THURSDAY, MAY 15, 2025
Why does anyone believe us? Long ago, Betrand Russell was gobsmacked by a silly "paradox." As we noted yesterday, we love the passage in question.
Hold on, though. There's more!
In Principia Mathematica, Russell and Whitehead spent 700 pages establishing the fact that 1 + 1 = 2 (or doing some such thing). As we noted yesterday, we love to contemplate the apparent absurdity of that.
It's as we noted yesterday! According to the later Wittgenstein, the greatest thinkers in the western tradition have routinely been gobsmacked by the darnedest things. Their work has featured "the misbegotten products of linguistic illusion and muddled thinking" pretty much all the way down!
Right here in the present day, President Trump has an extremely strong inclination to say the darnedest things. Why does anyone believe him? Why do any voters believe the things he says?
Why do voters believe what he says? More in sorrow than in anger, our answer proceeds like this:
Late last month, Michael Tomasky wrote a piece for The New Republic which asked that very question. We'd call his piece instructive.
The triple headline it sported was perhaps a bit impolite. Below, you see the core of his presentation:
Fooled Again
Who Were Those Gullible People Who Believed Donald Trump’s Bullsh*t?
His campaign promises, from peace in Ukraine to “beautiful” tariffs, were truly unbelievable. And yet, somehow, many people believed him.
[...]
One thought keeps popping back into my head: Who were these people who were gullible enough to believe Donald Trump’s bullshit?
How many times did Trump say he’d end that war [in Ukraine] on the first day of his presidency? It had to have been hundreds. I saw a lot of those clips on cable news over the weekend, as you may have. He did not mean it figuratively. You know, in the way people will say, “I’ll change that from day one,” and you know they don’t literally mean day one, but they do mean fast.
But that isn’t what Trump said. He meant it literally. He used the phrase “in 24 hours” many, many times. So I ask you: Who really believed that?
What kind of voters were dumb enough to believe all that stupid sh*t? Tomasky, whose work we've long admired, very much wanted to know!
Our answer would go like this:
For the record, 77.3 million people voted for Candidate Trump. Those millions of people weren't all the same person.
They didn't all believe (or disbelieve) the exact same things. They hadn't all heard the same things. They didn't all have the same ideas about what Candidate Trump had promised, proposed or said.
Imaginably, many of them had never heard the things he'd said about ending the war in Ukraine. In fairness, Tomasky also seems to have been a bit behind the curve on that topic.
Editor, name-call thyself! To see what we mean, you can scroll through this voluminous fact check by CNN's Daniel Dale:
Fact check: ... Here are 53 times Trump said he’d end Ukraine war within 24 hours or before taking office
[...]
On the campaign trail in 2023 and 2024, Trump said on dozens of occasions, in an entirely serious tone, manner and context, that he would end the war in Ukraine either within 24 hours of his return to the White House or even sooner than that. He said over and over again, including at both presidential debates of 2024, that he would have the war “settled” when he was president-elect, before his inauguration.
Over and over, Dale presents instances where Candidate Trump said that he would end the war even before taking office. Routinely, the candidate's promise concerning the war in Ukraine was even stranger than Tomasky recalled.
Over and over, the candidate said he would settle the war even before his inauguration! Presumably, some such negotiation on his part would have violated aspects of American law, but he said it again and again, as Dale documents in his lengthy list.
In his column, Tomasky seems to have forgotten all that, assuming he ever knew it. In the process, he understated the strangeness of what Candidate Trump actually said.
That said, Tomasky follows the news on a daily basis; it's his occupation. He doesn't work in an Amazon facility. He doesn't deliver the mail door-to-door, and he doesn't drive a truck.
We've always admired Tomasky! But despite the fact that the news in his occupation, he himself didn't seem to be aware of what the candidate repeatedly said.
It isn't the borderline mistake he made. Instead, it's the tribal arrogance. The guy who follows the news for a living was now mocking tens of millions of regular people about how dumb and how clueless they were.
There's a ton of tribal arrogance here in Blue America. We Blues have never quite found the way to move past that undisguised attitude.
Tomasky has always struck us as the last person who would ever succumb to that point of view. That said, these are deeply challenging times.
Why did people vote for Trump? We can think of a million reasons! The arrogance displayed in that column would be one of those reasons, but the reasons continue from there.
