I ended up watching most of Donald Trump's endless speech tonight, and it was remarkable. I mean, the guy not only promised immediate peace and prosperity worldwide, he literally said he was going to cure cancer and Alzheimer's if he was elected. I'm not making that up.
I feel sorry for the poor reporters assigned to fact check the speech. What's the point? As near as I could tell, virtually every single thing he said was false. Oh, it's true that Don Jr. is his son and J.D. Vance is his running mate. But on major policy points I only counted two that were actually true:
- Wages grew under his administration. That's true—though not as fast as they did in the four previous years under Barack Obama. (Note that the chart below ends in January 2020 so I'm not counting COVID against him.)
.
- China took away a lot of American manufacturing jobs. That's also true, though it happened in the noughts and ended about 15 years ago.
.
Most of Trump's lies were just the usual stuff that goes back to 2016, though there are a few new ones that I haven't been able to puzzle out. He repeated yet again his claim that Joe Biden wants to raise taxes 4x, which is obviously absurd—but where does it come from? The only thing I can find is that apparently Biden has tossed out the idea of quadrupling the tax on stock buybacks from 1% to 4%. I suppose that must be where it wormed its way into Trump's brain. Maybe?
Aside from that it was just falsehood after falsehood. Quite an impressive performance in its own way. And his themes were pretty much the same as they've been since 2016: illegal immigration, crime, illegal immigration, trade deals, illegal immigration, American energy, and illegal immigration. Plus his odd ongoing assertion that we're on the brink of World War III. All in all, it was more weird than anything else. Joe Biden may be declining mentally, but Trump's brain worms continue to eat away at him too. I wonder if he even knows what consensus reality is like anymore?
People still bother fact checking the firehose of bullshit coming out of Trump's mouth?
I thought everybody just assumed that literally everything he said was a lie.
They were mostly the same old lies. Just cut and paste the prior fact checks.
But it doesn’t matter. The people he is talking to love his lies even though they don’t believe them. Yeah, it’s weird.
It’s no different than the kid who finds the one word or phrase or sentence that drives his parents up the wall, and then proceeds to say it over and over again for weeks, months, years whenever he wants to annoy his parents.
The only weird thing about this behavior is that most people used to grow out of it. Now a sizable plurality of Americans engage in it for their entire lives with everyone else, but especially everyone else coded as “Democrats.”
& the fact deum found that piece about biden wanting to raise tax on stock buybacks from 1% to 4% means the usual gang of idiots at politifact, plus standalone scumbags like glenn kessler & daniel dale, will rate it true.
Actual Daniel Dale (the only one I have checked): "This is false, just as it was when Trump made the same claim during the 2020 election campaign and in early 2024."
Thank you for saying: Trump LIED. I HATE the word: falsehood.
It reminds me of an oil tanker running aground and dumping an immense amount of oil that destroys life in all directions - and we hear that some oil was spilled (that sounds like a widdle accident).
"claimed without evidence" is another euphemism that needs to stop.
Kevin has the right idea. Faster and more efficient to note the rare times Donald speaks the truth and then identify everything else he says as lies.
Did he pause for commercial breaks?
That would have been in character and glorious.
I don't think anybody paid him to pause - so no.
The Melania appearance was also very strange.
the check cleared
no, cash only.
melania knows not to trust donald to not put a stop payment on it or write it from a closed account.
Hulk Hogan, Dana White, and Kid Rock.
That happened.
where were kid rock's heroes from the methadone clinics?
"it was just falsehood after falsehood" and there were, no doubt, true statements in there as well. What's going on?
It's called Propaganda, where the Goal is to convince - NOT strive to be rational, irrational, easy going, stern, truthful, or deceptive. Trump is the salesman in the appliance section of the home furnishings store who will say anything to close the deal on the washing machine.
And as I said above - it was just LIE after LIE. "Falsehood" is such a bullshit word.
“Hello, Milwaukee!”
and
“I’m Donald J. Trump.”
There’s your truth.
trump should have given the address from shank hall & opened with, "hello, cleveland".
Back in 2016, in his inaugural speech, Trump babbled "We stand at the birth of a new millennium, ready to unlock the mysteries of space, to free the Earth from the miseries of disease and to harness the industries and technologies of tomorrow."
I've never understood why more attention wasn't paid to these vacuous words.
"to free the Earth from the miseries of disease "
He almost accomplished that one, but there weren't enough bleach injectors and uv lights.
Culling the herd was closer to what he had in mind. It became a major talking point in Republican circles in 2020.
Boring trump with lies and incoherence. The media has to start covering his rallies again live. Who knows? Someone might take a shot at him. You can’t miss that on live TV.
But then, the world was hacked! Or maybe just a bad update affecting windows. My employer texted me at 4 am telling me not to turn on my laptop. ????
The AI overlords are growing more powerful.
I thought you were going to say he spoke for 90 minutes and said nothing because that seemed to be the consensus of a lot of people. The convention will be remembered as Snoozefest '24
Trump tells lies as a display of dominance. What he's really saying is "I can say whatever I want and nobody can stop me."
