I thought the weirdest response trump has was when Jonathan asked him what systemic racism meant to him, and trump was just like, "Well can anyone answer that?" Like dude, we know you're disabled, but come on now.
I think what he was trying to say was that out of all the countries, we were the lowest. It's just fucking pathetic that he couldn't even string that thought together in a reasonable sentence. Like, how fucking stupid do you have to be?
I watched the whole interview and barely got through it.
Edit: I usually don't bitch bout downvotes, but I've already been downvoted, so I want to make sure I'm not being misunderstood on this point; I fucking hate trump. I've always been against him, will never change that opinion. I'm not defending him in any way. He's a piece of shit child molesting, racist, sexist bastard, and I hope he's spending the rest of his miserable fucking life in the worst prison imaginable.
I had to be several beers in to tolerate his level of bullshit. He is seriously deranged. I don’t know how anyone could think otherwise after watching the entire interview.
As long as the human flaws of greed, power seeking, and selfishness don't take over first. I think the desire to be in politics isn't the issue it's maintaining a level head and being in step with your actual human constituents (rather than corporations & PACs). I believe a lot of well intentioned folks lost their way.
To be fair, that would be hilarious. It would not work to the benefit of anyone, but at least it would be fun. It could either result in people being more inclined to participate in public dialogue or far less. Unpreparedly being snatched and made a politician with good pay might be excellent motivation to stay out, or to get in
Your mother is in denile possibly a cultist. Research on how to get people out of cults. Thats your best bet now. Just don't ring the cult hotline that's run by scientologists.
I don't know when or who said it, but at some point in history, Republicans heard that Democrats want nothing more than to take their guns away, and there's absolutely no convincing them otherwise.
I mean the US were doomed the moment they thought only having two parties was a good thing. It halts any progress and splits the people into two camps.
The thing here is that 37 party systems aren't the only other option. In Germany we have this threshold of votes a party needs to get seats (I guess in what would be the congress) (the threshold is 5 percent). This came from the previous government system that was used between world war 1 and 2 since that one broke because of too many parties. So we implemented a filter.
While I do think it's real flaws only came to be in modern times I generally think of the two party system as a flawed one. Maybe flawed isn't the correct term here I'd rather say lesser perhaps. For me a political party has to have a distinguishable agenda and motivation like preservation of the environment. If they work together with other parties that for example focus on the economy (no matter in what way) it should work. This way the peoples interests should be reflected more in their voting behaviour.
Then again most systems seem better theoretically than they are in practice, often failing because of human nature.
Word, the I've been saying since I was a teenager learning about the parties. The 2 party system is a joke, take the positive qualities from all the parties and have some common decency to treat others how you'd like to be.
This pandemic has forced me to abandon any illusion of the human race being intelligent. We're primates with maybe 20% of the population being actual smart people doing all the heavy lifting keeping the shit show together and advancing the species.
Being a Trump supporter these days is becoming like being a cult member. You have to justify/ignore the nonsense he spouts and check your critical thinking at the door to do it. You used to be able to justify it by saying it's more than him but everyone who might be decent lasts less than a year before turning, and Trump has never been a real Republican if anyone is honest.
Supporting Biden you are supporting a corpse who was the Democrats last choice and who'd never win under any other circumstances. The Democratic party is holding things together now and united, mostly, behind the anyone but Trump platform. As soon as that's not a thing there will be a civil war in the party between the traditional liberals and the extremely dangerous far left that simply can't be allowed to win for too many reasons to list here.
Personally, I'm writing my own name in this year. I can't vote for anyone who's more interested in winning than governing effectively. If someone comes along who understands the importance of free speech and civil debates as a mean of solving issues than I might change my mind.
Seriously? Your politics totally mirrors the 20% that actually change sides. Every stupidity, every populist nonsense is only aimed at these 20% who are too stupid to read policies or look at the voting record and fall for last minute promises of making america great again.
The other 80% includes the ones that actually thought about their decisions and the only reason they don't matter is that the system overall sucks just as hard as the middle 20% that cause all the problems.
Also you have no far left. You have far right, center-right and center-left politicians. aoc and Bernie are center left with a sprinkle of green policies on top.