Why did people vote for Trump? In some cases, they voted for him because of the unexplained southern border. (It remains unexplained to this day.)
In some cases, they voted for him because of the remarkable state of affairs involving President Biden himself. The problematic behavior there is just starting to hit the fan.
In some cases, they voted for him because of the positions which came to be derided as "woke." With respect to that arena, we Blues have adopted many positions which help establish a basic point:
There's no such thing as a good intention which can't be unwisely pursued.
Different people voted for Trump for different reasons. In some cases, people voted for Candidate Trump because, as they were watching the Fox News Channel, they saw a piece of videotape like this:
CA student details experience being forced to share locker room with biological male
California student Celeste Duyst discusses her experience being forced to share a locker room with a biological male and the response to telling her story on 'Fox & Friends Weekend.'
In our view, Fox & Friends Weekend is an assault on the human experiment. That said, some people voted for Candidate Trump because they saw a tape like that on that particular program.
We Blues! We have a lot of splainin' to do at the present time. We know of no sign that we'll be able to rise to the challenge. In our view, the situation may be even worse than it seems.
We were disappointed by the arrogance in Tomasky's column, but it's a common trait here in Blue America. He didn't remember what Trump had said, but he name-called the lesser breed, as a group, for how stupid and dumb they are.
Russell fell for "the liar's paradox." Michael Tomasky, a good, decent person, eventually fell for that.
Somerby never actually tells us what Tomasky's answer was, about why those people believed Trump (if they did). He reacts to Tomasky without sharing Tomasky's conclusions with his own readers. That is sloppy on Somerby's part, but sadly typical. As often as not, Somerby quotes someone without providing a link. Sometimes he omits the source of the quote entirely. He alludes to things he never mentions again. He routinely teases a topic for later that he never returns to. This makes trying to follow his arguments a frustrating exercise, assuming he were speaking more plainly than he does. Real writers cannot get away with such a lackadaisical approch to sharing ideas, much less info.
ReplyDeleteI'd like to think about why Trump voters believed Trump after all of his lies. I'd like to evaluate Tomasky's ideas too. I don't want to subscribe to another publication that I may never want to read again, just to find out what Somerby should have summarized (or quoted), right at the top of today's essay. Somerby implies that Tomasky is being arrogant. How can we decide that if Somerby doesn't tell us what he said? Isn't there some arrogance involved in Somerby's name-calling of Tomasky without letting us in on what Tomasky said? I think so.
"I don't want to subscribe to another publication"
DeleteDo you see the irony here?
Where’s the irony, Dogface? I refuse to subscribe to the New York Times, but Somerby quotes it all the time.
DeleteTomasky didn’t call anyone dumb; he called them “gullible”, and those aren’t the same thing.
ReplyDelete“ In some cases, they voted for him because of the unexplained southern border. (It remains unexplained to this day.)”
ReplyDeleteBut what did they believe about the southern border, and where they gulled into believing it?
I do not believe that most Trump voters believe what he says about anything. I think they support Trump out of self-interest, taking vicarious pleasure from his antics and identifying with him as a bro, fellow misogynist or racist, rule-breaker and bomb thrower and all around naughty child. I don't believe they think anything bad will be allowed to happen to our nation when Trump screws up -- they have no sense of danger or exposure because they trust in the safety they have always experienced (because of more responsible presidents than this one). When they experience consequences they feel betrayed, as when someone gets arrested for drug use at Disneyland. They may view Trump as a spectator sport with fan rallies and a sense of enhanced identity when they wear MAGA gear. But I don't think they care whether they can believe what Trump says or not. It isn't real to them.
ReplyDeleteThere are certainly exceptions among the MAGA faithful. Some of them watched loved ones die during covid because they thought they didn't need vaccines or masks. Reality gobsmacked those people. It would be interesting to know how they feel about Trump now. What are the people saying who have lost jobs recently due to tariffs or DOGE? That seems more important than wondering why anyone believes a conman, by definition a person who knows how to manipulate others for their own benefit. The answer is just that they are human beings whose trust was abused in situations where it should have been safe to trust someone, especially a presidential candidate who has a gold toilet in each of his homes, even his plane.
The question should be "why isn't Trump in jail yet." Because that is what we do to those who lie, cheat, steal, con, rape women and young girls, and otherwise misbehave. We have laws that apply to guys like Trump. Why haven't we applied them for the public good? What is broken in our system that we cannot protect the people from a thief but instead elect him president? Did Tomasky investigate that? If so, what did he discover?
