Donald Trump has taken his obsession with crafting falsehoods about Democratic nominee Kamala Harris to the next level, penning his own fan fiction on Tuesday about the vice president.

  • Coelacanth@feddit.nu
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    1 year ago

    In case anybody hasn’t noticed, Trump has shifted away from lying in the form of “plausible deniability” or lies that have at least a kernel of reality to them so long as you dig deep enough and just don’t think too hard about it, to literally just making up events about things that other people did that simply never happened.

    I feel like this has been going on for a long time, though? He literally lied about the crowd size of his inauguration 8 years ago despite pictures of the actual crowd being widely available.

    • MagicShel@programming.dev
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      1 year ago

      only for news outlets to show the moment he endorsed her, which was two days before his post.

      This is the difference right here. He’s getting fact checked instead of journalists just coughing politely when he spews pure nonsense.

      • Coelacanth@feddit.nu
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        1 year ago

        Sure, and if they’d have done that from the start 10 years ago maybe things would have developed differently. But at this point everyone already knows he is a pathological liar, and neither his devoted supporters nor the independent/undecideds seem to care.

    • OldWoodFrame@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      Yeah this is classic Trump actually, the famous difference between a Bullshitter and a Liar. He’s a Bullshitter because he doesn’t care what the truth is, he just says whatever will help him. Biden is re-joining the race. Covid restrictions will end by Easter 2020. He won the 2020 election. Obama is a secret Muslim with a fake birth certificate. Just whatever. He gets called out on these things and just sticks with them.

      A Liar has a relationship with the truth but says the opposite. A Bullshitter has no relationship with the truth.

      • Passerby6497@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        But there was at least some subjectiveness to it. Crowd sizes can be relative.

        But absolutely wasn’t.

        Like with just about all of the annoying orange lies, its only really subjective if you don’t know the truth and have 0 curiosity.

      • Hemingways_Shotgun@lemmy.ca
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        1 year ago

        Crowd sizes can be relative

        Ummmm…that’s not how counting works.

        I agree with you that a lot of things can be relative. But crowd size at his inauguration is a terrible example of that (no offence). Two rallies in the same location, the number of attendants isn’t a relative ephemeral thing, it’s a cold-hard-statistic.

          • Coelacanth@feddit.nu
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            1 year ago

            Now, instead of staying with the purposely vague “largest crowd ever!”, he’s saying…

            If we’re sticking with the inauguration example, Trump actually specified a “a million, a million-and-a-half” as his estimate, while the probable reality was more like 300,000 - 600,000[1]. I believe “largest crowd ever” was Sean Spencer’s line.

            For more blatant lies that are easily fact-checked he also claimed to have personally witnessed people jumping out of the windows of the skyscrapers during 9/11. Trump’s residence is more than four miles away from ground zero. [2].

            Don’t forget when he randomly said low flow toilets were causing problems with water use because people were “flushing 10 to 15 times” [3] or when he went on about the noise of windmills causing cancer [4].

            He has never had any regard for reality and has not had problems making things up out of thin air, going back decades - probably forever.


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              • Coelacanth@feddit.nu
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                1 year ago

                You do realize we’re ‘arguing’ because we’re trying to figure out how big a liar Trump is, right? And you’re kinda sorta making me defend Trump here. I’m sending you the bill from my shrink. :P

                Yeah I don’t really know how we got here. I get stuck into proving a point sometimes, I think it’s an autism thing. I don’t know. I’ll ask my shrink.

                I’ve gotta still mildly disagree. His bullshit used to have at least a whiff of believability and plausible deniability, even if you had to dig several dozen layers to find it. But he’s getting older. Cognitive decline, you know. Bless his heart. Now he’s just letting the shit spill out of the diaper just to see who’ll come by to clean it up.

                I don’t know. Like the fake civil war memorial suggests, he’s always been perfectly fine with making things up completely I think. Don’t forget he invented at least two fake personas to talk as in efforts to talk himself up, too [1]. I think he’s always had no problem disregarding reality completely. I could probably dig out more examples but like you said earlier - this is turning into a pretty meaningless exercise!

                And I definitely do agree that his cognitive abilities seem to be on the decline. In fact it was reported on only earlier today [2]


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      • Coelacanth@feddit.nu
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        1 year ago

        I love your optimism in trying to find signs of desperation, but I just don’t think it’s true. A quick perusal of the wiki page detailing his false and misleading statements shows his blatant lies with no ground in the truth go back way farther than even his political career.

        A personal favourite is the erection of a monument commemorating the so-called River of Blood Civil War event while renovating his golf course - an event that of course never happened on a site where no major battle took place.