This is a great description of the man and how he would rule, not govern but rule. It's from 2017, and here we are five years later with Trump still claiming to be president, and worse, much worse, maybe 50 million people agreeing with him.
https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics ... p-bullshit
"The Bullshitter-in-Chief
Donald Trump says a lot of things that aren’t true, often shamelessly so, and it’s tempting to call him a liar.
But that’s not quite right. As the Princeton University philosophy professor Harry Frankfurt put it in a famous essay, to lie presumes a kind of awareness of and interest in the truth — and the goal is to convince the audience that the false thing you are saying is in fact true. Trump, more often than not, isn’t interested in convincing anyone of anything. He’s a bullshitter who simply doesn’t care.
...When Trump says something like he’s just learned that Barack Obama ordered his phones wiretapped, he’s not really trying to persuade people that this is true. It’s a test to see who around him will debase themselves to repeat it blindly. There’s no greater demonstration of devotion.
...He’s a man who doesn’t care much about the truth. He’s a man who cares deeply about loyalty. The two qualities merge in the way he wields bullshit. His flagrant lies serve as a loyalty test.
Harry Frankfurt’s theory of bullshit
As Frankfurt put it in his groundbreaking essay “On Bullshit,” “one of the most salient features of our culture is that there is so much bullshit.”
Frankfurt attempts to give the term definition that distinguishes the bullshitter from the liar, with the most salient distinction being that the liar is genuinely trying to trick you.
“The bullshitter,” by contrast, “may not deceive us, or even intend to do so, either about the facts or about what he takes the facts to be.”
The liar wants to be seen as the one telling the truth. The bullshitter just doesn’t care. That’s Trump. During the course of the 2016 campaign, he said over and over again that America is “the highest-taxed nation in the world,” which isn’t even remotely close to being true. But he kept saying it, despite having been called out repeatedly, and then he said it again in a recent interview with the Economist.
Trump says, over and over again, that he won one of the greatest Electoral College landslides in history. It’s not true, it’s obviously not true to anyone who bothers to look it up or remembers any past presidential elections, and it’s not even remotely clear why it’s important. But Trump keeps on saying it.
For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.
This is a perfect portrait of a typical Trump statement. His assertions about policy matters are often so garbled as to make it nearly impossible to work out what he’s even trying to say in order to evaluate its truth or falsity.
The reason is that Trump is often completely indifferent to accuracy. His administration, like all administrations, sometimes tries to sell the public on something or other using tactics that are at times deceptive. But where he breaks from the mold is in the sheer quantity of things he seems to say for no reason at all, utterly outside the context of a planned sales pitch.
The annals of Trumpdown are simply littered with this kind of casual, fundamentally pointless falsehood:
• He told the Economist that he invented the phrase “prime the pump.”
• He says China stopped manipulating its currency only after he won the election.
• He says “millions” of illegal voters cost him the popular vote.
• He claims to have had an incredibly productive first 100 days in office.
• He says labor force dropouts are counted as employed by the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
• He says Germany and other NATO members owe money to the United States.
None of this is useful in moving the ball forward on any kind of policy goal. And indeed, Republicans on Capitol Hill and even in the executive branch typically groan about these outbursts of Trumpian bullshit that throw their work into chaos and tend to at least temporarily derail the GOP’s substantive goals. But Trump not only keeps bullshitting, he tends to demand that his team offer a zealous defense of whatever bullshit he happens to spout on any given day — putting staffers and legislative allies in the untenable position of defending the indefensible.
The function of bullshit in the Trump regime
Trump launched his term in office by dispatching White House press secretary Sean Spicer to deliver an inaugural press briefing dedicated to disputing clear photographic evidence about crowd size.
t seemed insane, and one popular interpretation was that Trump had, in fact, lost his marbles and simply couldn’t stand the blow to his ego implied by mocking media coverage. But George Mason University economist Tyler Cowen argues that this kind of thing can serve a strategic role.
The key issues are trust and loyalty. By asking subordinates to echo his bullshit, Trump accomplishes two goals:
• He tests the loyalty of his subordinates. In Cowen’s words, “if you want to ascertain if someone is truly loyal to you, ask them to do something outrageous or stupid.”
• The other is that it turns his aides into members of a distinct tribe. “By requiring subordinates to speak untruths, a leader can undercut their independent standing, including their standing with the public, with the media and with other members of the administration."
Trump: “We had the safest border in the history of our country - or at least recorded history. I guess maybe a thousand years ago it was even better.”
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, Useless. So much for "Ignored". You fail again. Plus, Useless, you've been busted too many times for anyone to believe you're not reading my posts, anyhow. It's just your excuse for cowering. Awww.
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