[GolfPopper]

Yep. There's some immense "the Leader can never be wrong" energy with the response to the (factually inaccurate, and thus untrue) "transgender mice" line in Trump's address to Congress.

Any remotely sane administration, faced with something similar, would just put out a statement about how a speechwriter made a mistake, the intent was different than the exact wording used by the President, and let it go.

Instead, various lackeys are left to performatively scramble and media outlets are under pressure, all to find some twisted interpretation under which he can retroactively have been right all along. Madness reminiscent of Orwell's writing. It makes you wonder, happens if he says "pi is 3"?

[s1artibartfast]

The interesting part is that many people correctly understood exactly what Trump meant with his language the first time.

For those people, it is the left that is twisting the words and factually incorrect ( e.g. Trump did not mix up transgender and transgenic).

Using poetic or lose language is rhetorical style that trump has employed since the first term. Trump keeps doing it because the feeble response makes it a winning tactic.

For many people, Trump comes out looking like the sane one when he calls a mouse on HRT a trans mouse, and the rebuttals are "The studies weren't about gender in mice because, gender being a social construct, mice don't have it" or scientists weren't "putting mice in drag and asking them their pronouns."

[ipaddr]

I don't think Trump is looking like a same person unless you consider a Trump hotel in Gaza sane. Do you?

[GolfPopper]

Discussions that go in this direction remind me of the short story "Sort By Controversial" [1], about 'Scissor statements':

  "If you just read a Scissor statement off a list, it’s harmless. It just seems like a trivially true or trivially false thing. It doesn’t activate until you start discussing it with somebody. At first you just think they’re an imbecile. Then they call you an imbecile, and you want to defend yourself. Crescit eundo. You notice all the little ways they’re lying to you and themselves and their audience every time they open their mouth to defend their imbecilic opinion. Then you notice how all the lies are connected, that in order to keep getting the little things like the Scissor statement wrong, they have to drag in everything else. Eventually even that doesn’t work, they’ve just got to make everybody hate you so that nobody will even listen to your argument no matter how obviously true it is. Finally, they don’t care about the Scissor statement anymore. They’ve just dug themselves so deep basing their whole existence around hating you and wanting you to fail that they can’t walk it back. You’ve got to prove them wrong, not because you care about the Scissor statement either, but because otherwise they’ll do anything to poison people against you, make it impossible for them to even understand the argument for why you deserve to exist. You know this is true. Your mind becomes a constant loop of arguments you can use to defend yourself, and rehearsals of arguments for why their attacks are cruel and unfair, and the one burning question: how can you thwart them? How can you convince people not to listen to them, before they find those people and exploit their biases and turn them against you? How can you combat the superficial arguments they’re deploying, before otherwise good people get convinced, so convinced their mind will be made up and they can never be unconvinced again? How can you keep yourself safe?"

1. https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/10/30/sort-by-controversial/