r/politics • u/rollingstone Rolling Stone • Jun 02 '24

Trump Denies Ever Saying ‘Lock Her Up.’ He Did… Several Times Soft Paywall

https://www.rollingstone.com/politics/politics-news/trump-denies-saying-lock-her-up-clinton-1235031145/
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u/SvenHudson America Jun 02 '24

It's not either of them, really.

To tell the truth is to say the thing you believe to be true because you have an intent for the listener to know the truth.
To lie is to say the thing you believe not to be true because you have an intent for the listener not to know the truth.
To bullshit is to speak without consideration for what is or is not true in the first place.

Bullshit is the zone he lives his entire life in. Though he is extremely stupid, stupidity is not why he says things that are untrue. And though the untrue things flatter him more than reality, his intent is not to deceive. The core of the problem is actually his personality: he does not value the truth enough to even try learning, sharing, or hiding it.

It would be bad if he said that, therefore he says he did not say that. That is the entirety of the thought process. Nothing precedes it and nothing follows it.

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u/thewhaleshark Jun 02 '24

I love this comment so much.

It's why pointing out his lying and hypocrisy doesn't matter. He doesn't need to know what's true or not, he just needs to know what serves him in the moment.

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u/suninabox Jun 02 '24

Yup, bullshit is both easier and more effective than lying.

To lie correctly you have to keep track of the truth, and conceal or distort it. You need a good memory to not ever say something that lets slip its a lie.

To bullshit, you just describe reality however you want it to be, regardless of whether it directly contradicts what you said 5 seconds ago.

It has the added bonus of really riling up your political opponents, who think you should care that you've been caught lying, but don't. The more Trump bullshits, the madder his opponents get, and the madder they get, the more his base loves him because "he's making all the right people mad"

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u/KingBanhammer Jun 02 '24

You're oversimplifying this in a way that reduces it beyond the reality: it's not that he's stupid or there's no thought process. This is his usual narcissistic inability to be wrong.

The "lock her up" process plays bad for him now because it suggests that he would have to lock himself up, therefore it -never ever happened-. It's not a question of if he believes he said it (he does believe it), it's that it would be evidence that he is wrong, which means he is not the perfectest and the bestest and the smartest and the brightest, therefore that evidence DOES NOT EXIST. He can't reconcile it with his worldview, therefore the evidence is wrong.

Even when he knows it to be right.

This is also why he can't admit that he understands the charges or did any of it. It would be evidence he was wrong. In his head, he cannot be wrong, therefore he isn't, and none of that happened.

You're reducing a pathological issue to a question of native intelligence, which it really is not.

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u/bubblebooy Jun 02 '24

On top of that I think he spews some bullshit and then believes himself.