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Could it be because Trump is a fundamentally bad person who wants bad things to happen

I agree wholeheartedly. Only caveat: Trump does have three core beliefs that drive everything he does: - White men are supreme - Women are only on earth as playthings for males - Accumulation of wealth and power is the meaning of life. So his racism, misogyny, and greed are hard-baked in.

Great thread. I reposted. bsky.app/profile/upin...

Grimly i thought : often the autopsy speaks for itself

I guess we’ll never know why he is claiming that gas prices are lower under him than under Biden. Is it a lie? Who knows! I can’t get in his brain. Also I have amnesia.

Daniel is the ONLY person in media to do this. His job is literally ‘just the facts, mam’. That is exactly what we need during this calculated avalache of lies. And presented with none of the nonsesnse punditry to cloud the facts. He is the ‘who’ and ‘what’. Leave the ‘why’ to others.

Satan in the flesh. Literally.

Not just “asshole” as one epithet among many, but he is PRECISELY and MERELY an asshole. Beyond that, you’re overthinking it. @davidjroth.bsky.social wrote a piece about it in 2017 to which not a word need be added or subtracted. thebaffler.com/latest/the-p...

That was such a great piece! It has profoundly shaped how I have thought about Trump and responded to him. In the past 10 years, I have almost never listened to his words, because I do not consider those words as honest efforts to communicate an actual mental state.

wayback link web.archive.org/web/20160930...

I hadn't seen this before, and goddamn did you nail it a decade ago.

Women who have been in abusive relationships understand the kind of man Trump is better than any journalist & if we had a better media system we would have heard from those women more from the beginning. Journalists often *sound* like people trapped in those relationships! Same rationalizations!

Nice

@volts.wtf On Firefox, choose reader view and refresh

Trump has only one belief. It is that Donald J. Trump is the ONLY thing that matters in the universe. Everything else is subordinate to that. The fact that he was born into money, and was able to con half the nation in believing him, has allowed this miserable human to survive and bother us so much.

It strikes me reading this that Trump behaves a lot like the AI agents that everyone insists on anthropomorphizing; he has a task that he must carry out at all costs and everything that happens on the way to completing that task is irrelevant collateral damage

Half way through reading this I realized it also kind of describes how AI uses language I've long thought describing AI errors as hallucinating is not correct and bullshitting a more accurate description

Sounds awfully close to a category of personality disorders. 😔

Should be paid for that.

archive.ph/8GSVz

@volts.wtf non-paywall link https://archive.ph/8GSVz

This article was fantastic, and I reference it a lot. It’s one of the best things ever written about Trump. This article will teach you more about him than one year of news reporting.

Sure, but at least you're enjoying all those sweet, sweet residuals now! Right? Right?

Also in the summer of 2016, Fareed Zakaria said on CNN and in the Washington Post that Trump isn’t merely a liar, he’s a bullshitter who has no interest in the objective truth of anything he says. youtu.be/_kJpttKLUtI?...

Still the single/-best piece EVER written on Trump.

The media have failed this moment because they think they're covering a presidency.  They need to understand that they are actually covering a president who sees his job as making and starring in a TV show.   They will continue to fail unless they adjust their coverage accordingly.

Saw him speak in 2015 and immediately recognized he wanted to overthrow democracy. Also said to my friend - "he's bipolar at minimum", having had experience with that disorder. Little did I know the witch's brew of personality disorders this man has.

It took the NYT several years to put the word 'lie' in print. They still refuse to use the word 'murder'.

My 10+ year angst. The diagnosis is important- but particularly important is to apply what the d/x means. Yes trump has multiple severe and unmanaged personality disorders, but here’s why that matters to you….here’s how it impacts his decision making…here’s what it means to allies…and on and on.

That’s a strong argument against a “why” think piece, though? I agree that is really nothing to analyze, character-wise. It doesn’t matter why he is this person. He just needs to be this person somewhere else. (-Preferably jail, but I’d be fine with Trump family migration eastward.)

Aim for the stars, friend.

why does he behave this way? I'll give it a shot: he's a sundowning malignant narcissist w total immunity from the corrupt SCOTUS who has never faced a single consequence from his actions everything he says and does is in service to his ego, and lying makes him feel better, ergo … he lies!

The guy wasted 10 years of his life doing something anyone with a functioning brain can tell within 3 seconds of that fat slob opening his mouth.

Dale is a tireless, relentless and talented worker in the sand mines. He works all day every day at the beach, digging furiously to reveal what's hidden beneath all that sand: Sand.

Wow that Hitler sure invades a lot of countries…

Paywall-free version: archive.ph/8GSVz

He's not really a "liar". Liars care about the truth. He's a BS artist; a parody of a used car salesman. He says whatever is convenient to the moment even if it contradicts what he said yesterday. It's why Republicans are constantly backing and filling and having limbs chopped off from under them.

Trump’s lies speak volumes to me. I’m glad they are individually called out. I don’t need Daniel Dale to break down why Trump is corrupt and batshit crazy.

But wouldn’t you want to do that piece? Wouldn’t you want to bring in experts and make sense of a man who lies as he breathes? Wouldn’t you see that as an obligation to your viewers? The lies are the symptom but the disease is what is destroying the country.

Trump’s lies are more about muddying the waters and shifting things forward from his previous lies. He has no concerns about whether they’re believable or not. In fact it’s a win for him when commentators waste time dissecting his bullshit.

Trump’s biggest superpower that everyone wants to get him on camera. In the 2016 election, that meant he got millions of dollars of free coverage by networks just running his rallies in full on TV. It’s equally true that his lies seem to mean nothing to the media, as long as he’s entertaining.

I don't even think psychologists are who we really need; it's philosophers. Journalists, judges, scientists, these are all empirical actors playing chess on Trump's rugby field

There's just one thing anyone needs to learn: Trump lies every single time he speaks or posts. The question we cannot stop asking is why and that just isn't important. He lies all the time about everything, the why shouldn't matter.

A related but actually interesting exercise by this kind of analyst would be who Trump hopes to badger or suck up to by choosing either the same words or antagonism. He saw Hillary wrecked by Obama on Iraq. His “super intelligence” weirdness sounds like Zuck was last person to talk to him.

and how much of it is because he doesn’t get any pushback from reporters or politicians

a remarkable and enduring absence of curiosity amongst American journalists.