The ones I hear didn't really believe trump. There was no freakin' fuckin' way in hell they would ever vote for a woman, much less a black woman. Period. End of story.
ReplyDeleteThey are enjoying watching Prince Orange Chickenshit fire longtime Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden last week and replacing her with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche. I mean, it gets them hard to watch this woman summarily tossed to the side by a fat corrupt lying sack of shit. What else do you want to know?
I continue to find it remarkably offensive and stupid that Somerby puts forth Bertrand Russell as an example of someone who exhibits “the misbegotten products of linguistic illusion and muddled thinking.”
ReplyDeleteRussell wasn’t “gobsmacked” by his paradox. He was pointing out an inconsistency in set theory.
I could say Somerby is the one who has the muddled thinking about Russell’s work, but I won’t.
TDH sometimes cites Bo Dylan. Well, Dylan in 'the Times Are a-changin" sang: "'don't criticize what you don't understand." I think that would apply to his thing bout Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead. (I read, or treid to read, Process and Reality in college years ago - and certainly didn't understand it and am sure I couldn't make heads or tails of Russell's Principia Mathematica either - but that's probably on me, though maybe not). But Dylan's advice in that song might be something TDH should heed.
DeleteThe old Somerby would have distinguished between the Liars Paradox & the Zermolo/Russell Paradox.
DeleteIf Michael tomasky caused a single person to vote for Trump, I would like that person to be found and interviewed.
ReplyDeleteOne reason why the victims of con artists do not report the crime is because they are ashamed of being conned. The shame is not solely about their credulity but also about their own greed. Con artists succeed by offering an unlikely windfall if the mark helps the con artist in some way, often by matching money, investing, or helping break some rule. That makes the mark complicit in his own loss. People don't want to admit that if they had been less greedy, more honest, more of a rule follower, they wouldn't have been taken.
ReplyDeleteSomerby used to understand this process, referring to his own readers as rubes and marks. He called what journalists and politicians did "rube running". No, that wasn't very nice of him, but he has always been dismissive of his own readers, these days the liberals who he refers to as "us liberals" or "we blue voters". So, he doesn't have much right to call Tomasky arrogant, given his own attitudes at this blog.
Does Tomasky discuss Trump's false promises in these terms? I don't know because Somerby would rather talk about Tomasky himself than his ideas and his conclusions about Trump supporters' beliefs. Ideas are just the framework for Somerby's contempt, which he aims at us, even when deploring Gutfeld (did you know he is 60 years old?). If Somerby were serious about discussing Tomarksy, he would discuss the content of his writing, not whether he is a good decent person (as if Somerby were any judge of that).
“CA student details experience being forced to share locker room with biological male”
ReplyDeleteThis piece of video tape aired in April of this year, not during the election season. (by the way, Somerby’s link doesn’t work; it takes you to an “access denied” page).
At any rate, is Somerby claiming that videotape like this caused some voters to vote for Trump? Does he believe that is a sufficient reason? Fox viewers get only one side of issues like this, and if they base a vote on a one-sided presentation, can they then be called “gullible”? Apparently no complaints were filed in this particular case.
The part of the video shown by Fox did not "detail experience" at all. It was a declaration that boys shouldn't be there. Was the experience part edited out? Perhaps Somerby is hinting that blonde teens can get people to believe anything if they cry?
DeleteThere are some problems with the logical flow of today's post from Our Host. Most notably, Our Host quotes Tomasky asking a pertinent question about Trump's propensity for exaggeration, accompanied by one example out of many instances. From there, TDH swaps the example for the question.
ReplyDeleteLet that go. I'm more interested in the question as posed: "Who Were Those Gullible People Who Believed Donald Trump’s Bullsh*t?"
First, there's an important distinction that demands attention. There are people who believed Trump, and then there are people who voted for him. These groups overlap, but they're not identical.
Lots of people heard Trump insist that Haitian immigrants were eating cats. Some may have believed him. Many didn't. Some who didn't believe him still voted for him.
The same goes for Trump's claim he'd end the Ukraine war before inauguration. Many people may have recognized this as bullshit but voted for him anyway.
(We needn't look very far for people like this. They pop up in the TDH comments daily.)
