Sunday, January 22, 2017

Trump's Big CON: 'I Wrote the Speech'

UPDATE II:  Did Trump plagiarize a comic book villain in his speech?

Read the Daily Mail, Did Trump quote Batman super-villain BANE in his inauguration speech? Comic book fans point out eerie similarity in landmark speech.

UPDATE:  Trump is so obviously a con man that nothing he says should be believed. Consider:

"For all the frequency of his communication and his victory, you’d think President-elect Donald Trump would easily make himself understood. 'Blunt talk' was his strength, we were told. Since the election, however, never have so many aides, nominees and supporters have had to clarify so frequently, so much of what the president-elect says (either in interviews or tweets).

Both Vice President-elect Mike Pence and U.N. Ambassador nominee Nikki Haley on Wednesday had to assure us that Trump didn’t mean that NATO was obsolete when he said NATO is, well, 'obsolete.' Health and Human Service secretary nominee Rep. Tom Price (R-Ga.) had to explain that health-care insurance for 'everybody' doesn’t mean actual coverage; in the Trump administration that means 'access' for everybody to some type of coverage. When Trump said he had a health-care plan ready to go, he really meant Price would come up with something. Pick a topic and almost every Trump pronouncement gets reinterpreted or dumped. Sean Spicer and Kellyanne Conway seem to do nothing but explain what Trump meant to say.

The act, frankly, has gotten old. Trump says what he means; the problem remains that he doesn’t know what he is talking about. His impulsive, vague notions about putting America first were sufficient in the campaign to beat a rocky opponent (with help from James Comey and WikiLeaks). Since then, Trump apparently has not bothered to learn much about the world or even what certain phrases ('health care for everybody') mean in the context of grown-up policy discussions. Either that, or he really does intend to destroy NATO, enable Russian President Vladimir Putin, create universal guaranteed health-care insurance, slap tariffs on China, etc. You see the optimistic interpretation remains that he lacks the requisite knowledge and/or the language skills to explain policy positions. . .

Recording accurately and holding him to account for his statements drive Trump up the wall — and onto Twitter where he can attack others instead of explaining with a modicum of detail what he believes. He doesn’t believe much of anything we suspect."

Read the Washington Post,  ‘What Trump meant to say. . .’

And the obvious interpretation is that The Donald is a con man

"Of course the picture is all bullshit — as are the words that Donald Trump tweeted out with it on Wednesday: 'Writing my inaugural address at the Winter White House, Mar-a-Lago, three weeks ago. Looking forward to Friday.'

We know it is bullshit because of the way Trump is bending the notepad up at the corner, as if to conceal that nothing is written on it. We know it is bullshit because he seems to be sitting at the receptionist’s desk at Mar-a-Lago and 'writing' with a Sharpie. (Have you ever tried to do that?) We know it is bullshit because three weeks ago, at the time he was supposedly writing the speech, his transition team announced that Stephen Miller, the Trump aide who wrote most of his major speeches during the campaign, is crafting this one as well, possibly with Steve Bannon. . .

But there is something so obviously phony about the speechwriting photo, as if Trump and one of his kids staged and shot the scene on the spur of the moment in between rounds of golf. A man who famously does not like to read and whose books are all ghostwritten, a man whose aides are often frustrated by his inability to focus on one subject for more than a minute or two at a time, is not a person who is going to sit down and write a speech for his presidential inauguration."

Read Salon, Donald Trump’s claim that he’s writing his own speech isn’t just BS — it’s flimsy, transparent B.S., which notes that the "photo of Trump 'writing' his speech on a blank notepad is just lazy, even for authoritarian propaganda."