374
Donald Trump's colossal admission during trial
(www.newsweek.com)
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 07 Nov 2023
374 points (94.1% liked)
News
23305 readers
3821 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. We have an actively updated blocklist, which you can see here: https://lemmy.world/post/2246130 if you feel like any website is missing, contact the mods. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
The thing I love most about this article is this one throw-away little line right here:
It just illustrates who Trump is so well. First, he hears a term that he doesn't understand, like: "election interference". Like what he did when he incited his cult of morons to attack the capitol during January 6th to prevent Congress from certifying the election. Then, he takes that term that he doesn't understand and uses it improperly to insinuate that that's what's being done to him. This is either because he's too dumb to know what it means and too stubborn to look it up, or because he believes that about his cultists.
This is the exact same playbook he used for "puppet" during his debates with Hillary, "Fake news" when he was campaigning, "witch hunt" when he was being investigated for impeachable offenses, etc.
The man is a complete god damned moron, and yet somehow, he's managed to figure out that a significant number of Americans are even dumber than he is, and he has become their messiah. It's awe-inducing.
This is what fascists do. They co-opt the language of their political opponents, and divorce any meaning from the word.
The strategy is to deny their opponents the vocabulary they need to organize. This is part of the same strategy as burning books that teach black history and banning students from saying the word gay.
They never taught their slaves how to read either
What's the counter to this strategy of theirs, is there one?
To not focus on the semantics but the main point. It's obvious whoever is doing it is being childish and immature so the counter tactic is to be the adult in the room and to talk to them as if they were a child you were disciplining.
Alt-right playbook
That's not Trump not understanding what things mean, that's modern Republican messaging strategy. MTG literally just called a protest Tlaib led "an insurrection" last week. They water down words until they have no meaning anymore, and explicitly accuse the other side of what they're doing to feed the "both sides" narrative, and take weight off genuine accusations from Democrats or the media. They've been doing it for a while. They've also done it with "weaponization of government" recently and a few other words and phrases I can't think of right now. This is why people talk about Republicans being hypocrites and "projecting". They do it very much on purpose.
He's watering down the terms. "Fake news" is a perfect example. He completely stole the term and directed attention away from all the literally fake news websites created to help his election.
Can't attribute that to Trump, news themselves watered down "fake news" when they started putting up fact checks that weren't very factfull
He's a moron's idea of an intelligent man.
You don't have to be smart to be a conman. And being not the brightest bulb in any room, might actually help Trump doing what he does best (conning people): ethical or non gullible people are very quickly put off by him, leaving him surrounded by unethical people who have no qualms enabling him (as long as they believe that they stand to gain from it) + gullible people that can be milked for all their worth. This is why it was such a smart move for Trump to leave the democratic party and become a republican: the republican party loves gullible voters + unethical fellow travellers. Basically the same reasoning as to why spam phishing mail is so obvious usually: scammers don't want to waste their time on non gullible people.
This is why Jerry Falwell approached Ronald Reagan: they both loved money, power, and authority that those provide. Falwell provided Reagan with millions of followers who had been brainwashed from birth to blindly obey a male authority figure. Hence, the modern Republican Party: millions of "Christians" whose beliefs are diametrically opposed to the teachings of their God. Cognitive dissonance at it's finest.
He's genius is in his ability to market himself. the fact that he is a moron just means he's often stumbling on stupid shit that will resonate with morons, and he has that keen sense to take advantage of it.
Trump's defense strategy: "No, YOU!"