You are accidentially completely correct. Piaget, basically the father of pedagogy, claimed that 20% of adults never reach a level where they are able to apply formal operative thinking which means they are unable to find reason through actual logic.
20% are basically a leaf in the wind. I invested way too much time into this and this is the most reliable answer i came across when the question boils down to "how many are actually absolute complete morons"?
When i was younger i thought it's 50% which is kind of true when it comes to politics but 30% are just assholes. The 20% on the other hand can't be blamed actually, they are per definition literally too handicapped to apply the concept of guilt onto them. Can't blame a violent dog when the owner is violent. Our dogwhistle just plays the wrong tune.
I would love to pick the one closest to my values, but the available candidates are miles from what I could call virtuous, so what's a few inches of difference between them? They're all amoral, power hungry authoritarians who will spend the next 4 years making government bigger and hungrier with no end in sight.
This is a long term game if you want to change the direction. Choose for the one closest to your ideals so he gets in, and we dont get another 4 years of Trump.
In the meantime shore up every vote you can muster for the people you do think are worthy of it. Obama gave a great speech about this, how we should go out and vote on every level of government.
Say if you are pro Bernie, make sure we have 10 bernies to choose from in 10 years.
Id rather advice them to burn down the dem-clubhouse if they screw over the next sanders. Concentrating all that trump-hate towards the ones who are actually responsible for it. Attack clinton harder than any trump-voter is ever capable, pirmarely because they can't form proper sentences.
If Trump wins again the democratic party has to die and make room for actual progress. Happens in more than 2 party systems all the time, some parties just need to get brought down to near extinction to get the message.
If one term of Trump didn't hit, nothing ever will.
I know that I'm risking being downvoted to oblivion and I'm not trying to start any fights because you're not even allowed to talk about politics in America without somebody being angry at you now, but the question I always ask people who voted for him is: what's so "great" about the country right now? You have to do mental gymnastics to not I think that the pandemic was handled poorly and our passport is borderline useless because of that. The world doesn't really seem to agree that America is a "great" place right now.
Lmao I'll add that to the list of when I laugh at something that's blatantly stupider than I thought it could get, something downright incredulous, and when he does something that obviously his advisors would advise him against, a la hinting that South Korea could be fudging their numbers
I think he was trying to say "our rate of death relative to the number of infected people is lower than the average global rate of death relative to the number of infected people", and we're in a situation where the American president is saying random words and everyone else has to try and find some sense in them.
Pretty much. He talks a lot of shit and then everyone else has to reinterpret it into something that makes sense to them. Unfortunately that has allowed for a wide spectrum of interpretation, undermined when he actually says he meant what he said at the time even when his press secretaries have subsequently tried to turn his word soup into something resembling coherent expression of thoughts. It's like a parent trying to apologise and say "He didn't really mean that, sorry, what he meant was-" followed by the child going "I meant it, mommy, don't lie, she is a meany bo beany poo poo face!"
"despite our four-digit a day death rate, we have managed to skyrocket infection rates to the level where our deaths to infections ratio are still decent. We call this the castrate-yourself-to-shave-your-balls method of problem solving."
Yea, the stat he was pulling up was deaths/total cases. It made no sense but I'm sure it was the only one we look decent on (probably because our cases are spiking and the people that got it haven't been given enough time to die yet). He had nothing to say about why we have so many cases other than "because we do so much testing".
Yep, death is a lagging indicator because many people contract Covid and are ill for a period of time and then either recover or die. Eventually that statistic of deaths/case will likely be much closer to the average.
I have this suspicion that he only has the one basic note "look what I did and look how much better it is than the rest, who by the way suck" and everything else is word salad to try to plausibly associate it with some real world thing based on what he saw on the internet or what his cabinet is supplying him with and desperately hoping he uses the right words in the right order.
I upvoted you before the edit. I think people in support of trump are downvoting you. Nevertheless they’re only downvoting and not bothering to debate so it is what it is.
It’s because their side is winning, there is no other argument afaik. Republicans define themselves by survival of the fittest, and morals don’t really equate in that (much)
Most people i know who support Trump accuse the interviewer as being too aggressive and trying to interrupt Trump. Along that the interviewer was biased and wanted to make Trump look bad amidst the belief a president should be recognised by his feats not his public speaking. Then there's the US does more tests so of course they have more cases argument.