+1
that's the problem. msm helps him out by showing all his bs as if it's serious.
If Trump said the sky was blue, I could be sure I needed either an umbrella or a flashlight.
Of course it was all lies. It's all he ever does. And it works, so why change? His base will believe him no matter what and the msm are too kowtowed to do anything about it. Fact checking Trump is like draining Lake Michigan with a teaspoon.
As I commented in another thread, his base doesn't "believe" him; they love the fact that he can shovel horseshit for hour after hour with absolutely no compunction. There's a kind of bad-assness to it. They know it's not literally true. But it "feels" like it is.
Hannah Arendt observed in her book on fascism many years ago that Goebbels's Nazi propaganda machine wasn't meant to be believed: it was to awe/terrify the public with the fact that the government could create its own reality and make bad things happen to you if you denied it. Conversely, consenting to the propgandistic version of reality and enforcing it conferred certain benefits -- jobs, influence, power, sense of belonging, etc.
Or: what shapeofsociety said above
They may not believe it, but they want to believe it. Which is the disturbing thing about it. It's a cult. Donald Trump took the GOP strategy of bending the truth and went even further, by outright breaking it. Whether he wins or loses, we are in for trouble. Probably more immediately if he loses.
107% undocumented immigrant employment!
His lies are so often over the top to the point of seeming like parody or sarcasm, yet people go along with it. But when he says things like "I don't care about you, I just want your vote" they don't take it seriously. The handful of times he's ever been honest it usually goes right over their heads.
then they get upset he's not hurting the people he needs to be hurting & is instead hurting them.
Sometimes I hope the GOP get into control just so I can see the look of betrayal on his followers faces as he screws them over. Some might actually be o.k. with it. That quote from LBJ comes to mind. But unfortunately GOP policies affect everyone. Not just the delusional dopes in Trumps cult. He can cause or allow to cause real harm to people.
trump voters, previously recipients of ssi, dying on the streets from untreated disease & malnourishment, unhoused & untended, will be disgusting (but not undeserved) after mikey johnson & rick scott tearout social security & hand the trustfund lock stock & barrel to wall street with the stroke of trump's larger than am averagesized pen.
This is correct jte21. They love it, and they love it because if they only had the money Trump does they would be free to say anything they like as well. Of course, a certain number of them could care less as well, but the main point will be made at some point on this thread by Leo1088, who cannot get over, absolutely cannot get over, that in what appears to be a field he or she knows something about, academia, you just can't espouse quite any view you like with no repercussions. Tjhat's their opposition to DEI programs, it used to be just preferential hiring, now its against preferential hiring and rules on speech harassment. They didn't like the first remedy and they absolutely cannot stand the second.
Worst speech in the history of politics. Guy is so beatable.
correct. Dems need to get their shit together
They need to hit Project 2025 and his past of using scabs instead of union workers. They need to be as relentless as he and the GOP are. The question is can the DNC do it?
His words don't matter. They rarely do. He appeals to the worst of his supporters nature. And they love him for it. I'm a union member and I see a lot of support for him from my fellow union member despite him being notoriously anti union. It makes no sense.
or as they said of Mussolini, he allows them to be their worst selves. That is, he not only appeals; he enables.
You are absolutely correct. Unfortunately.
Agree and the only truths were words NOT spoken.
1- He will stick it to the liberals
2- His vice president will NEVER certify an electoral vote electing a Dem
Yeah, I think not enough people are talking about the fact that will be Vance's main mission. In fact the entire GOP is basically gearing up to turn every election from here on out into a complete shitshow with intimidation, corruption, and court challenges. Right now of course the media is too busy losing their shit over Biden's situation and (still) trying to normalize Trump that they haven't gotten around to this minor story yet.
There was a time when economic self-interest largely drove politics -- plutocrats voted Republican because they wanted low taxes and de-regulation; workers voted Democratic because Democrats were pro-labor and pro-union. Trump could have them all fired, knee them in the nuts, and screw their wives in front of them and they wouldn't give a shit because, hey, they still got Jeebus. And their guns. Oh, and somewhere, a poor, migrant child is crying, which is gravy.
It was honestly so bad, so self indulgently awful, that you kinda have to wonder if Trump was trying a double bank shot: give a speech so bad, with so many echoes of 2016, that Biden decides to stay in.
But Trump is not that strategic. In this case, he obviously couldn't resist the opportunity to strike back at his enemies. Crazy Nanci, etc.
He said the same things he always says in the same way he always says it, teetering on or crossing into incoherence. But it’s worked for him for 8 years. There is a long trail of political corpses of candidates who thought him “so beatable”. If he were, why isn’t DeSantis or Haley the Republican candidate? Why is he ahead in the polls? Trump’s appeal is a complete mystery to you and me, I get that. And that’s why he is so hard to beat.
like a vintage fidel stemwinder.
