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PaperclipPerfector  9d ago (text post)   30658 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 21, 2025

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Trump did an interview with "Time," to mark the end of the first 100 days of his second term. The first topic they discussed was Presidential power:

Q: You know better than anyone that the President of the United States is the most powerful person in the world. At the same time, it seems like you are expanding the power of the presidency. Why do you think you need more power?

A: Well, I don't feel I'm expanding it. I think I'm using it as it was meant to be used. I feel that we've had a very successful presidency in 100 days. We've had people writing it was the best first month and best second month, and really the best third month. But that you won't know about for a little while, because it takes a little time in transition. You know, we're resetting a table. We were losing $2 trillion a year on trade, and you can't do that. I mean, at some point somebody has to come along and stop it, because it's not sustainable. We were carrying other countries on our back with, you know, with trade numbers, with horrible numbers, and we've changed it. You see the market fluctuates quite a bit. Today, it's up 1,000 or 1,200 points. It goes up and down, but that will steady out, and we're taking in tremendous amounts of money. We have, as you know, already, 25% on cars, 25% on steel and aluminum—

Q: Mr. President, I think what we’re driving at is that you've taken congressional authority on trade and appropriations. You fired the heads of independent agencies. You're challenging the courts right now, as you know. You're using the levers of government to weaken private institutions like law firms and universities. Isn't this seizing power away from institutions and concentrating them inside the presidency?

A: No, I think that what I'm doing is exactly what I've campaigned on. If you look at what I campaigned on, for instance, you can talk about removing people from the country. We have to do it because Biden allowed people to come in through his open border crazy, insanity. He allowed people to come into our country that we can't have in our country. Many criminals—they emptied their prisons, many countries, almost every country, but not a complete emptying, but some countries a complete emptying of their prison system. But you look all over the world, and I'm not just talking about South America, we're talking about all over the world. People have been led into our country that are very dangerous. If you were walking down the street, and if you happen to be near one of these people, they could, they would kill you, and they wouldn't even think about it. And we can't have that in our country.

Q: So you're not concentrating more power in the presidency?

A: I don't think so. I think I'm using it properly, and I'm also using it as per my election. You know, everything that I'm doing—this is what I talked about doing. I said that I'm going to move the criminals out. I saw what was happening early on when I heard that he had open borders, when I, because it was a hard thing to believe. I built hundreds of miles of wall, and then he didn't want to, and we had another, an extra hundred miles that I could have put up because I ordered it as extra. I completed the wall, what I was doing, but we have, I wanted to build additional because it was working so well. An extension. And he didn't want to do that. And when he said he wasn't going to do that, I said, “Well, he must want open borders.” There were sections that were being built. And he stopped to work on it, and I said, this guy actually wants to have open borders. That's going to be a tragedy for our country. That's going to mean that other countries will release into our country some very rough people.

Anyone know of a mainstream interpretation of the Constitution that claims Trump has not done anything to expand Presidential power and is "using it as it was meant to be used?"

He also claimed to have made more trade deals than there are countries... The way he answers questions is peculiar and worth reading. Near the end of the interview:

Q: You were harshly critical of what you called the weaponization of the Justice System under Biden. You recently signed memos—

A:Well, sure, but you wouldn’t be—if this were Biden, well, first of all, he wouldn't do an interview because he was grossly incompetent.

Q: We spoke to him last year, Mr. President.

A: Huh?

Q: We spoke to him a year ago.

A: How did he do?

Q: You can read the interview yourself.

A: Not too good. I did read the interview. He didn't do well. He didn't do well at all. He didn't do well at anything. And he cut that interview off to being a matter of minutes, and you weren't asking him questions like you're asking me.

Q: Well, we appreciate that you are able and willing to answer these questions. It says something about you, Mr. President.

A: I am indeed. I've been answering them for years and I’ve been getting elected by bigger and bigger numbers all the time, but you didn't ask questions like this to Biden, because if you did, he would have crawled under this beautiful desk.

Should we be considering the possibility that Trump has dementia?

  • -17

"using it as it was meant to be used?"

Fundamentally he seems either deliberately unwilling or simply unable to comprehend that the interviewer is asking about means rather than ends. Saying 'I was elected to close the borders/change our terms of trade' is just a total non-sequitur response to the question 'have you expanded the powers of the presidency'. It would be one thing to say 'I don't care about process, I care about results', but he doesn't say that, he's just talking past the question.

AFAIK this is (sadly) standard political interview technique. Open live debate with a hostile interview can go wrong in too many ways, so you don’t do it unless you’re desperate. The standard technique is to totally ignore anything the interviewer says and repeat your talking points until they give up.

Even if the interviewer gives you a jumping off point for what you want to say you still shouldn’t take it because there’s too much chance they've booby-trapped the framing.

Sad but true.

It's not sad, it is a rational response to the fact that journalists have zero interest in reporting anything honestly and are de-facto hostile in every interaction you have with them. You would be a fool to ever answer their questions in the same way you'd answer a friend's or co-worker's. You treat it as an opportunity to get your talking points and story out -- nothing more.

Source: me, a local politician

IQ Distribution Meme.

Left: Why can't he just answer the question??

Middle: The interviewer is hostile and can trivially control the frame.

Right: Trump is feigning ignorance and deliberately misunderstanding the question in order to sneak in a non sequitur in a transparent attempt to change the frame. He must think we're idiots.

Edit: I got the meme exactly backwards. Of fucking course this is one of my most-engaged-with comments in my history on this website. No you're salty.

Alternative, IMO more accurate frame:

Left: Thats a stupid question.

Mid: Why not answer the question.

Right: Obviously no one would respond to a hostile question.

Are you familiar with the meme? The point isn't to flatter the one you agree with as the highest-IQ response. The humor lies in the irony that Joe sixpack could see the world more clearly than the wordcel egghead. Maybe you and I disagree on what levels of intelligence is required for each response.

The way I've always seen it used, the humor is in the fact that people graduate past the naive idiotic conclusion by noticing some principle and grabbing onto it... and then it turns out that if you're even better you go back to the original "idiotic" answer because of some nuance that the principle overlooks.

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