Anyway, to my ear, Tomasky is asking a narrower question than Our Host credits him with: Who are the people who heard Trump's claims and actually believed him?
For the record, Tomasky doesn't propose a definitive answer to his question. He summarizes thusly:
Delete"It’s hard to say. Maybe those people’s instinct is to hate liberals. Maybe they believed all that 'he’s a businessman' crap. Maybe they just didn’t want a woman in the White House. Whatever the case, they’re poor judges of character, and we—and this is a 'we' that includes them—are about to pay a high price for their bamboozlement."
Good analysis, QiB. In fact, the subheading to tomasky’s essay says this: “ His campaign promises, from peace in Ukraine to “beautiful” tariffs, were truly unbelievable. And yet, somehow, many people believed him.”
DeleteMany people, not all. And yet, Somerby immediately switches to “ 77.3 million people voted for Candidate Trump. Those millions of people weren't all the same person.”, as if tomasky were referring to all Trump voters. Somerby does this often. I won’t ascribe a motive.
All this suggests a follow-up question: Why did some people vote for Trump despite recognizing his promises and statements as bullshit? Why did anyone expect a bullshitter and fantasist to be competent at running the nation?
DeleteThese are the questions I think Our Host calls to our attention. The answers suggest an embarrassing failure to offer a compelling alternative.
Hmm. Interesting point, but it’s hard for me to understand the idea that anyone would vote for a conman or sociopath knowingly, just because they didn’t like the other candidate.
DeleteHarris wasn’t “compelling” enough, so I’m going to vote for the lying conman sociopath? Does that make sense?
DeleteThe only compelling alternative to someone like Trump may be another conman. Do we have to become them to beat them? I found Harris compelling. Somerby didn’t.
DeleteHarris is a woman of color.
DeleteDoes it make sense that millions won't vote for someone on the basis of such an identity?
No.
Does it happen.
Duh, yes.
Is it probably the most significant reason why Harris got a low turnout?
Yes.
4:43 it is not hard to understand when you learn a bit about behavioral science.
@4:43. Indeed. That's the question I think is worth looking into.
DeleteQIB - I have always voted for the Dem candidate., and can't stand Trump. However, we "blues' tend to be arrogant. (What about the guy here who has come up with thousands of ways to claim that all Trump voters are racists?). There is an appeal to Trump. Politicians have a way of sounding phony. Some, or maybe almost all, of it is irrational. There are millions of people we are talking about. There are lots of reasons. I tend to think a lot of this is, like you say, Harris, never mind her race, wasn't all that appealing;. Also all this about white fragility, systemic racism, etc. when "racism" in the US is way less than in the past. Micro-aggressions, pronouns, males playing women's sports, what gender were you assigned at birth, men can get pregnant -, caravans of migrants heading toward and over the border, lot s of reasons that turn off voters.
DeleteAC: couple of things. How are “blues” arrogant? Citing an anonymous commenter at TDH doesn’t prove that. There are right wing commenters out there who say really horrible things, including racist things, and are pretty arrogant. Would you conclude from that that Republicans tend to be arrogant or racist?
DeleteSecondly:
"racism" in the US is way less than in the past.
That didn’t happen organically. It was the result of a massive effort. Many were jailed, some lost their lives. I can’t imagine you would feel that the goal of the civil rights movement was merely to reduce racism. Its goals have yet to be met. Recall the “achievement gap” and the average wealth of blacks vs whites. There are many people still alive today who went through that struggle, suffered at the hands of the authorities and at the hands of bigots. You now have the federal government under Trump removing books and documents about black people, about the civil rights struggle, about slavery and so on, because there’s a group of white folks who don’t want to know about it and who don’t want their children to know about it. That’s what all the controversy has been about teaching about the civil rights struggle in school. You need to learn the actual history of what Happened, and it is actively being suppressed by a group of people who tend to vote Republican. It does seem racist to me. You might disagree.
And I really don’t understand this opposition to or discomfort with gender issues. There have been transgender people forever, there have been gay people forever, and I think it just makes sense to let these people live their lives in peace and not demonize them in order to win elections.
Trump's promises were not bullshit. On the contrary, he already fulfilled several of them
Delete-- closing the Sothern border without any new legislation.
-- Ending DEI
-- Making tips and overtime tax deductible. (I don't agree with these policies, but Trump is fulfilling them)
-- Cutting waste and fraud. Less than promised, but more than any prior administration.
