.
The cord-cut millennials will bail us out maybe even before the last boomer has watched the last reality tv show.