What did we ever do before the Innertubes allowed us to instantly figure out when someone was lying to us. Here’s a case in point.
Last week, Donald Trump appeared on Fox News and praised Reagan as one of the presidents he admired most.
HANNITY: Who are our past presidents that you admire most?
TRUMP: Well, I really like and knew a little bit Ronald Reagan, and I really liked him. You know, not only his policies, smart guy and so much smarter, you know, I always sort of have to laugh to myself when people try and criticize that level of intelligence. And I loved his style. I loved what he represented. … I thought he represented something very special for this county.
But in the last year of the Reagan administration, on page 60 of his book “Art of the Deal”, Trump used Reagan as an example of someone who could con people, but couldn’t deliver the goods.
You can’t con people, at least not for long. You can create excitement, you can do wonderful promotion and get all kinds of press, and you can throw in a little hyperbole. But if you don’t deliver the goods, people will eventually catch on. […] Ronald Reagan is another example. He is so smooth and so effective a performer that he completely won over the American people. Only now, nearly seven years later, are people beginning to question whether there’s anything beneath that smile.
I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt — maybe Trump doesn’t actually believe anything he is currently saying, but is merely throwing out red meat to get the base all fired up. Or maybe he just figured out that the base won’t bother to check anything he says. You may not be able to fool all of the people all of the time, but Trump only needs to fool some of them.
UPDATE: An interesting article about how Trump is playing us for suckers and getting away with it.
UPDATE2: From Matt Taibbi’s blog, answering an email that asks:
About how many times a day do you find yourself saying “What the fuck?” to nobody in particular? I’m up to about 23 these days.
Maybe twice or three times a day. Fewer than before, certainly. See, what I’ve done, and you all can try this yourselves, is to simply avoid reading the news as much as possible. I read old books and the only periodicals I even look at lately are NFL draft guides. I’ve read Nolan Nawrocki’s draft booklet like 400 times already. To me he’s the greatest novelist since Waugh. That does wonders for my general sanity, but then I’ll have something happen like last Friday, when I went into 30 Rock to do a hit on Cenk Uygur’s show and saw him talking about a poll that had Donald Trump leading the field of prospective Republican candidates. Donald Trump has 26% of the Republican vote right now? What the fuck? Things like that, honestly, I don’t even want to know, until I have no choice…
8 Comments
“You can’t con people, at least not for long. You can create excitement, you can do wonderful promotion and get all kinds of press, and you can throw in a little hyperbole. But if you don’t deliver the goods, people will eventually catch on.”
Sounds like The Donald was forecasting his own future.
He’s just playing politics, getting more republicans on his side…nothing more nothing less
The right worships Reagan these days. If you want to get in good with them, all you have to do is invoke the old bastard.
I agree with Chinagreenelvis. Trump was doing nothing more than pandering to his potential base, just like he did by resurrecting that birther nonsense. He’s a sociopathic liar who will say anything to win political points.
Technically he may not be lying. The Donald probably does admire the ability to con people with style.
Trump has made noise about running for president a decade ago, and nothing came of it. More likely he wants free exposure for himself to push up ratings of Celebrity Apprentice.
http://www.cnn.com/2011/OPINION/04/19/byron.trump.president/index.html
Regarding Update 2….I’m currently reading Dickens to divert my attention from the insanity.
Mad Hatter: That made me smile. But seriously, are you? Which one? 😉
(Dickensian stories as more positive about human behavior than our current behavior? Oh the delights of irony that could be played there…)