-- Cleaning up the Deep State. Lots more to due, but lots of progress
-- Renewing all the tax cuts in the 2017 bill.
People are broke. People are up to their eyeballs in debt and they know they will never get out of it. They don't trust the mainstream media. They don't trust the government. They don't trust any major institution. They don't have anything. And when you don't have anything, you don't have anything to lose. So what does it matter how much Trump is a bullshitter? It's a country full of bullshitters and they're all feeding people bullshit all day long. People chose the guy they felt was a more authentic bullshitter. That's all.
DeleteEg. Democrats were telling voters there was an economic recovery but data showed most people were experiencing real wage losses and declining purchasing power at the very same time. Trump used that to appeal to people’s actual lived realities. Joe Biden was saying that he would never pardon his son and then he gave him an ostentatious pardon. People look at instances like these as bullshit also.
A vacuum has been created in our political system. Elites have captured both parties and control them with money. Trump, despite his bullshit, exploited this vacuum with a populist message that rang truer than the Democrats’ bullshit claims of progress, worker-friendly policies and ethical superiority.
America is the land of bullshit. We are the bullshit capital of the world. We are surrounded at every moment by bullshit. We manufacture, process and distribute total bullshit like no other organized group in history. We are a bullshit country, filled with bullshitters who do nothing but dispense total bullshit all day, everyday.
DeleteAnd when you are the world capital of bullshit, you elect the biggest bullshitter of them all to be your president. No?
AC/MA,
DeleteAre you ever going to tell us exactly which group of people shouldn't have their rights protected, because that's woke?
"California student Celeste Duyst discusses her experience being forced to share a locker room with a biological male and the response to telling her story on 'Fox & Friends Weekend.'"
ReplyDeleteThis student no doubt has eyes that are equipped with eyelids, making those eyes capable of being closed in order to preserve the privacy of others and protect oneself from seeing something unexpected.
I was a student in high school once, forced to change in a large locker room with other students. I didn't want to see any of their private parts, or have them see mine. I dressed and undressed in a modest way (every girl knows how to do this) and disliked every second of the process. This was with girls, not boys. If a girl is bent on maintaining privacy, she can do so, and doesn't need to be confronted by the only part of a boy that will shock her. The transgirl will no doubt be hiding her male parts too. So it would take a great deal of determined effort to even know that someone had them.
But I find myself wondering why Celeste has never been able to view male genitalia before that. It would mean she has no brothers, has been to the homes of no one with a male baby, never babysat such a child who needed a diaper change, never encountered a flasher in a trench coat, never watched a movie with male nudity (there are quite a few these days), never come across a porn magazine hidden or discarded in public, never seen the fun party favors used at bachelorette parties, never seen a work of art in a museum depicting male nudity (David, but also frequently cherubs and paintings of baby Jesus being bathed), never seen a dog or farm animal mating, never received a dick pic on the internet and never had a boyfriend who displayed physical affection.
What kind of sheltered life has this girl had, and is that level of naivete desirable in someone who most likely will have a husband somewhere down the road. Should she be shocked on her marriage night? Stories of innocence include tragic stories of wedding nights that caused both man and wife a great deal of unnecessary grief. But men like Roy Moore want to be sure their wives have never had a chance to compare them to another man.
The greater abuse is that this girl's parents probably put her up to testifying like this. That will be something she may later regret, something that may make her a laughingstock among current friends. Her privacy should have been protected not abused by her parents. Even Michael Jackson knew enough to cover his children's faces with paper bags when walking through the airport. Why would her parents use her as a political pawn this way?
If I have a mistaken view of her story, that may be because Somerby's link to the video results in an error message saying Access Denied.
There are many families where the male and female children engage in nude swimming, bathing, dressing and undressing and may even share rooms. The phrase "like kissing your sister" means that there is no sexual interest in doing this, but that family members do not produce lust. The same should be true of a transgirl in a locker room. That girl is not interested in the other girls as sex objects, the way a man would be. They consider themselves girls, not boys. The inability of conservatives to recognize this may be related to their lack of ability to empathize in general, with poor people, neighbors, immigrants, people with disabilities, the list is endless. If you are a man who cannot imagine ever feeling a lack of arousal around your sister, that is your problem, not your sister's. The sick minds come from people like Celeste's parents.
