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Old 02-23-2017, 11:26 PM   #10
BigV
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Join Date: Nov 2004
Location: Seattle
Posts: 27,063
One of the many things I find frustrating and disheartening about President Trump is the regular, endless contradiction in his communications.

When he, himself contradicts himself, and just breezes right by it, it erodes my confidence in him. My ability to trust what he says has been ground down. It is compounded when he just makes shit up like the incandescent non-issue of the attendance of his inauguration, and when he gets shit wrong from an obvious absence of critical thinking like his remarks about trouble in Sweden. And there's a special kind of contradiction that I find deeply worrying. It's the thinning, the dilution of meaning.

Today's news gives a perfect example, though hardly unique, hardly even unusual. Trump spoke today about his plans and instructions for deportation:

Quote:
"We're getting really bad dudes out of this country, and at a rate that nobody's ever seen before," Trump said Thursday. "And they're the bad ones. And it's a military operation."

He added: "You see what's happening at the border. All of a sudden for the first time, we're getting gang members out. We're getting drug lords out."
That, my friends, is news. Hello?! We have a military operation inside the borders of the United States? WTF.

But just wait, here comes the dilution, the smoke and mirrors, the Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.

Quote:
A White House spokesperson said Trump did not misspeak by calling deportations a 'military operation,' but clarified the President meant "military" as an "adjective."
Come on. Just on the face of it when Trump says military and his spokeperson says "military is not military, it's an adjective".... shut up. What does it mean? And from the lips of the people very close to the situation, discussing it in the same room as their counterparts from Mexico, our Secretary of State Tillerson and the Head of Homeland Security Kelley said:

Quote:
Trump, though, is not using the military to deport undocumented immigrants. Department of Homeland Security Secretary John Kelly told reporters in Mexico City Thursday that there would be "no use of military force in immigration operations, none,"
So, *not* war? Ok, good, good.

A lot of the people around this administration *do* think before speaking, like Kelly and Tillerson (so far). Many just ... don't . Spicer, Conway, Bannon, Preibus. And most of all Trump. (Let's not get started about "alternative facts" and the media as the "opposition of the American people", that is huge, deserving of it's own conversation.)

I feel like when I'm tracking what's being said, and the words are ALL OVER THE GODDAMN PLACE, and some are pretty scary--let's face it, the stakes are high, I'm definitely not the only one paying attention--it's overwhelming. I'm getting zapped and stabbed and tagged from every direction. One of my most effective sanity preserving reactions is to turn the volume down on the words and look at the actions. What the fuck is actually going on? What's the vibe here? Where is the center of gravity? Feel it... Like Luke lowering the blast shield of his helmet to better understand what the fuck is going on and (this is key) respond appropriately. By reducing the distracting and contradictory input from the main (visual channel), he understood the situation better.

I'm not encouraged by his actions.

I used to think that the calls for diagnosing his mental health from a distance were just kinda bullshit, but he clearly does not think and communicate like practically everybody I interact with (even at a distance, like I do with him). But I've noticed some similarities in the communication styles of Trump and of other people of my long and close acquaintance that I consider mentally unhealthy. Now I wonder more. It seems clear, he's a privileged, old, white guy that just doesn't connect with the kind of people I know in my life. "A champion of the working man" just.. just makes me laugh. He betrays ZERO knowledge or empathy of anyone who lives paycheck to paycheck. Worse, he thinks he does and sees others through the lens of his own experience. I think his capacity for empathy is near zero.

There's consistency and predictability to Trump, but it doesn't come from just paying attention to what he's saying. That's largely a diversion.
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