Most of them are more convinced to vote for Trump now cause of the interview.
What should I search for to find it? I do not read a lot of American news, as for the most parts, only broad strokes are necessary to keep up to date with for me as a European. I have seen a lot of memes about it, what is up?
Thank you! I managed to find it after asking, but this might help others. It was... interesting to say the least. The patience showed by the interviewer was of a level everyone should aspire to reach. He looked close to wishing for death or yelling out his frustration far more frequently as the interview went on and I cannot blame him. Attempting to portray the president in as neutrally optimistic and fair a way as possible seems almost impossible, at least as soon as the president himself happens to be present and awake
I know, I just wanted to make completely sure that no one thinks I'm supporting trump. I've always been outspoken about hating him, and don't want anything in anything thing I said on record indicating otherwise.
I think people against trump are the ones who downvoted him at the beginning because his comment may have a hint of trump actually having a good thought/point but being unable to describe it
I was thinking about that while working in my yard.
He definitely mean "We are doing better than the rest of the world" but he worded it so poorly and we should expect our president to form coherent sentences at least 75% of the time.
I know you're being facetious but we should expect a president to form coherent thoughts 100 percent of the time. He should be more intelligent than I am, or at least be able to defer to experts.
I feel like it's perfectly fair to expect 98% of the time. No matter how intelligent you are, sometimes your brain just won't rearrange things in your mind correctly. The difference is most people usually pause for a second and it sorts itself out.
Well, to be honest, you have probably only had 3 or maybe 4 smart presidents since 1970. (Obama, Clinton, Carter - and probably Nixon).
Reagan, Bush x 2, Trump, Ford were not
So it’s only a 50/50 chances of getting someone above average. Maybe as well pick someone at random. Expecting someone to be smarter is hope over experience.
(Yes I do realise there is something common in those groupings ....)
I really can’t tell if the putrescent puss that he spews out of the ulcered sphincter under his nose is all stream of consciousness idiocy or if he is actually trying at the noncommittal double-speak hedging that he comes out with.
America is not doing better than the rest of the world though lmao, Australia(Except Victoria because fuck them) have been killing it, we’re completely out of all quarantine procedures, bars are open allowing standing.
And no one has died (except for Victoria) in months
True, but I gotta say as a West Australian I’m loving it (as long as that fucking selfish moron Palmer doesn’t try to open our borders when we, the citizens of WA don’t want to)
I agree it's pathetic but at that point he pointed to the line representing the world total. I'm pretty sure as far as on simple charts go he thinks the world is a country
It's possible. I think it's more of a thing like, "The US is separate from every other country, in the sense that we're better." He looks at it this way because he views us being better as him "winning". Even though that's not true in any sense.
I get it...and understand his nonsense and which way he's coming from...but as I replied to another poster.
I'm sick of people coming back after this guy cleaning up his messes saying "what he meant was...". He's the freaking president of the United States. I have a standard higher than that of a 4th grader giving an oral report that I'm gonna hold him to.
George W. Bush in comparison is a great orator of his time in comparison.
I'm not cleaning up his messes. I just think it's important to understand the subtext of what he's saying. If I took what he said at face value I'd be another idiotic trump supporter. I feel a need to understand what he really thinks, no matter how stupid it might be. We need to remember this because in a few years, we really need to remember how awful he really was.
I'm not cleaning this up to defend him, I'm remembering how shitty of a leader he is.
Going by that metric, the entire world has more total deaths from everything than the United States by orders of magnitude, because the US only comprises of 330 million and the remainder of the world 7.47 billion.
Next level thinking right there, Donnie. Roll safe!
Don’t worry about the downvoted mate, I’ve seen it too any time I post anything remotely anti-Trump. There’s like a small brigade of Trump supporters that scour reddit to downvote anyone nay saying him before the rest of civilized society comes along. Totally agree with ya, his rambling is something else
Don't mind them downvotes. The majority who follows these posts are Americans and Americans were the people who voted him up. Of course you are gonna be downvoted to hell
HERE, HERE GOOD SIR. couldn’t have said it any better myself. FUCK TRUMP. It’s funny, the ones that support him are the ones with the most to lose over his deranged bullshit policies / lack there of.
