FAILS: Candidate Biden seemed to exhibit a cognitive fail!

FRIDAY, JULY 12, 2024

Then again, so did Candidate Trump:  Did E.J. Dionne get it right when he offered the warning in question?

He issued his warning four days before the fateful June 27 debate. This was the text of his warning:

DIONNE (6/23/24): Because the “age issue” has been raised relentlessly against [President Biden], the media have a tendency to overlook or downplay Trump’s many moments of incoherence and even lunacy. Biden and his lieutenants must turn this side-by-side performance into an opportunity to have the two men judged by the same standards.

So Dionne wrote, before the debate. Four days later, President Biden's performance was so strange that it has routinely been described as "shocking." 

That brings us to Candidate Trump's performance at the same debate. Has it been judged by a different, less aggressive standard?

We'd have to say yes, it has been.

Was President Biden's performance "shocking?" We'd say that it pretty much was. Two weeks later, it largely remains unexplained. We've seen little effort by mainstream news orgs to consult with medical specialists concerning what might have happened that night.

President Biden's performance was quite strange. Then again, there was Candidate Trump, issuing a stream of groaning misstatements—many of which entered a realm which may seem to take us to a cognitively challenged place.

Trump issued a stream of groaning misstatements that night. As we noted in Tuesday's report, CNN's fact check team instantly summarized matters as shown:

Trump made more than 30 false claims during CNN’s presidential debate—far more than Biden

Both President Joe Biden and former President Donald Trump made false and misleading claims during CNN’s presidential debate on Thursday–but Trump did so far more than Biden, just like in their debates in 2020.

Trump made more than 30 false claims at the Thursday debate. They included numerous claims that CNN and others have already debunked during the current presidential campaign or prior.

[...]

Biden made at least nine false or misleading claims in the debate. 

According to the CNN census, Trump made "more than 30 false claims." Biden made at least nine.

President Biden's physical appearance and apparent confusion qualified as "shocking" that night. But there were two candidates on the stage during that evening's ersatz debate. What about the steady stream of bogus statements issued by Candidate Trump?

CNN issued a long list of misstatements by Trump, with links to previous fact checks. That said, a certain taxonomy may been missing from the detailed fact check. 

With merciful brevity, we would offer this:

Some of Trump's false or misleading claims qualified as misstatements of the fairly typical kind. This would be one example:

TRUMP:  We now have the largest deficit in the history of our country under this guy.

In fact, we don't have the largest deficit in history at this time. That said, that false assertion qualifies as a misstatement of a fairly typical kind. 

At one point in the evening, Candidate Trump even issued a type of throwback misleading claim. This was a standard type of misleading assertion back at the turn of the century:

TRUMP: Now, when we cut the taxes—as an example, the corporate tax was cut down to 21 percent from 39 percent, plus beyond that—we took in more revenue with much less tax.

If you lower the tax rate, you take in more revenue! Sean Hannity used to live off that silly, misleading claim way back in the dim, distant past. Suddenly, Donald J. Trump brought it back!

Some of Trump's misstatements were fairly typical. That said, many others weren't. Example:

One familiar claim by Candidate Trump—the claim that President Biden wants to "quadruple your taxes"—is more than a typical political misstatement. The claim is absurd on such a scale that it qualifies as something more than false or misleading, or as simply inaccurate or wrong.

The statement is so absurd—defies plausibility to such an extent—that it takes us close to the realm which we would describe as "crazy."

So too with other claims by Trump that night—for example, with patently ludicrous claims of this now-familiar type:

TRUMP: Fifty-one years ago, you had Roe v. Wade, and everybody wanted to get it back to the states. Everybody, without exception. Democrats, Republicans, liberals, conservatives, everybody wanted it back. Religious leaders.

And what I did is I put three great Supreme Court justices on the Court, and they happened to vote in favor of killing Roe v. Wade and moving it back to the states. This is something that everybody wanted.

That claim moves us past the realm of mere misstatement. It takes us past the point of mere error into a dumber and stranger land.

So too with these related statements:

TRUMP: As far as the abortion’s concerned, it is now back with the states. The states are voting, and in many cases, they—it’s, frankly, a very liberal decision. In many cases, it’s the opposite.

But they’re voting and it’s bringing it back to the vote of the people, which is what everybody wanted, including the founders, if they knew about this issue, which frankly they didn’t. But they would have—everybody wanted it brought back...

