Trump names his heroes
The transcript part 2.
Next comes the bit I saw on Twitter, which motivated me to read the whole thing. Empty empty empty. He is so empty.
Do you have any models — are there heroes that you steer by — people you look up to from the past?
Well, I don’t like heroes, I don’t like the concept of heroes, the concept of heroes is never great, but certainly you can respect certain people and certainly there are certain people — but I’ve learnt a lot from my father — my father was a builder in Brooklyn and Queens — he did houses and housing and I learnt a lot about negotiation from my father — although I also think negotiation is a natural trait, I don’t think you can, you either have it or you don’t, you get better at it but basically, the people that I know who are great negotiators or great salesmen or great politicians, it’s very natural, very natural . . . I got a letter from somebody, their congressman, they said what you’ve done is amazing because you were never a politician and you beat all the politicians. He said they added it up — when I was three months into the campaign, they added it up — I had three months of experience and the 17 guys I was running against, the Republicans, had 236 years – ya know when you add 20 years and 30 years — so I was three months they were 236 years — so it’s sort of a funny article but I believe it’s like hitting a baseball or being a good golfer — natural ability, to me, is much more important to me than experience and experience is a great thing — I think it’s a great thing — but I learnt a lot from my father in terms of leadership.
His hero is himself, in fact. He has that heroic quality of being a good negotiator, in the sense of getting more money out of a deal than anyone else. He has it naturally. Heroic.
How is being president going to change how you operate?
Ya know this is a very, very big change — I led a very nice life and ya know successful and good and nice and this is a lot different — but ya know my attitude on that is when you’re president, you’re in the White House which is a very special place — you’re there for a limited period of time — who wants to leave? Like I’ve liked President Obama, he’s been very nice, yeah he’s been nice one on one, but maybe not so nice in other ways — but who wants to leave the White House to go to some other place and be away on a vacation? The White House is very special, there’s so much work to be done, I’m not gonna be leaving much — I mean a lot of work to be done — I’m gonna be in there working, doing what I’m supposed to be doing — but who wants to leave the White House?
Oh, I see – it’s about the house. I didn’t realize that. Ok. He’s excited about the house. He’s all about the house. He won’t be wanting to leave the house.
But he’ll be working hard while he’s in the house. At what? Twitter. He’s really big on Twitter you know. Did you know that? He wants you to know that.
When you’re president will you still tweet? And if you do will it be as the Real Donald Trump, as Potus, or probably as Real Potus?
@realDonaldTrump I think, I’ll keep it . . . so I’ve got 46 million people right now — that’s a lot, that’s really a lot — but 46 million — including Facebook, Twitter and ya know, Instagram so when you think that your 46 million there, I’d rather just let that build up and just keep it @realDonaldTrump, it’s working — and the tweeting, I thought I’d do less of it, but I’m covered so dishonestly by the press — so dishonestly — that I can put out Twitter — and it’s not 140, it’s now 140, 280 — I can go bing bing bing and I just keep going and they put it on and as soon as I tweet it out — this morning on television, Fox — “Donald Trump, we have breaking news” — I put out a thing . . .
Well yes, it’s true that when a president tweets something deranged or contemptible, it gets on the news…but that’s perhaps not such an unalloyed good as he’s thinking.
But ya know the tweeting is interesting because I find it very accurate — when I get a word out and if I tell something to the papers and they don’t write it accurately, it’s really bad — they can’t do much when you tweet it and I’m careful about, it’s very precise, actually it’s very, very precise — and it comes out breaking news, we have breaking news — ya know, it’s funny, if I did a press release and if I put it out, it wouldn’t get nearly — people would see it the following day — if I do a news conference, that’s a lot of work.
Very, very precise – that’s good to know. He’s careful about it, it’s very very precise, he means every word. Good to know.
Are you looking forward to meeting our prime minister?
Well, I’ll be there — we’ll be there soon — I would say we’ll be here for a little while but and it looks like she’ll be here first — how is she doing over there, by the way, what do you think?
Theresa?
Yeah, May.
Glad we got that cleared up.
What do you do when there’s a toddler in the White House? Not because the president has a toddler but because the toddler is the president? What do you do?
