President Trump gave an impromptu half-hour interview with the New York Times on Dec. 28. We combed through the transcript and here’s a quick roundup of the false, misleading or dubious claims that he made, at a rate of one every 75 seconds. (Some of the interview was off the record, so it’s possible the rate of false claims per minute is higher.)
Item-by-item breakdown at the link.
For a guy innocent of collusion, it's a little weird that he goes out of his way (the interviewer didn't press him on it) to bring up collusion nineteen times.
Sometimes I want to take one of my friends/co-workers who voted for Trump, sit them in front of a television, and force them to watch half an hour of the man talking. And then explain to me, in their own words, how they could have voted for somebody who is such a lying fucking moron.
Spoiler alert - their answer would be - A) Well he's not a politician so he talks plainly, B) FAKE NEWS, or C) Yeah I wish he wasn't so rough around the edges, but DEM EMAILS THO.
Trump likes to overwhelm people with so many lies that they don't know where to start. The reality-based community is always off guard.
Today China chided him for a juvenile tweet about them being caught RED HANDED making secret shipments of oil to NK. Trump is such a habitual liar that I am inclined to believe China. His credibility is nil. Maybe 1/3 of Americans still fall for his cons, but nobody else in the world does, and the Chinese know that.
El Guapo wrote: Fri Dec 29, 2017 3:28 pm
He hates the "Amazon Washington Post" (as he likes to call it), and sees an opportunity to potentially hurt Amazon as revenge
Therefore I wish the Amazon Washington Post was responsible for all the cut rate junk mail my mother gets from the post office. If she lived up north we could probably heat her house every winter with logs made from all the mail designed to scam seniors with reduced faculties.
Kraken wrote: Sat Dec 30, 2017 2:55 am
Today China chided him for a juvenile tweet about them being caught RED HANDED making secret shipments of oil to NK. Trump is such a habitual liar that I am inclined to believe China. His credibility is nil. Maybe 1/3 of Americans still fall for his cons, but nobody else in the world does, and the Chinese know that.
I don't believe Drumpf on anything but news reports are that SK are the ones who caught China and NK "red handed".
Kraken wrote: Sat Dec 30, 2017 2:55 am
Today China chided him for a juvenile tweet about them being caught RED HANDED making secret shipments of oil to NK. Trump is such a habitual liar that I am inclined to believe China. His credibility is nil. Maybe 1/3 of Americans still fall for his cons, but nobody else in the world does, and the Chinese know that.
I don't believe Drumpf on anything but news reports are that SK are the ones who caught China and NK "red handed".
I.e. this story doesn't originate with him.
The South Koreans acted to impound the ship but the actual evidence of the transfer was from American satellite imagery that was released to the public over a month ago. The ship in question is flagged in Hong Kong but owned by a Taiwanese company (that supposedly is not incorporated in Taiwan). If there is any evidence linking the PRC to the incident, nobody seems to have released/leaked it yet.
Perhaps Trump believes that the One-China policy means that Taiwan and China are one and the same.
"What? What?What?" -- The 14th Doctor
It's not enough to be a good player... you also have to play well. -- Siegbert Tarrasch
Whatever the facts behind this particular incident, my point is that I automatically disbelieve everything that Trump says. I think most Americans and probably most foreign leaders are at that point, too, and adversaries can use that to their advantage. Not a good position for the WH to be in.
I can still be persuaded if Trump's claims are supported by other sources, of course. SK is more credible than the WH, and our intelligence community is still uncompromised AFAIK, so I'll believe them over China. If it were a he-said she-said between Trump and China, though....
A likely scenario is that Xi promised Trump that China would never aid NK. Trump believed it because Xi praises him whenever they meet.
A president who consulted his IC rather than his ego would never have believed China in the first place and would adjust expectations accordingly. This affair is global politics is usual, only Trump is angry because he dimly perceives that he got played.
There is a lot of reporting today that Russian tankers have been involved in illegally transferring fuel to North Korea. I'm sure that has nothing to do with why Trump is pointing his pudgy little finger at China.
"What? What?What?" -- The 14th Doctor
It's not enough to be a good player... you also have to play well. -- Siegbert Tarrasch
I guess he's back to work, since this morning he has tweeted that Huma Abedin should be jailed and that the "Deep State Justice Dept" might finally be forced to act against "Comey & others."
Holman wrote:I guess he's back to work, since this morning he has tweeted that Huma Abedin should be jailed and that the "Deep State Justice Dept" might finally be forced to act against "Comey & others."
