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Culture War Roundup for the week of November 24, 2025

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The complicating issue is that many presidents do the "what? what? I don't know what you're talking about" all the time - Trump himself (low hanging X tweet video in question) literally within the last few days pulled it himself, and also has a history of this kind of thing as a tactical pseudo-deniability measure (I have lost track of the number of people who are wonderful friends one day, and the next year once they do something bad are suddenly suck-up hanger-ons that he 'barely knows'). It's taking advantage of and leveraging any wiggle room/benefit of the doubt in your political favor.

So there's personal judgement which is one thing - we can judge ourselves which are 'legit' and which are deliberate all we'd like in the political arena - but legal judgements are a totally different thing with totally different standards.

Presumably, in my opinion, if a president doesn't agree with the use of the pen by his office, it's incumbent on the president himself to correct it. And if he doesn't, then it's presumed legit. I'm not a fan of successive presidents attempting to reverse engineer intent and state of mind, and on a practical level of course we seem to all agree it's a bad precedent and hard to administer fairly.