Boasts, lies, insults
Trump in Missouri yesterday – each day crazier than the last.
The lede is that he lied to Justin Trudeau.
President Trump boasted in a fundraising speech Wednesday that he made up information in a meeting with the leader of a top U.S. ally, saying he insisted to Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau that the United States runs a trade deficit with its neighbor to the north without knowing whether that was true.
“Trudeau came to see me. He’s a good guy, Justin. He said, ‘No, no, we have no trade deficit with you, we have none. Donald, please,’ ” Trump said, mimicking Trudeau, according to audio of the private event in Missouri obtained by The Washington Post. “Nice guy, good-looking guy, comes in — ‘Donald, we have no trade deficit.’ He’s very proud because everybody else, you know, we’re getting killed.
“… So, he’s proud. I said, ‘Wrong, Justin, you do.’ I didn’t even know. … I had no idea. I just said, ‘You’re wrong.’ You know why? Because we’re so stupid. … And I thought they were smart. I said, ‘You’re wrong, Justin.’ He said, ‘Nope, we have no trade deficit.’ I said, ‘Well, in that case, I feel differently,’ I said, ‘but I don’t believe it.’ I sent one of our guys out, his guy, my guy, they went out, I said, ‘Check, because I can’t believe it.’
You know, we’d do better if we just went to a random bar and found the drunkest guy there and made him president. It has to be a guy for fair comparison, and the drunkest guy at a random bar would be better at presidenting than Donald Trump is.
The Office of the United States Trade Representative says the United States has a trade surplus with Canada. It reports that in 2016, the United States exported $12.5 billion more in goods and services than it imported from Canada, leading to a trade surplus, not a deficit.
Trump rushed to Twitter this morning to say yes we do too so, and to explain his methodology.
We do have a Trade Deficit with Canada, as we do with almost all countries (some of them massive). P.M. Justin Trudeau of Canada, a very good guy, doesn’t like saying that Canada has a Surplus vs. the U.S.(negotiating), but they do…they almost all do…and that’s how I know!
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 15, 2018
Erm…what is how he knows? The fact that he says they all do, they almost all do? That’s how he “knows”?
We could go to a random morgue and find a better president than Trump. Prop him up, he’ll do the job better.
In his 30-minute speech to donors in Missouri, Trump made a blistering attack against major U.S. allies and global economies, accusing the European Union, China, Japan and South Korea of ripping off the United States for decades and pillaging the U.S. workforce.
Russia? Anything about Russia? Anything at all?
“Our allies care about themselves,” he said. “They don’t care about us.”
Says the guy who revived the pro-Nazi slogan “America First.” Says the guy who is the most unable to see past his own adored Self of any president in our history.
The president was in Missouri to raise money for Josh Hawley, who is taking on Sen. Claire McCaskill (D) in November’s midterm election. He called McCaskill “bad for Missouri and bad for the country.” But he barely spoke about Hawley. Instead, he talked about himself — bragging about his 2016 election win and lavishing praise on himself while ticking through a list of U.S. allies that he said are taking advantage of the United States.
He cares about himself. He doesn’t care about his allies.
See, Trump is magic! He can take a trade surplus and turn it into a deficit with just a tweet! Man, to have that kind of power…
Being a Brit, Donald Trump was only some blowhard I’d only vaguely heard of before I moved to the US. So when he started running for president, I was constantly thinking ‘who talks like this’? I’ve known plenty of people with zero self-awareness but Trump takes it to a whole new level. But like a lot of people, I never took him seriously until it was too late and he was on track to become the GOP nominee.
It’s getting harder and harder to be shocked by anything he does or says – which is, of course, part of the problem. But this was a jaw-dropper for me. To swagger around boasting about how you bullshitted your way through a meeting with one of your country’s most important trading partners like a lazy kid who never read the book for his book report is one of the most horrifying things I’ve ever heard. Not because I fear what Canada will do but because the thought of this man in a room with Kim Jong-Un is so blood-chilling I can hardly find words to describe how it makes me feel.
Please, won’t somebody make it stop?
Not that different from Americans who aren’t in the thrall of reality TV. I heard of him vaguely, but I would not have recognized him, I knew almost nothing about him, and I safely ignored him. It never occurred to me that we could someday have to deal with such a president.
Same here, with the slight exception that I was vaguely aware of him as a vulgar annoyance to New Yorkers (especially those in Manhattan) because he built a huge monstrosity near Columbus Circle that blocked a lot of people’s light, as well as because he just was a vulgar annoyance. That was 100 years ago, but it did mean I recognized the name in later news. It used to be so easy to pay no attention to him at all.
Isn’t part of bullshitting not admitting that you’re bullshitting? It undercuts the point of your lying if you admit you lie. But then, if he doesn’t show how clever he is at having got away with it, he hasn’t “won.” I suppose it’s best that he gets some practice in with a friendly country that isn’t armed with nuclear weapons before going up against a hostile country that is.
I bet he’s as beligerently mendacious with his staff, insisting that he “knows” how things are and insisting that they agree with him and having them “check,” knowing they have to because he’s the Prezzident and all. This is a natural and logical escalation from the Bush II administration’s contempt for the “reality based community.” Are we seeing the “fact by fiat” community? Or, perhaps more aptly, facts by ukase*?
(* From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia A ukase, or ukaz (/juːˈkeɪs/;[1] Russian: указ [ʊˈkas], formally “imposition”), in Imperial Russia, was a proclamation of the tsar, government,[2] or a religious leader (patriarch) that had the force of law. “Edict” and “decree” are adequate translations using the terminology and concepts of Roman law.
From the Russian term, the word ukase has entered the English language with the meaning of “any proclamation or decree; an order or regulation of a final or arbitrary nature”.[1]
“We could go to a random morgue and find a better president than Trump.” I think I made this point some time ago. I think I said there were dead people and house plants that would do a better job of presidenting. Not that this was ever really in dispute or hard to figure out. Just want to establish priority….
I must be missing something here, because I read it as Trump initially actually getting it right for a change.
Trump said “Trudeau came to see me. He’s a good guy, Justin. He said, ‘No, no, we have no trade deficit with you, we have none…..Donald, we have no trade deficit..”, which I take to mean that Canada has no deficit with the U.S., and Trump said ‘Wrong, Justin, you do.’, meaning that Canada does have a deficit,, and which was confirmed in the quoted piece:
Of course, Trump being Trump, his tweet said exactly the opposite, that Canada holds the surplus and the U.S. is in deficit, but the bit he made up at the meeting was correct as I read it, since Trudeau’s claim seems to be that Canada has no deficit with the U.S.
This is just Trump being Trump; Trudeau says Canada has no deficit with America, so Trump says they do. Later, somebody confirms to Trump that Canada does have a deficit with America (which was Trump’s initial stance), so Trump says they don’t. He wants everybody to believe that he’s always the smartest person in the room (which wouldn’t be true even if he was the only person in the room) so is compelled to contradict every piece of information he is given, which means that he’s only ever right by accident, and wide open to the most basic forms of reverse psychology.
AoS, I think you’re giving Trump too much credit for understanding what words mean, and what sentences mean.
Yeah, I sometimes think that I got a double dose of the Pollyanna gene.
Meanwhile, I’ve read a couple of reports suggesting that President Pinocchio invented the entire meeting with Trudeau. The ‘conversation’ was fabricated, stitched together from snippets taken from several telephone chats he’d had with Trudeau and further embellished by the dirtbag Don (kind of like when Reagan reminisced about his war exploits that were actually scenes from his movies).