Might is not will
Trump in 2011:
Narcissists are big on projection.
The thing that annoys me most about that clip though is the last thing he says – Isn’t it pathetic.
What is “it”? The thing Trump predicts Obama will do. It’s a prediction, it’s about the future, so Trump can’t know it will happen. He couldn’t know that even if his reasons for thinking so (or pretending to think so) were good as opposed to contemptible. It’s now in the past so we know it didn’t happen, so his stupid prediction based on ludicrous and disgusting assumptions was a bad wrong prediction, but even if it had been a good one, you can’t exclaim “Isn’t it pathetic!” about an action you predict will happen. You need the conditional tense for that, not the future.
That’s not a merely grammatical or aesthetic point, it’s fundamental – it’s about being able to keep track of what you know and what you don’t, what you can know and what you can’t, of reality itself. What is really pathetic is Trump’s apparent conviction that his thoughts are so powerful that his mere venomous prediction about Obama can create a future fact that he then gets to call pathetic.
Ophelia, your point about what is wrong with Trumps statement is of course true, although for people who use that style of rhetoric it is also the whole point. Propose a hypothetical, often one that is untrue or likely to be untrue, then act as though it has already come about. Thus you make the false into fact and many of your supporters will act accordingly without a trace of dissonance.
That reminds me of one of Fred Clark’s points about the Left Behind books–the authors wrote them postulating ‘what if millennial Christians were right all along, and the Rapture happened?’ and then their fans basically, somehow, imagined that their scenario had happened in the real world and behaved accordingly. It’s a weird brain trick.
That kind of thing drives me absolutely CRAZY. I should get a foldable sign made with “you can’t possibly know that” on it so that I could whip it out whenever I needed it.
‘Big if true!’ Well, maybe you want to find out if it’s true first, BEFORE deciding that it’s big.
You don’t need a sign you can put away, you’d spend your whole life folding and unfolding. You need a t shirt.
No because a t shirt just looks like a generality, which can’t possibly apply to MOI. Although I suppose I could dramatically point to the t shirt when necessary, while going “AHEM.”
He needs at least to be seen to be ready to go to war to get re-elected. This has been predicted by quite a few for some time now.
Hey, it worked for Dubya. For some reason, Americans love ‘war presidents’ and hesitate to change leaders during a war, even if that leader is screwing up the war in a big way – until they get so sick of it they ‘throw the bums out’ – only to re-elect the same bums once they have a few years to forget that they are the ‘bums’ and decide the currently in power party are the ‘bums’.
And I don’t think war works quite the same from Democrats. It seems to be a Republican thing.