Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

Not all heroes wear capes.

Take hopelessness and turn it into resilience.

Text STOP to opt out of updates on war plans.

My right to basic bodily autonomy is not on the table. that’s the new deal.

He really is that stupid.

When I was faster i was always behind.

Baby steps, because the Republican Party is full of angry babies.

The arc of the moral universe does not bend itself. it is up to us to bend it.

One way or another, he’s a liar.

Marge, god is saying you’re stupid.

People are weird.

They think we are photo bombing their nice little lives.

Sometimes the world just tells you your cat is here.

There are consequences to being an arrogant, sullen prick.

They love authoritarianism, but only when they get to be the authoritarians.

A fool as well as an oath-breaker.

Jack be nimble, jack be quick, hurry up and indict this prick.

After dobbs, women are no longer free.

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

You passed on an opportunity to be offended? What are you even doing here?

Republican also-rans: four mules fighting over a turnip.

Never give a known liar the benefit of the doubt.

“I was told there would be no fact checking.”

When tyranny becomes law, rebellion becomes duty. ~Thomas Jefferson

You are here: Home / Elections 2024 / Trumpery Open Thread: Childcare & Word Salad

Trumpery Open Thread: Childcare & Word Salad

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Childcare / Word Salad - STOCKPILE

(John Deering via GoComics.com)

 



Goddess bless Alexandra Petri, at the Washington Post — The Wonderful Trump Headline Machine” [gift link]:

I found it! The machine! The wonderful machine that they have at all news production headquarters. Its input is Donald Trump’s remarks; its output is headlines. Everything makes sense now.

It functions somewhat like a juicer. You insert Trump’s remarks at one end, turn a crank (you have to turn it pretty hard; the machine does a lot of heavy lifting and twisting) and then — Presto! — out comes the headline or chyron produced by those remarks. I had long been wondering where we were getting these headlines and chyrons. You glance up idly at a muted television and see “DONALD TRUMP DELIVERS REMARKS ON ECONOMY,” and you think, “Ah, presidential at last!” And as long as you do not make the mistake of unmuting your television, the machine’s work is complete. If you are silly enough to unmute your television, you find yourself thinking, “I don’t know what those are, but I would not describe them as remarks about the economy.”

A similar process occurs in print. If it were not for the machine, we would have headlines every day like “Would-Be President Rambles Unintelligibly For Eighty Minutes After Promising He Would Speak About The Economy; At Intervals We Glimpsed Something In The Torrent Of Words That If Pulled Out And Dried Off Might Become A Policy Idea, So We Sent Several Guys In After It, But None Of Them Returned Alive, Except For One Guy Who Just Said ‘The Horror, The Horror’ After We Retrieved Him And He’s Now Staring Off Silently Into The Void. Is Donald Trump Entirely Well? Harris Also Delivered Remarks But Not As Many As We Wanted.” Maybe we should have those headlines, but, thanks to the machine, we don’t…

… I looked up Trump’s economic policy speech Thursday, including this 358-word ramble about child care, word for word:

“Well, I would do that, and we’re sitting down — you know, I was, somebody, we had Sen. Marco Rubio, and my daughter Ivanka was so impactful on that issue. It’s a very important issue. But I think when you talk about the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, that — because, child care is child care. It’s, couldn’t, you know, it’s something, you have to have it — in this country, you have to have it.

“But when you talk about those numbers compared to the kind of numbers that I’m talking about, by taxing foreign nations at levels that they’re not used to — but they’ll get used to it very quickly — and it’s not gonna stop them from doing business with us. But they’ll have a very substantial tax when they send product into our country.

“Those numbers are so much bigger than any numbers that we’re talking about, including child care, that it’s going to take care. We’re gonna have — I look forward to having no deficits within a fairly short period of time, coupled with the reductions that I told you about on waste and fraud and all of the other things that are going on in our country, because I have to stay with child care, I want to stay with child care, but those numbers are small relative to the kind of economic numbers that I’m talking about, including growth. But growth also headed up by what the plan is that I just, that I just told you about. We’re gonna be taking in trillions of dollars, and as much as child care is talked about as being expensive, it’s, relatively speaking, not very expensive compared to the kind of numbers we’ll be taking in. We’re going to make this into an incredible country that can afford to take care of its people, and then we’ll worry about the rest of the world.

“Let’s help other people, but we’re going to take care of our country first. This is about America first. It’s about Make America Great Again. We have to do it because right now we’re a failing nation, so we’ll take care of it. Thank you. Very good question. Thank you.” (To be clear, the question he’d been asked was: What specific legislation would you support to lower the cost of child care?)…

Reader Interactions

56Comments

  4. 4.

    Baud

    I’m glad to hear Trump is going to tax every other country and not just Mexico. He’s grown since 2016.