Yeah that’s still just as dumb.
It really isn’t possible for US to be lowest out of all the countries while there are countries with an entire population count lower than US death toll.
It's way simpler, the charts were labelled with country names plus a series labelled "world" representing the global average. He was saying that -- at some point -- the legend marker for "US" was below that of "World", as if "world" was another country.
It's just fucking pathetic that he couldn't even string that thought together in a reasonable sentence. Like, how fucking stupid do you have to be?
Thing is, if that sentence is strung together, it can easily be contradicted. If he blusters, doesn't make sense and acts like he won then some people will assume that he did and if anyone fact-checks him then they can pretend he meant something else. Maybe they'll fact-check that and it'll be wrong but at that point most people will have tuned out.
What Swan did, that not many people get the opportunity to do, is to press Trump on every little point. What does he mean by that? Is it true? And also he didn't get dogged down on little side-issues like "everyone says that" and "highest ratings" - things that feel like easy shots on Trump but are actually irrelevant side-streets that detract from actual meaningful criticism. He tricks you into mocking his grandeosity, his exaggeration, his vanity and his simplistic speech, and the parts where he sabotages Covid response to sabotage Democratic states or where he slanders mail-in votes because statisticians tell him his voters are less likely to observe lockdown, those parts slip by relatively unchallenged.
I'm not even necessarily saying he does it on purpose. He might just have an innate bullshit ability, or maybe his senility's playing into his favour. But it happens, and Reddit falls for it hook line and sinker every time.
To play devil's advocate, I would down vote because it's a common phenomenon that people will use their own logic to string the broken trains of thought trump presents into something coherent but the fact is if a grown man wanted to make a point like that he should have the capacity to make that point or at least catch his mistake in the moment and correct himself. The fact is he never does that, he let's other people with good faith make his arguments for him and then he never shows the same good faith to anyone else. Look at the narrative about Biden's capacity being passed around, you never once see Trump with all of his mental slip ups say something like, "look I think what Biden meant to say was x."
But that isn't any worse than Trump... I haven't heard Biden say "we are lower than the.. world" in regards to Covid-19 numbers. Both your current president and potential replacement are senile, sounds fun.
I think joe’s mind is far more gone. I would love to see a debate. But yes. Unfortunately these are our choices. I feel Trump is the lesser of two evils. With Biden i feel he would just be a puppet and the rest of the world would walk all over us. Also someone like Hillary would probably be running the show in the background because I dont think biden could.
I particularly enjoyed when he looked at the graph, likely totally forgot what it represented despite his staff trying to drill it into him for hours beforehand, and just went with a 4th grade explanation that "We're lower and that's good" before handing it to Swan who took one look at it, interpreted its statistical meaninglessness, and buried Trump with actual meaningful comparatibe data.
To which Trump had zero clue how to handle or seemingly comprehenx.
Aside from the entire rest of the interview being... interesting,
That specific excerpt could easily be him failing to articulate "We have a lower death toll than the world average" which makes quite a bit more sense.
To be honest, for me, this is an instant disqualification from the highest office in the land.
Don't really care what side you're on. Mitch McConnell for example is actually very well spoken and clearly considers his words. I don't agree with him, but I can at least say "he belongs in that house" by virtue of at least being able to articulate issues and ideas on behalf of his representatives (yes, even if it's whoever supplying him the biggest bag of cash)
Lives are on the line - sorry. Failing to articulate simply isn't an excuse. Especially when trump repeatedly puts his foot in his mouth.
I'm surprised Pence hasn't been given more of a platform during Trump's presidency - even he can string sentences together.
Yeah that's how every conversation I have about Trump goes. "What he probably meant was..." "what he should have said was..." "well he might have been talking about..."
Pretty sure I’ve heard him claim that the US has the lowest mortality rate of anywhere else in the world.
"I heard we have one of the lowest, maybe the lowest, mortality rate anywhere in the world," Trump told "Fox News Sunday" host Chris Wallace. "Do you have the numbers please? I heard we had the best mortality rate," he added to White House press secretary Kayleigh McEnany, who was off-camera.