Why, you name him King, of course. (In honor of this day, at the very very least!)
And then, the very next second, you name a Protector, Competent-In-Affairs, Fixer-Better-Info, Nominally-Safe-Apostrophe or Under Study Apparent (USA).
Pretty soon it will be time for change. (of diapers)
Thus endeth a Republic. Mark my words.
I wonder if he’ll grab her pussy.
Wow, it’s shallow all the way down. There’s no end to the shallowness. There are no depths to plumb. It’s puddle as far as the eye can see, horizon to horizon. A backyard plastic wading pool for kiddies is the Marianas Trench next to this.
I actually could agree with this part – but he goes and ruins it all.
I’ve seen this phenomenon before, though. There is one exercise I do in class where I ask students to name a person they admire. They are unable to name any – not one. There is no one they admire, no one that inspires them, no one that is important to them, nothing. They sit there with blank stares on their face. They have no one they admire. Except themselves? Who knows.
Our society has elected a president that is even more narcissistic than our constant “look at me” society that spends hours on end checking to see if anyone is looking at them on Facebook, Twitter, or the rest, and counting the number of “likes” and “friends”.
Your Name’s not Bruce? @ 3 – snap. I keep thinking of the shallowest of shallow puddles when I think about him. I think of similes for how shallow he is.
iknklast – that’s terrible. I have so many people I admire. I now realize how important that is.
I think I disagree with you about heroes, provided it’s not a delusional or abject version. I think heroes defined as people one considers better than oneself and worthy of admiration and emulation – I think those are a good thing.
Slick? ;-)
Yes, me too. Once in a while someone, after being puzzled for a minute, will blurt out “Jesus!” That’s almost sadder than those who admire no one.
I guess my thinking about heroes is fired by so many people turning out to be such jerks. The recent meltdowns in atheism, as a good example.
I admire Charles Darwin greatly, but I have to recognize that he had some very unpalatable views – racist, sexist – even though they were the view of the time, and he was actually much better on racism than many, since he did regard people of color as actual people, even though “savages”. Still, it’s hard to overlook some of the things he says that are cringe-worthy in our current world.
I admire a lot of the early feminists, but there were certainly some things about them that are problematic, as well, which to some extent has a lot to do with the changing values of our world.
Maybe it’s just a matter of not requiring heroes to be supermen (or wonder women).
I think it is. That’s what I meant by “provided it’s not a delusional or abject version.” Sort of hero-lite, or figuratively hero.
The minority of voters selected a supervillain for their president and he (ineffectively) rules over the rogues’ gallery that is the Republican-controlled congress.
It’s an age for heroes…
Another (unnecessary) example of his weak command of language: he doesn’t know how to express indifference toward a thing. He knows good and bad, and their extremes – great, terrific, amazing; terrible, horrible, awful – but the closest he can get to not rating something either way is ‘absence of superlative’. He would flunk a high school essay question no matter the topic.
I don’t know, I don’t think I could name a hero, or a person I admire. I admire the work of a lot of people, who’ve either enriched my life or contributed to bettering the world in some way (generally, to me, by increasing our understanding of it), but I guess I separate that admiration from admiring the people themselves. Part of this is being too cynical to think it’s a good thing that some (few) people are willing to sacrifice their own well-being, and lives, for a cause–a) if you don’t believe there’s any more to life than the physical life you live, then that really sucks (and would under no circumstances be something I would want to emulate), and b) all too often their sacrifice, while it may have achieved something at the time, doesn’t end up improving much over the long term.
English-speaking adults tend to have a vocabulary numbering in the tens of thousands, but Trump appears to have a vocabulary numbering in the tens.
I have never before heard someone interviewed in their native tongue who has such a paucity of words that he is unable to complete a coherent thought.
He reminds me of my attempts to communicate in German when I was on holiday.
My school-level French is better than his English, and I last had a lesson in 1974.
I should clarify the above – I’ve never had a German lesson, I picked up a few dozen words from my friends (who studied it for a year in 1973) and spent half an hour watching a YouTube video of basic vocabulary, so I would be able to order a vegetarian meal (and check that it was gluten-free), ask the whereabouts of the station, and understand the answer.