Does anyone here imagine that the transgirl in question wanted to be stared at, talked about, bullied and shunned, just for the right to dress in a dressing room with Celeste? Somerby's choice to feature this Fox excerpt is mean-spirited, but Somerby is not a particularly nice guy and he hates women. Whatever his motives for presenting this Fox clip today, they are not innocent.
I viewed the video and she is doing nothing except repeating right wing propaganda while crying. She does not recount any personal reaction except to repeat that the transgirl has XY chromosomes (how would she know that?) and shouldn't be there. It is as if her parents or another adult wrote her statement for her to deliver, without any traumatic details or personal content at all. Not a single word about what made the experience difficult for her. Just an assertion that "he" didn't belong there.
DeleteFrom what I read, no complaints were filed with the school in this instance.
DeleteFox News' version of the story was obviously phony from the get-go.
Delete"conservatives' lack of ability to empathize in general"
DeleteHow much empathy do you show to a teenage girl who doesn't want to turn around in the locker room and see a swinging dick?
Is that what she saw, 5:47?
DeleteWhat guy isn’t facing his locker instead of the rest of the room? This is made up.
DeleteDoes he take a shower while he's facing his locker? Does he walk to the shower while he's facing his locker? Does he walk over to the bathroom while he's facing his locker?
DeleteDon't be so stupid.
In fact, 9:52, the young lady from the Fox video did not testify to seeing any genitalia.
DeletePpeople walk around wearing a towel.
Delete"Does anyone here imagine that the transgirl in question wanted to be stared at, talked about..."
DeleteYes. It's called autogynephilia and is common in transgirls and transwomen.
Tomasky called Trump “ an outright sociopath” in his essay.
ReplyDeleteMichael Tomasky's column is too silly to be taken seriously. Here's why
ReplyDelete1. Everybody knows that Trump exaggerates. We all knew, or should have known, that by "Day 1" Trump meant early in his term
2. It's completely normal for candidates to over-promise. Examples are easy to find.
3. The word "literally" is frequently used to mean "figuratively" or "not literally." In fact, I think the latter meaning may be more common than the former. This usage is so common, it's in the dictionary
:2 in effect : virtually —used in an exaggerated way to emphasize a statement or description that is not literally true or possible
4. Trump's efforts to end conflict causing hundreds of thousands of deaths is very important. I think it's laudable. But, even if you think it's harmful, it's very important. It's silly to ignore this vital issue and just focus on the precise wording of a campaign promise.
No one is focused on precise wording. He has made no progress at all.
DeleteDiC, tomasky is wondering about the people who DID take Trump literally, and why they believed him. And there must be some, right? Or are you saying that no Trump voter really believes Trump?
Delete@7:10 I am saying that Trump voters are smart enough to understand what he means. I think I was.
DeleteWhy didn’t Trump just say what he meant, then? Why lie or exaggerate, if everyone knew what he really meant?
Delete@7:34 -- look at the dictionary definition above: used in an exaggerated way to emphasize a statement or description that is not literally true or possible
DeleteYou cited a definition of “literally”. You did not cite a reason why trump lies. If a problem is real, or felt to be real, why are lies necessary to “emphasize” it? You don’t think he is duping people by promising things he can’t deliver (“before I take office”). You are actually saying that no one believed that? Why should these lies not result in Trump being discredited, or not being believed?
DeleteHere’s another one: the tariffs will make us all rich.
Delete"I am saying that Trump voters are smart enough to understand what he means."
DeleteThis is one of the dumbest statements I've ever read.
To point out the obvious, if Trump repeatedly and emphatically states he will end the Ukraine War on Day One (or before) and then comes nowhere close to doing so, he hasn't exaggerated. He's lied.
DeleteEven a child knows this.
@7:53 Naturally a candidate wants to emphasize the good things he expects to accomplish.
DeleteHector - If Trump actually ends the Ukraine war in 6 months I'd say he came very close to his promise. The important part of the promise was ending the war. If he accomplishes that, he came close IMO.
BTW I am not terribly optimistic about ending the war. Putin doesn't seem particularly interested.
And here's David to prove my point. He knows Trump was bullshitting. He knows Trump makes promises that he can't keep. He doesn't care.
DeleteQuaker- I said I was pessimistic, not Trump. Also I was more optimistic when Trump made the promise. I am more pessimistic now because of Putin’s actions.