Whew, glad he's still concentrating on the things that matter. MAGA!
"Who's going to tell him that the job he's currently seeking might just be one of those Black jobs?"
-Michelle Obama 2024 Democratic Convention
Wise words of warning from Smoove B: Oh, how you all laughed when I warned you about the semen. Well, who's laughing now?
Holman wrote: Tue Jan 02, 2018 9:51 am
I guess he's back to work, since this morning he has tweeted that Huma Abedin should be jailed and that the "Deep State Justice Dept" might finally be forced to act against "Comey & others."
When darkness veils the world, four Warriors of Light shall come.
Carpet_pissr wrote: Tue Jan 02, 2018 10:52 am
I’m starting to think he could be a REALLY good troll, and is not possibly as stupid as his tweets make him out to be.
Ok, well done, you win Mr President. Fooled us all, ha ha! You can stop pretending to be a fucking moron now. You got us good!
You've heard him speak when he's not reading off a teleprompter, haven't you?
The last time anyone died on a U.S.-certificated scheduled airline was Feb. 12, 2009, when Colgan Air Flight 3407, operating as a Continental Connection flight between Continental’s hub at Newark, N.J. and Buffal0, N.Y, went into an aerodynamic stall short of the runway at Buffalo. It fell to the ground in Clarence Center, N.Y., All 49 people onboard, plus one person on the ground, died in the crash.
I want to give his supporters the benefit of the doubt, but when they applaud his constant, pathological need for approval, I can't help but agree they're also morons.
Dutch aviation consulting firm To70 and the Aviation Safety Network both reported Monday there were no commercial passenger jet fatalities in 2017. “2017 was the safest year for aviation ever,” said Adrian Young of To70.
To70 estimated that the fatal accident rate for large commercial passenger flights is 0.06 per million flights, or one fatal accident for every 16 million flights.
The Aviation Safety Network also reported there were no commercial passenger jet deaths in 2017, but 10 fatal airliner accidents resulting in 44 fatalities onboard and 35 persons on the ground, including cargo planes and commercial passenger turbo prop aircraft.
...
In comparison, there were 16 accidents and 303 deaths in 2016 among airliners.
The deadliest incident last year occurred in January when a Turkish cargo jet smashed into a village in Kyrgyzstan as it tried to land at a nearby airport in dense fog, killing 35 on the ground and all four onboard.
That's his announcement for 2018. Now Trump can free all the face eating tigers from regulations, like God intended.
"A lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on." -Terry Pratchett, The Truth "The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to those who think they've found it." -Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment
Captain Caveman wrote: Tue Jan 02, 2018 10:48 am
Deep down, he’s just an insecure doofus desperately seeking praise.
That's why he can't let go of Twitter. To us he looks like an idiot, but every time he posts he gets flooded with adulation on a scale equivalent to his campaign rallies.
Of course he also gets tons of criticism and mockery, but that's probably just as gratifying. Attention is attention, and he clearly loves to hate back.
Holman wrote: Tue Jan 02, 2018 9:51 am
I guess he's back to work, since this morning he has tweeted that Huma Abedin should be jailed and that the "Deep State Justice Dept" might finally be forced to act against "Comey & others."
I don't get all the hate for Comey, wasn't he the tool that announced on election eve that they were re-opening the Clinton investigation?
Holman wrote: Tue Jan 02, 2018 9:51 am
I guess he's back to work, since this morning he has tweeted that Huma Abedin should be jailed and that the "Deep State Justice Dept" might finally be forced to act against "Comey & others."
I don't get all the hate for Comey, wasn't he the tool that announced on election eve that they were re-opening the Clinton investigation?
There have been hints that Comey actually thought he was getting ahead of the story and tamping it down (perhaps before a major leak from Giuliani and his friends in the NYC FBI offices), i.e. he was trying to keep it "above politics" and miscalculated horribly. We'll probably never know, but there are few clear indications that he was personally trying to sabotage Clinton.
But of course Trump hates Comey because Comey rejected Trump's demand for loyalty, refused to squash the investigations, and then got himself fired in order to make Trump obviously guilty of Obstruction.
Holman wrote: Tue Jan 02, 2018 9:51 am
I guess he's back to work, since this morning he has tweeted that Huma Abedin should be jailed and that the "Deep State Justice Dept" might finally be forced to act against "Comey & others."