Everybody wanted it brought back and many presidents had tried to get it back. I was the one to do it. And again, this gives it the vote of the people. And that’s where they wanted it. Every legal scholar wanted it that way.

TRUMP: Now, ten years ago or so, they started talking about how many weeks and how many of this—getting into other things. But every legal scholar, throughout the world, the most respected, wanted it brought back to the states. I did that.

Every legal scholar wanted it that way? 

Every legal scholar throughout the world? Even the founders would have wanted that, had they only known?

Every legal scholar in the world wanted Roe returned to the states? That claim is so baldly absurd that it needs to be separated from the realm of mere misstatement.

Many of Candidate Trump's statements this night wandered across the borderline into the realm of the baldly absurd. Then too, we come to the array of self-affirming claims which barely qualify as actual statements at all.

We refer to the types of claims this disordered man delivers in bushel loads when he's out on the stump. These are statements in which he alleges the unparalleled greatness of everything he's ever said or thought or done.

It's a type of greatness no one has ever seen before! Everyone was amazed by his greatness! So we're routinely told:

TRUMP: We had the greatest economy in the history of our country. We had never done so well. Every—everybody was amazed by it. Other countries were copying us.

TRUMP:  First of all, our veterans and our soldiers can’t stand this guy. They can’t stand him. They think he’s the worst commander in chief, if that’s what you call him, that we’ve ever had. They can’t stand him. So let’s get that straight.

And they like me more than just about any of them. And that’s based on every single bit of information.

TRUMP:  So, I want absolutely immaculate clean water and I want absolutely clean air, and we had it. We had H2O. We had the best numbers ever. And we did—we were using all forms of energy, all forms, everything. And yet, during my four years, I had the best environmental numbers ever. And my top environmental people gave me that statistic just before I walked on the stage, actually.

TRUMP:  Jake, we’re doing very well at addiction until the COVID came along. We had the two-and-a-half, almost three years of like nobody’s ever had before, any country in every way. 

TRUMP:  And if you would see my statements that I made on Twitter at the time, and also my statement that I made in the Rose Garden, you would say it’s one of the strongest statements you’ve ever seen.

TRUMP: All of the things that we’ve done, nobody’s ever—never seen anything like—even from a medical standpoint. 

Nobody's ever seen anything like the astonishing things this amazing leader has accomplished. Routinely, were told that no one had ever seen anything like it before.

Routinely, these self-affirming claims of greatness are based on no discernible or imaginable evidence. 

His top people just gave him the statistic, we are inanely told. His claims are based on every single bit of information!

In fact, these claims are based on no imaginable type of information. As such, they barely qualify as statements at all.

They take us into an unfamiliar realm. They move us past the point of error into a realm which seems to border on something which might be compared to a second cousin to lunacy, to borrow a term from Dionne.

Does this disordered person's cognitive state perhaps come into question as he churns this endless array of emissions? Behind the high walls of the mainstream press, the answer is typically no.

In our view, the reason for that seems to be fairly obvious. It involves an unwise and childish decision which has infected the world of the mainstream press corps and of Blue America's thought leaders.

It involves the enjoyable use of the childish term LIES. 

It happened some time back. In the face of President Trump's endless stream of weird misstatements, the mainstream press corps decided to abandon a long-standing prohibition on the use of that highly fraught term.

In our view, that decision was unwise on the basic merits. The decision has also had the effect of empowering Candidate Trump. 

In our view, that decision drives the dimwitted double standard which is now general within the mainstream press corps. According to that double standard, Candidate Biden seems to exhibit a possible cognitive shortfall—but for all his apparent lunacy, Candidate Trump does not!

Candidate Trump is a LIAR, full stop. We regard this stance by the mainstream press, and by Blue America, as silly, childish, unwise, destructive—as a very large cognitive fail.

"The media have a tendency to overlook Trump's lunacy," Dionne wrote on June 23. Given the strength of the language he used, we'd have to call that a remarkable claim.

We'd call it a remarkable claim! Sadly, we're going to rule that Dionne got it right—and that his colleagues in the press, and in Blue America, have long been caught in their own extremely large, very unhelpful, all-too-human cognitive fail.

Still coming: What's wrong with calling a LIE a LIE? Gene Brabender helps us explain.