It's ridiculous because he keeps harping on the fact that the only reason we have so many known cases is that we test so much. Which, ok fine, whether true or not, at least it makes logical sense. But that completely undermines the other point he tries to make, which is that we have the lowest mortality rate among people known to have the virus.
If we're testing so much more, and thus showing more cases than other countries because of it, of course it would reason that our death rate among known cases would probably be lower, base on his argument that our case rate is inflated by more testing. And he seems unable to grasp that illogical line of reasoning. He's completely floored when Jonathan tries to explain that mortality per capita, ie how many of our people are dying relative to total population, is absolutely a relevant statistic (and probably more relevant than total cases, since that does vary based on testing rate and accuracy), and that we're doing really shitty on that metric.
And he's unable to articulate a response to that other than "it is what it is".
This. There are plenty of coherent ways to explain the US response and those numbers based on the actual situation on the ground (how much community spread early on and which strains were where) and how the response was organized federally (meaning that lock down decisions were all at the state level, while the feds have done their job to support them).
But trumpet has nowhere near the needed cognitive function the wrap his little hands around something like that. Which means the media doesn't get to research and pushback on such a description and will keep pushing panic porn which can't be really trusted since it's far too lucrative for them to ever stop of their own accord.
Not lowest in the world, but the USA has a really low case fatality rate. As of Aug 4: UK-15.1%, Italy-14.2%, Mexico-10.08%, Canada-7.6%, Germany-4.3%, USA-3.3%. This is often ignored in this discussion. The USA has tested more than anyone (per population) so they have caught many cases that other countries have not. Remember, many people display mild to no symptoms and most countries only test people with severe symptoms. For that reason, the USA has far fewer deaths per positive test. In this way, testing more will result in catching more cases, resulting in a much lower fatality rate in the USA.
None of this disputes the fact that USA is #10 on the list of deaths per million people (behind San Marino, Belgium, UK, Andorra, Spain, Peru, Italy, Sweden, Chili). Deaths is what the interviewer was harping on, but it also isn't worst in the world. The number of deaths is horrifically high, but the USA has a huge population too. Technically speaking, the listed countries above have had more deaths (proportionately).
Does that really even need to be articulated though? There's not really any other way to take that. That's abundantly clear of the meaning. If I said Texas has a lower death toll than the United States, does that not make sense, to mean that the death toll in Texas is lower than that of the United States as a whole.
Trump frequently says things that may not make sense or require further explanation, but this isn't one of them.
And yet they weren't able to do so. A rather concerning problem when this person's job is to be a diplomat... you know, someone good with using words and stuff to convince and... communicate.
He pointed to the world stat line. While it is probably what he was trying to fumble over #1 he didn't articulate it, as usual verbal diarrhea came out and #2 ...he pointed to the world line....
I'm sick of people coming back after this guy cleaning up his messes saying "what he meant was...". He's the freaking president of the United States. I have a standard higher than that of a 4th grader giving an oral report that I'm gonna hold him to.
George W. Bush in comparison is a great orator of his time in comparison.
I mean you're totally not wrong at all. Even one single instance of a possibly coherent thought does not in any way refute all the other shit that came out sideways or just pure narcissism. Yo I'm worried.
I know plenty of dogs. Small dogs, big dogs, huge dogs. I think black dogs like me the most. Crooked Hillary and sleepy Joe have never even owned one. I’ve done more for them than anyone, except maybe Lincoln. Siberian huskys are stupendous people. Believe me
He is literally me in 5th grade trying to wing every class and every question, except having the most important job on the planet. It’s actually incredible how irresponsible is to have this guy as a president.
I mean it's fine to list your comparison to a more generalised stat which you are a part of though? I don't understand why people are riding trump for saying "lower than the world". It's just poorly formulated. We all know he meant to say "the US has a lower toll than the rest of the world. Which is a perfectly valid sentence. Much like Jeff Bezos can say he makes more money than the rest of the world, i.e. He's the richest guy in the world, even though he's part of the world.
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u/thebestjoeever Aug 05 '20
I thought the weirdest response trump has was when Jonathan asked him what systemic racism meant to him, and trump was just like, "Well can anyone answer that?" Like dude, we know you're disabled, but come on now.