I like to read works in other languages – I can generally understand most of what I’m reading, but that is a very different thing to being able to converse.
Fortunately, the Germans seem to take pride in having excellent English.
I wonder what happened to Drumpf’s genetic heritage?
That was my experience on my trip to Germany, as well. Most of them spoke English better than many of my neighbors.
I also had that experience with some of the African immigrants I’ve worked with. They went to English schools, and learned English at a level high enough that it was difficult for them to converse with rural Oklahomans who had a fifth grade education, because they didn’t sound to my friends like they were speaking English. (I once had to do an interview with a client for a colleague, because he couldn’t figure out what language they were speaking. I told him they were speaking Oklahoman. He marveled that they had their own language. I explained it was English, but highly modified)
Haha, they spoke à la Homemade?
“modified” meaning…reduced. Only, not reduced like a sauce, but reduced like impoverished.
A sauce will reduce to enhance the essence; this goes the other way?
tiggerthewing @ 16
And that paragon is about to be president of the US. It’s mind-numbing.
Between this very poor command of his native language, inability or unwillingness to remember his prior statements, and narcissistic personality disorder, isn’t it plausible that, under the terms of the 25th Amendment’s section 4, he is “is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office”? It’d take Pence and a majority of the Cabinet to oust him and a 2/3rds majority in Congress to make it stick, but quite apart from impeachment, it seems reasonable in the legal sense, if not (alas!) politically.
Yes. I do think he’s absolutely and conspicuously unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office…but I also think that won’t be good enough. Team Him will just say, as usual, that the voters knew that when they voted for him.
And he’d be right. Many of his voters voted for him precisely because he was unfit – they seem to think that is some good thing, having no idea what you’re doing. This is seeping into a lot of fields, too. The idea that teachers should be experienced is coming under attack from our “school reform” people – including those on the Obama team. The idea of using experienced people to sell your house? List with a realtor, and see how many people make fun of you for paying a commission, when you could just “do it yourself”. It is nearly impossible to get elected to a school board if you have any education experience. And then, don’t get me started on the whole anti-expertise movement in the medical field, leading to a burgeoning of nonsensical health claims by uninformed people.
But, boy, put one comment out there critical of religion, and they will inform you that you must be properly versed in all aspects of that religion, broad, universal knowledge, before you can say a word against it. Experts in religion are not regarded well by the masses, either, until the time someone points out the nonsense of their position.
Worse, telling Republicans that their elected representative is too stupid to govern is going to be transmuted, via FOX, into an attack on all rural people. “This liberal elitist is saying all conservatives are too stupid to govern!” And since the viewership is inoculated against real information, it’s the only narrative they’ll hear. Plus, we’ve already seen that the Republican party membership is utterly dominated by tribalism, with many of them jettisonining their earlier objections to Trump now that he has won.
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Holms, I have long suspected that their objections to Trump were based on their belief in what is constantly being said by political analysts – you can’t win if you aren’t perceived as nice. Never mind that the nastiest candidate often wins, they keep on repeating it. So I suspected that the only objection they had to Trump was that he wouldn’t be able to win because he was so obviously unfit; it wasn’t his policies or his ideas, just the worry that Hillary Clinton was so obviously more qualified a candidate, even with her downsides (which are miniscule compared to the great orange one).
So, he won. Now they’re fine, because they have what they want – Congress, the White House, and, soon, the Supreme Court. They already have the court system, since most of the federal judges have been appointed by Reagan, Bush, or Bush…but the Supremes are still split. They want a lock on the country for the remainder of their life, or the life of our country, whichever comes first.
It also leaves open the question as to what exactly in Trump’s view is ‘false’: the Khan statement, or the Constitution?
http://www.politico.com/magazine/story/2016/08/2016-donald-trump-constitution-guide-unconstitutional-freedom-liberty-khan-214139
TRUMP’S INAUGURATION SPEECH
AND ALSO HIS FIRST STATE OF THE UNION SPEECH (FIRST DRAFT)
The US has one hell of a problem right now.
And it is me.