  5. 5.

    J. Arthur Crank

    Was is Fermi who said of a paper he recently read:  “it isn’t even wrong”?    That level of quality for that quoted word salad would be an improvement.

  8. 8.

    Frankensteinbeck

    What I’m hearing is that Trump’s incoherence is starting to leak into the national press, even if it’s in the form of contrarian “Why aren’t we talking about this?” takes.

  10. 10.

    Suburban Mom

    Today I spent two hours phone banking for the Harris/Walz campaign.  About half those I spoke to hung up early in the call, but the rest were positive and pleasant.  Quite a few (more than I expected) were interested in volunteering.  It was fun and uplifting.  I plan to do more of this over the next few weeks.  If in-person canvassing isn’t your thing, you might want to give this a try.

  13. 13.

    comrade scotts agenda of rage

    Felonious D makes Caribou Barbie seem cogent and articulate by comparison.

    The GQP unleashed the stoopid and here’s where we are.

  21. 21.

    dmsilev

    I’m far too old to even guess whether this ad will resonate with The Youths, but it at least seems to be a valiant effort to drive home Trump’s ….fractured abortion rhetoric.

    The assortment of clips posted by the Harris campaign include Trump saying that he believes women who receive unlawful abortions should be punished, celebrating the overturning of Roe V. Wade, and dodging questions about restricting contraceptives and a national abortion ban.

    The campaign captioned the video “oof.”

  22. 22.

    lowtechcyclist

    @Frankensteinbeck:

    What I’m hearing is that Trump’s incoherence is starting to leak into the national press, even if it’s in the form of contrarian “Why aren’t we talking about this?” takes.

    That’s how I’m seeing it too. Better late than never, I guess, but damn, it’s WAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAY late.  Trump’s been like this for awhile, yet their reporting has given the appearance that he’s a perfectly normal Presidential candidate.  ‘Sanewashing’ is a good term for that.

    I’m still pissed off at all the media outlets who said after their debate that Biden needed to step aside.  He did, in a sense – but that sense was that Trump would be an absolute fucking dumpster fire as President, so it was a national necessity that the Dems field a candidate who could beat Trump.

    Of course, that’s not anything like what the media were saying, with the exception of a few outlets like the Philadelphia Inquirer. They were saying just Biden needed to step aside, as if the other guy was A-OK.  It amounted to a freaking endorsement of Trump – that as long as the race was Biden v. Trump, Trump should be the next President. How else do you interpret ‘Biden should step aside, but Trump? <crickets>’ ?

    Yeah, I know all the reasons given of why the media is that way, but I don’t give the tiniest goddamn why, just that they were ready to toss this country into that dumpster fire, and still are.  Too bad we can’t just toss the FTFNYT into an alternate timeline where Trump wins, in which they would experience the appropriate FOing for their FAing, while the rest of us get to stay in a timeline where Kamala wins.

  23. 23.

    dmsilev

    @Tony Jay: The Post has had their share of Trump-normalizing headlines, but also a fair number that are blunt and accurate. It’s really aimed at the NYT…

  24. 24.

    satby

    @Frankensteinbeck: it is. I’m hoping we’re approaching a critical mass of criticism from their peers that stops the sanewashing and gets us some factual information in the final weeks of the campaign. The media doesn’t care what the hoi polloi thinks of their reporting, but they’re deeply stung by criticism from their peers.

  25. 25.

    TF79

    @laura: sanewashing indeed. I’m curious how much of it is reporters sifting through the turds for meaning and intentionally polishing them, vs how much of it is campaign staffers feeding “what he really meant was…” and reporters just play strenographers. (Or both to some degree).

  26. 26.

    What Have The Romans Ever Done for Us?

    I read that Petri op ed yesterday (or was it Friday?) and it’s brilliant as usual. Wonder if the machine is called The Pitchbot?

  31. 31.

    scav

    I get rather hung up on, given that it’s supposed to be a statement about child care, he talks about he, singular, being someone and then instantly switches to we (plural?) having Marco Rubio and his (singular) daughter Ivanka.  I mean, talk about gender fluid!  Can’t stick to a single pronoun, apparently possibly has children without the intervention of anyone else and gives one (the male, in fact) an entirely different surname (not to mention only awarding the daughter the singular possessive in a sort of “look what your son has done” move).   And never mentions, in fact, anything about who actually cared for these offspring once produced, but that’s politics for you.  It seems as valid a reconstruction as anything the media came up with.

  33. 33.

    catclub

    @laura:

    Of course, it has pushed his Arlington national cemetery hijinks off the front page.

     

    I can hope that the MSM finally takes continual notice of sanewashing. until the election.

  35. 35.

