Well maybe I am, but I also think there is a tendancy to dismiss a lot of trump’s behaviour as delusional, or dumb when I see it as intentional malice with moments of dementia woven in.

I do think he is not very bright, but not so dumb as many want to believe. It feels good to think of him as dumb, but the fact of the matter is he convinced tens of millions of people to vote for him. He has steam rollered the USA and imposed his will. He is clever enough to have understood his to manipulate the public masterfully up to his second election, despite being a convicted felon by that point. To say he is stupid and somehow lucked his way into all of that is not impossible but improbable. I think his issue now is that he underestimated how the public would respond as he got positive reinforcement for many years even when doing harmful things because of his blind support from MAGA. He underestimated how much they would put up with.

It is entirely possible that he pulled the number out of the air but I don’t think that’s how he works. Some of what he says is rooted in a truth that he then distorts and exaggerates to serve him, which is why I think the number comes from his deliberate misunderstanding than from nowhere.

The deception doesn’t require him to accept he was wrong. It requires mental gymnastics. Something he has proven to be an Olympic gold medalist at.

Just to be clear I am not defending him I am advising caution. Writing him off as stupid means you are in some way excusing his actions as being accidental and leads to the “of its just trump being trump” rhetoric that has let him get away with so much. He is a dangerous, dangerous man. I can’t decide if he believes the things he says or simply wants you to believe the things he says. I lean towards the latter.

As I wrote this I am reminded of Boris Johnson who is someone who spent a great deal of time convincing the UK public he was a harmless, likeable idiot. He was not. He was an intelligent, deceptive man who wore his public image like a mask to hide his nefarious intent. Boris is not trump of course, but I see Boris as a cautionary tale and it makes me view Trump differently than I perhaps would if Boris had not existed.

Fully accept I may be wrong about all of this, but just want to share my opinion.

I’m not sane washing. I believe it’s how he sees it and now he’s probably been told that’s not how it works, he continues to use this method as a way to make the number bigger. So it crosses from idiocy to deliberate deception. IMO

Why is no one concerned about how unfair this is for the puppy?

More importantly does Tim Cook know he’s Ellen DeGeneres?

When he says he’s going to reduce drugs by thousands of percent, I think he looks at the price of drug x in, for example, Germany and sees a price of $10 then he looks at the price in the USA of $160. So the USA price is 1600% of the Germany price.

He claims to reduce them to the Germany price, and then screws up on how percentages work and says he’ll reduce it by 1600%, instead of what he should say, which is reducing it by 94%.

So that’s how I understand the comments he makes. Either way he’s full of shit and won’t actually reduce them at all, but I think I get why he thinks he is correct in stating percentages in the thousands.

Cue Ted Cruz: “Nice university ya got here. Be a shame if something happened to it”

Does this not destroy his argument or betray his own lies.

Either:

A. His assertion is that the FBI under Biden’s direction or agents into the crowd to indie violence. This is demonstrably false since Biden did not control the FBI and therefore could not have done this. He could have said agents but he chose to lie that it was the FBI, and in doing so, crippled his own argument.

Or

B: There were agents in the crowds tasked with inciting violence. These agents must have been working under Trumps direction as it was his FBI. Therefore he is telling on himself. This time the lie is under whose orders the agents were acting.

I believe there were no agents there. Just a bunch of sycophants who revere trump so much they would be willing to root in jail for him and that their cause is so righteous that overruling democracy is fine.