I wonder what trick of perspective made him believe all those empty bleachers lining the route to the White House were actually full of cheering, devoted fans? Oh, right, the “he’s a fucking idiot” trick of perspective.
No, Trump’s problem is that it is not acceptable for him to have had anything less than an unprecedentedly massive crowd. Any normal President or generally sane person put into that same situation would have responded by saying a) of course Obama’s '08 inauguration had a vastly larger crowd, the first black President in history was a truly incredible occasion, especially in a city with such a large black population - this comparison serves no purpose other than as a partisan attack, and b) it still looked like a pretty great crowd to me - tons of people stretching all the way down the mall made the trek to DC to show their support, and I’m grateful for it.
Trump is not capable of that, though - as soon as someone says he was worse at something, he must shout loudly until everyone agrees he was actually better at it. This is also why he’s on about the illegal votes - losing the popular vote is fine if no one mentions it, but if everyone is going to say that he actually lost the popular vote, he is going to try to make them all say that he didn’t. If someone could just figure out how to turn this pathology into something positive for the country, we might actually get something out of the next 4 years besides racial tension, global instability, and a smoking ruin of an economy.
I hope someone asks him about his daughter, son-in-law, Treasury nominee, and senior adviser today at the joint press conference. They are fraudulent voters and he needs to be confronted with this in public.
… To be clear, being registered in several states isn’t actually illegal (which makes sense, given people move all the time.) What’s illegal is voting in several states.
The GOP has been pointing to minor issues like being registered in more than one state and calling it “voter fraud” when it’s not. While it’s tempting to point and laugh at Tiffany Trump etc., it’s actually playing into the GOP’s false claim that illegal voter fraud is widespread.
Only for the stupid. Pointing at Tiffany and saying this is voter fraud according to your father and the POTUS who knows nothing about our laws, and then pointing out it’s not illegal is not playing into the GOP. The news outlets I’ve seen point this out 100% of the time. The reason we’re talking about this at all is Trump’s ploy, but ignoring it does nothing. Ignoring this does exactly what it did to get him in the White House in the first place. Ignoring it lets people who make shit up control the narrative.
Exactly, it’s obviously not voter fraud but when the President is calling it that repeatedly, it bears confronting him in it.
I’m quite sure I was guilty of this heinous crime when I moved to CA years ago.
… Don’t you remember how we get into this situation in the first place?
Assuming most people will read the whole story and not just the headline is a deadly trap. The headlines we want are “GOP planning to remove your right to vote,” not anything that reads as"Some debate about voter fraud, complicated details inside." That will immediately get digested as “Voter fraud is common.”
See: the Clinton Foundation “controversy.”
So, for how many generations will the media have to tiptoe around the idiocy of the electorate?
Reporter: Do you consider being registered in two states illegal?
Trump: Yes… absolutely. Illegal, bigly. Voter fraud. SAD!
Reporter: Would you favor imprisonment for those who knowingly register in more than one state?
Trump: Yes…of course…I mean… if it’s illegal there should be some form of punishment…right?
Reporter: So you would be in favor of imprisoning your daughter since, based on these registration rolls, it shows she is registered in two states?
Trump: Wait… which daughter?
Reporter: Tiffany
Trump: Pfft, Tiffany? Yeah, lock her up
All of them. Not even joking, here. One of the things the media is going to have to come to grips with in the post-Reformation era of instant link-sharing is that you cannot bury the lede. You have to assume that sizable portion of “readership” will be confined to the headline alone, and another big chunk to headline + first 2 sentences. If you don’t consider the availability bias that will be created by people have seen your headline but not clicked the article, then you are contributing to the problem of a poorly-informed nation.
Just until the singularity.
Of course I do. Trump started this first. You can let the POTUS provide false information and just let it hang out there. The media shouldn’t have given him the coverage he got as basically free marketing… that ship sailed. This is the POTUS and he is making false claims.
Yup.
Mass voting rights + mass media doesn’t necessarily equal paradise. The fact that virtually any fact you care to name can be Googled in seconds turns out to be sadly irrelevant if most of us choose to be informed by fake news sites in Croatia instead. The truth alone won’t set us free - it will also take disciplined messaging.
This assumes the sentient computer overlords aren’t basing their model of the world on fake news sites from Croatia.
Those will all be gone or privately-owned hell pits of torture.
Or more likely just be jails, because that’s what was happening already: jails are the new mental institutions.
*for white people
not to be mistaken for the “other” white people. Middle Eastern is Caucasian. Arab is not a race.
Caucasian is not a race either.
What definition are you using?
Hospitals. US Census… although White/Caucasian is usually together in most drop-downs.
Next you’ll be saying the Allah that those brown people worship is the same God that good white Christians worship!
An obvious challenge is that often, the headline and link text are written by different people. And that doesn’t even count the aggregators retweeters and clickbaity reposters who deliberately confuse or inflate the link headline for clicks despite the content.