I don't get all the hate for Comey, wasn't he the tool that announced on election eve that they were re-opening the Clinton investigation?
Yes, he was the very same tool, who thereby swung the election in Trump's favor. But Comey did so out of stupidity and foolishness, not out of any love for Trump, so he continued the FBI's Russia-Trump investigation and refused to be Trump's lackey upon Trump taking office. Consequently he became an enemy of Trump.
All signs indicate that Trump came in believing that the Justice Department serves the President just as a company's legal department serves the CEO. The whole paranoid fantasy of a Deep State conspiracy is that Obama's Justice Department existed to protect his secrets and threaten his enemies.
Trump seethes about Comey/Mueller and is clearly angry that Sessions won't "protect" him from investigation. Just the other day he issued weird praise for Eric Holder's loyalty in "protecting" Obama.
The authoritarianism here is real. It's just that the norms are still barely holding. So far.
I have to wonder if all this renewed talk about a "deep state" from Trump the last few days has anything to do with the new season of X-Files starting up on Netflix. I mean, it's where he learned about it all to begin with.
Carpet_pissr wrote: Tue Jan 02, 2018 2:15 pm
I'm expecting him to mention the Illuminati any day now, given the Taco Bell commercial that's been running recently.
If he uses the temp "Belluminati", I'm moving in to my bugout cabin.
" Hey OP, listen to my advice alright." -Tha General "“I like taking the guns early...to go to court would have taken a long time. So you could do exactly what you’re saying, but take the guns first, go through due process second.” -President Donald Trump. "...To guard, protect, and maintain his liberty, the freedman should have the ballot; that the liberties of the American people were dependent upon the Ballot-box, the Jury-box, and the Cartridge-box, that without these no class of people could live and flourish in this country." - Frederick Douglass MYT
All told, the government shed about 16,000 jobs between January and September, according to an analysis by The Washington Post, citing data from the Office of Personnel Management. That stands in stark contrast to the first nine months of the Obama administration, when the federal workforce grew by 68,000. It's the first time the federal workforce has declined in the first year of a new administration since it fell by about 70,000 under Bill Clinton in 1993.
But it's still a leviathan. The Post story overstates the extent of the cuts by claiming—in the very first paragraph—that the reductions "could eventually bring the workforce down to levels not seen in decades."
That's technically true, but it will take a long time for that "eventually" to kick in. The federal workforce included 1.94 million employees at the end of September, according to the Post. That's well above the approximately 1.8 million employed by the federal government before the Obama administration started staffing up. Getting back to pre-Obama levels of federal workers would require cutting another 16,000 jobs every year for the next nine years.
Still, it's a step in the right direction—even if something of an accidental one.
This paragraph should get the anti-libertarian venom flowing:
Trump also gets credit for putting the right people in charge at various departments. Scott Pruit's Environmental Protection Agency, for example, cut 500 jobs during 2017 and rolled back regulations that require lots of officials to maintain.
Let the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments commence because without 2 million federal employees this country will fall into anarchy.
"The world is suffering more today from the good people who want to mind other men's business than it is from the bad people who are willing to let everybody look after their own individual affairs." - Clarence Darrow
So much depends on what jobs one is talking about. Career diplomats who've spent decades making contacts and finessing issues? Environmental scientists doing multi-year studies? Tax compliance people at the IRS? The private sector ain't gonna replace them. OTOH, there is probably an expendable surfeit of congressional aids, law clerks, provincial consuls, and suchlike. 16,000 positions out of 2 million isn't much if they're intelligently chosen.
Moliere wrote: Tue Jan 02, 2018 6:58 pm
This paragraph should get the anti-libertarian venom flowing:
Trump also gets credit for putting the right people in charge at various departments. Scott Pruit's Environmental Protection Agency, for example, cut 500 jobs during 2017 and rolled back regulations that require lots of officials to maintain.
Let the gnashing of teeth and rending of garments commence because without 2 million federal employees this country will fall into anarchy.
Scott "Pruit" [sic] is only the "right person in charge" if you dogmatically reject climate science.
Trump took out the people who can make policy and think for themselves, rather than the followers and asskissers. He went for inefficiency, not reform.
Trump doesn't like Reform, only Cuts!
"A lie can run round the world before the truth has got its boots on." -Terry Pratchett, The Truth "The presence of those seeking the truth is infinitely to be preferred to those who think they've found it." -Terry Pratchett, Monstrous Regiment
