Donald Trump has taken his obsession with crafting falsehoods about Democratic nominee Kamala Harris to the next level, penning his own fan fiction on Tuesday about the vice president.
In case anybody hasn’t noticed, Trump has shifted away from lying in the form of “plausible deniability” or lies that have at least a kernel of reality to them so long as you dig deep enough and just don’t think too hard about it, to literally just making up events about things that other people did that simply never happened.
I feel like this has been going on for a long time, though? He literally lied about the crowd size of his inauguration 8 years ago despite pictures of the actual crowd being widely available.
only for news outlets to show the moment he endorsed her, which was two days before his post.
This is the difference right here. He’s getting fact checked instead of journalists just coughing politely when he spews pure nonsense.
Yeah this is classic Trump actually, the famous difference between a Bullshitter and a Liar. He’s a Bullshitter because he doesn’t care what the truth is, he just says whatever will help him. Biden is re-joining the race. Covid restrictions will end by Easter 2020. He won the 2020 election. Obama is a secret Muslim with a fake birth certificate. Just whatever. He gets called out on these things and just sticks with them.
A Liar has a relationship with the truth but says the opposite. A Bullshitter has no relationship with the truth.
But there was at least some subjectiveness to it. Crowd sizes can be relative. The exaggerations he made were akin to the exaggerated benefits of whatever product you see during a television commercial. It was subjective hype, largely opinion based and about things that in the end really don’t matter outside of inflating his own ego. When he was saying things that other people did, there was a kernel of truth to them if you dug down far enough. It’s just that kernal was intentionally spun, misinterpreted, and twisted well beyond being out of proportion.
“He did XYZ, which is a criminal act that the American people will not stand for and will bring harm to all sorts of families like nobody saw before blah blah blah blah blah.” Everything else about it may be a complete lie taken way, way, way out of context. But most of the time, at least XYZ happened. Trump’s twisted interpretation of it and the context of it was what Trump used to lie about.
Now he’s not even bothering to look for the kernel of truth to latch on to. He’s just making it all up. The distinction might be subtle or even irrelevant to most people, but it’s there and it’s important to point it out because it shows that Trump’s normal lies aren’t even working any more and he’s becoming more and more desperate.
But there was at least some subjectiveness to it. Crowd sizes can be relative.
Like with just about all of the annoying orange lies, its only really subjective if you don’t know the truth and have 0 curiosity.
Crowd sizes can be relative
Ummmm…that’s not how counting works.
I agree with you that a lot of things can be relative. But crowd size at his inauguration is a terrible example of that (no offence). Two rallies in the same location, the number of attendants isn’t a relative ephemeral thing, it’s a cold-hard-statistic.
Did you count heads? No? Then you’re going based on estimations and opinions, which are relative. Maybe the people were standing a little further apart in a previous rally, giving the impression of more people showing up. Maybe there was a section of Trump’s crowds that were not properly pictured. Maybe some people hadn’t shown up yet when the picture was taken.
Now, none of this actually happened. But unless you have an exact head count of how many people showed up, there’s a whole bunch of maybes that Trump could and did hide behind to give him that bare minimum level of plausible deniability; that usual “Well, that’s what I was told” schtick he likes to do. That’s what he hid behind.
To stay with this example, he’s not even trying to do that any more. Now, instead of staying with the purposely vague “largest crowd ever!”, he’s saying “There were 7,692,814 people, 34 martians, and a partridge in a pear tree. Period.” and just hoping people start singing the 12 days of Christmas instead of thinking about what he actually said. He’s stopped hiding behind the thin plausible deniability he had and is just spouting out things that are objectively and provably false, hoping his base will continue accepting it as fact and not bothering to check.
I love your optimism in trying to find signs of desperation, but I just don’t think it’s true. A quick perusal of the wiki page detailing his false and misleading statements shows his blatant lies with no ground in the truth go back way farther than even his political career.
A personal favourite is the erection of a monument commemorating the so-called River of Blood Civil War event while renovating his golf course - an event that of course never happened on a site where no major battle took place.
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