This underscores the problem with Biden as the candidate, however. Joe should be out there refuting every one of these false claims and calling Trump out for the ignorant liar that he is. Joe should be doing this repeatedly, on interviews, press conferences, rallies, etc. - never letting up.
Long before the debate debacle, Biden was dropping the ball on defending his presidency. As a result he has low approval ratings despite a roaring economy, receding inflation, lowering crime rates, becoming stock market - all the things that should mean an incumbent president will sail to re-election. He no longer has the communication skills needed to make the case forcefully. That's the shitty situation we're in.
Very well put. Biden has never been a good communicator of ideas: he just assumes that people agree with him and gives them the rah-rah. What he has is doggedness in what he sees as the right thing to do, and for whatever reason, that is often what's best for the country. He has a good "Presidential temperament".
I don't think Harris has that same good judgment, though. When it's a topic on which she cares deeply, she can be a tough interrogator, but her answers to even simple questions are way too circumlocutive: she beats around the bush and it sounds evasive and milquetoast.
I know it won't happen, but I'd really love to see "that woman from Michigan" delivering an acceptance address at the Democratic Convention.
I don't agree. Refuting the false claims directly only draws attention to them. What Biden should be doing, campaign wise is noting that we have the best economy in 50 years, at least. And so on. Without referring to Trump.
References to Trump should be of the nature of "the one-man crime wave". Which Biden has already called him, at a rally.
I have to disagree. Failing to refute Trump's lies leaves them hanging out there. People will say "I heard Biden wants to quadruple our taxes."
Biden needs to say "Trump is lying - I am not planning to raise your taxes."
He needs to say it forcefully. He needs to say it a lot.
I would rather do a colonoscopy prep than watch that Orange Cheeto for 90 minutes.
I'd rather go through the procedure without anesthesia than listen to Trump at all. Listening to him reminds me of all the late night infomercials on late night TV I used to watch back in the day. Pure ????????.
reminder: trump had a colonoscopy without anaesthetic while president specifically so he wouldn't have to devolve power to pence for 90 minutes.
also, i believe he enjoys things going up his ass. (as to be expected from our second gay president.)
He did the 4x thing for taxes, but not for the price of bacon (noted by Kevin last week)?
The assertion 'China took away a lot of American manufacturing jobs' frames the transfer of US firms manufacturing labor from America to China as a conspiracy of the Chinese. The strategy to transfer labor to a lower wage foreign country was devised and carried out by American business executives. American businesses took these jobs to China. China took nothing. China did educate its working class and developed it to become productive.
China, like Japan before it, has a deliberate policy of subsidizing export industries. For a long time it deliberately kept the value of its currency low, although when that came to an end the trade imbalance continued. As its internal economy has worsened recently, the Chinese have again turned to major emphasis on exports such as electric cars.
But yes, American corporate executives took advantage of these subsidies and much lower labor costs - they have been collaborating with the Chinese. The same executives are contributors to the Republican party and have long controlled its real economic policy.
It will be interesting to see if Trump really does take significant action against China or just flails around with random tariffs, as he did before when President. He has no understanding of these matters, but the big-money people who will be in his administration know what they want.
The corporate overlords probably don't care that much what Trump does with China as long as there's tax cuts and deregulation. They can just move their manufacturing centers to Thailand or Vietnam or India. Tomatoe, tomahtoh.
What I came here to say. The Chinese didn't take our jobs, our betters gave them to China, because they profited from screwing American workers. Did China help by currency manipulation (that is, printing Yuan and using them to buy US Dollars, thereby making Yuan cheaper and dollars more expensive)? Yes. They did that to protect and grow their manufacturing industries. Successfully, as it happens, and for the benefit of the Chinese people.
Don't hold your breath for Trump to go against our betters in favor of workers, either.
And let’s not forget that when Trump was touting America First he was manufacturing stuff in China.
the ivanka's chinese coffins piece.
“Joe Biden may be declining mentally, but Trump's brain worms continue to eat away at him too.”
So the rule is:
1) When Biden talks, write about Biden’s mental decline. (See Drum’s July 7 post titled “Biden displays yet another mental lapse.”)
2) When Trump talks, write about Trump’s mental decline, but be sure to mention that Biden is declining as well.
Is Drum bending over backwards to avoid appearing biased against Trump?
No, he's just pointing out that a sane R Party would be looking at ditching their candidate, too.
"It's easier to fool people than it is to convince them that they have been fooled."
-- Mark Twain
We ARE on the brink of World War III. Witness:
Putin swallows Ukraine because someone is still pissed at Zelensky for not joining the conspiracy. China sees that and says "Wait, we can do that now?" and goes for a visit at Taiwan's house. Putin realizes that whole "Ukraine does not exist; is always Russia" argument also applies to NATO allies Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia, and maybe later on Poland. We'll see how it goes. And there you are. Article 5 gets you World War II again, with 2 fronts on opposite sides of the world, which the Pentagon has itching trying to refight since 1946.
See? It's easy to make up shit like that. Scary too.