    Another Scott

    @comrade scotts agenda of rage:

    Mr Trump American voters understand that you are a unique candidate with a unique story.  But nobody has all their faculties and lives forever.  Many are wondering – Who is your chosen successor?  Who will run TruthSocial while you are in prison?

    Where will you live after you’re out on parole and your properties have been seized to pay the various judgments against your businesses and fines against you personally, before your next federal convictions in the secret documents case and the January 6 case?

    Etc.

    Yeah, not holding my breath.

    ;-)

    Forward!!

    Cheers,
    Scott.

  37. 37.

    Villago Delenda Est

    @comrade scotts agenda of rage: ​They can ask all the hard questions they want (and they of course should) but the kicker is that TCFFG/PAB will never answer them in anything other than his rambling non-answers that mean absolutely nothing. That’s when they should badger him mercilessly to ANSWER THE MOFOING QUESTION.

  38. 38.

    mrmoshpotato

    What the fuck was that response?

    The shit “response” that came out of the orange shitstain’s fat, orange, fascist, resting-butthole mouth is an insult to words and salad.

  43. 43.

    Bill Arnold

    Since it’s an actual subject of this thread, copying this from a previous thread.
    I asked a large language model (Llama 70B instruct[1]) to summarize as newspaper headlines felon Trump’s gibberish quoted in full above, while highlighting the incoherence. The prompt prefix was

    Summarize this into a centrist non-partisan newpapers headline, making it clear that it is incoherent. The speaker is not the president, but is running for the office:

    Here are the results, which are better (IMO) than most of the actual headlines:

    Here is a possible centrist, non-partisan newspaper headline that summarizes the statement while highlighting its incoherence:
    “Candidate’s Rambling Response on Child Care Funding Leaves Questions Unanswered”
    or
    “America First’ Pledge Overshadows Vague Promises on Child Care, Economic Growth”
    or
    “Candidate’s Economic Plan Remains Unclear Amid Meandering Discussion on Child Care, Trade, and Deficits”
    These headlines aim to capture the essence of the statement, which appears to be a disjointed and unclear response to a question about child care funding. The candidate’s words jump between various topics, including trade, economic growth, and America’s global role, without providing a clear or coherent explanation of their plan

    Kinda depressing; the headline writers in Our Media are outperformed by a mid-sized LLM. IMO. (Also, a bit scary, TBH.) As a reply in the previous thread said (paraphrased very loosely), news media are on quicksand.

    [1] Free, quick, no login (working with them as a customer, to be clear). fast.snova.ai/

  45. 45.

    Nukular Biskits

    It’s not just the national media that is “sane-ifying” Trump’s word salads.

    Local media here in MS is simply giving it a pass and refusing to challenge state GOP officials to explain Trump’s policy “pronouncements” or if they agree with them.

  46. 46.

    Nukular Biskits

    @J. Arthur Crank:

    Was is Fermi who said of a paper he recently read:  “it isn’t even wrong”?    That level of quality for that quoted word salad would be an improvement.

    Related (but referencing lead up to the Iraq War):  The wrongness singularity

    You really should read it but here’s the gist:

    You see, wrongness is a fermionic property. That is to say, a statement is either wrong or it is not wrong; you can’t pile on the wrongness to make a condensate of wrong. By the conventional rules, n declarative statements can be wrong at most n times. By the Pauli exclusion principle, you just can’t be more wrong than that!

    […]

    So in fact, Reynolds has managed to fit five units of wrongness into only four declarative statements! This is the hackular equivalent of crossing the Chandrasekhar Limit, at which point your blog cannot help but collapse in on itself. It is unknown at this point whether the resulting end state will be an intermediate neutron-blog phase, or whether the collapse will proceed all the way to a singularity surrounded by a black hole event horizon. We may have to wait for the neutrino signal to be sure.

  51. 51.

    twbrandt

    @SiubhanDuinne: You can order physical postcards from them or from other vendors. The Postcards To Voters etsy store was out of the ones I wanted, so I ordered mine from another etsy vendor.

    ETA: ninja’d by Mousebumples.

  52. 52.

    Lyrebird

    @twbrandt: ETA: ninja’d by Mousebumples.

    Hey, Mousebumples pretty much IS the Postcard Ninja, so you can consider it a notch in your cap, right?    :-D

     

    FWIW,@SiubhanDuinne: Since I had to get mine in a hurry, I found some on the Bezos-founded site where I pay for fast shipping.  Made in USA, thematic, fine.

  55. 55.

    RevRick

    @comrade scotts agenda of rage: Yes! While it may very well be true that Trump is deteriorating mentally, the thing to remember is that he was always a stupid man. As his first Secretary of State observed, ” He’s a fucking moron.” He has never been capable

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