DeleteAll politicians make promises that they can't keep.
DeleteHow does Trump's Ukraine promise differ greatly from broken promises from other presidents?
DeleteIt differs in that Donald Trump is manifestly trying hard to fulfill it.
DeleteBy humiliating our ally? How much longer are you content to watch Putin bend Trump over?
DeleteBy trying to end this war, and to prevent a likely nuclear war; exactly as he promised.
DeleteIf by "ally" you mean Western domination of what's left of former Ukraine, he's trying to maintain that too. So, what are you unhappy about?
LOL. Thanks, Boris for your contribution.
DeleteTrump voters are smart enough to know that when Trump exaggerates about reducing the deficit, they know he really means he's going to keep minorities down.
DeleteFiguratively, there is a Republican voter who isn't a bigot.
DeleteHe said repeatedly that he would end the war before he took office.
Delete8:17,
DeleteBut Republican voters were smart enough to hear that he's going to keep minorities down in that statement.
Trump: You hide behind a tree and the drone comes down and it circles you with fire.. you see these trees being knocked down like like they're being sawed down by a top of the line timber-man like like you know who, Sean Duffy
ReplyDeleteDickhead in Cal: All of us trump lickspittles understand precisely what Prince Orange Chickenshit means.
I was looking for areas where the Biden and Harris campaigns overpromised. What I mostly found was a promise that they were not Donald Trump.
ReplyDeleteBiden didn't promise to deliver the lowest unemployment rate in over half a century. B iden delivered the lowest unemployment rate in over half a century.
DeletePrince Orange Chickenshit promised to lower prices on Day 1. Yesterday Walmart announced:
DeleteWalmart says it will hike some prices due to tariffs.
Trump “overpromised” I suppose back in 2016 when he said he would provide the best healthcare system, much better than Obama care. He then proceeded to do absolutely nothing about our healthcare system. That’s not just overpromising; he did not even try to meet that goal.
DeleteAlso, When you promise something by such and such a date, that puts a specific time frame on an event. Trump does this over and over again, “this will be done in the next two weeks”, he was famous for saying. That is a specific form of overpromising that makes him look ridiculous every time he doesn’t meet the timeframe. If an employee says “I’ll be done in two weeks”, And the boss comes after two weeks and asks if it’s done and the employee says “oh no I’m not done yet”, The boss might give him a second chance to do it or he might fire him right then. Why would you tolerate this kind of bullshit from a president?
All he has to say is “I’m going to work really hard to bring peace to Ukraine.” But Trump wants to dupe people about his ability to get things done “ it’ll be really easy “ he often says.
Trump could snap his fingers and end the war anytime he wants.
DeleteInstead, he's hurting minorities, because that's the reason he was elected.
Did Biden and Harris really promise not to waddle around in a dirty diaper, or is this one of David's exaggerations?
DeletePlease link to the quotes from Biden and Harris that they aren't fascists.
Delete@8:81 - I pay attention to facts more than predictions. The fact is that inflation went down last month
ReplyDeleteI find it amusing that when Biden and the Dems wanted to raise the debt ceiling, it was a giant scandal that signaled the financial apocalypse of the USA. But when Trump demanded (prior to the election) that Republicans increase it by 5 trillion dollars, republicans were like “yes sir!”
DeleteInflation is right about where it was the day Prince Orange Chickenshit took office, Dickhead. That means prices are still going up, not down, Dickhead in Cal.
DeleteWalmart says it will hike some prices due to tariffs.
That is not a fucking prediction, Dickhead in Cal. That happened yesterday, you fucking fascist freak.
I don't recall Donny "two dolls' promising children may have to suffer a little for his billionaire tax cuts.
@8:31 - history doesn’t report on Presidential campaign promises; they pay attention to actual accomplishments.
ReplyDeleteThat’s what you hope. I believe history will show what a pathological liar Trump is.
Delete9:15,
DeleteShow me on the doll where Biden's lowest unemployment rate in over half a century touched you.
The funny thing is, Dickhead in Cal has been here spiking the football and doing an endzone dance at least three separate times thanking Prince Orange Chickenshit for ending the war in Ukraine, only to sheepishly retract his premature celebrations.
DeleteGoing thru life thinking everything the felon says is bullshit is a good way to go.
Delete