- TRUMP: It had 9.2 million people. It's the highest they've ever had. On any, on air, (CBS "Face the Nation" host John) Dickerson had 5.2 million people. It's the highest for "Face the Nation" or as I call it, "Deface the Nation." It's the highest for "Deface the Nation" since the World Trade Center. Since the World Trade Center came down. It's a tremendous advantage.
I have learned one thing, because I get treated very unfairly, that's what I call it, the fake media. And the fake media is not all of the media. You know they tried to say that the fake media was all the, no. The fake media is some of you. I could tell you who it is, 100 percent. Sometimes you're fake, but — but the fake media is some of the media. It bears no relationship to the truth. It's not that Fox treats me well, it's that Fox is the most accurate.
Knew I'd miss Obama's eloquence. Never thought I'd pine for the soaring oratory of Bush II.
The thing about either Bush is we knew they were villains, but they were professional villains who had long occupied perches in the menagerie of career criminals that make up a functional democracy. We had a reasonable understanding that Bush II was not a particularly competent leader, but we knew that those who pulled his strings had, at the very least, been functional members of government for long enough to know what you can and cannot get away with. I can't remember who said it, but someone summed it up nicely by saying "thank God they're as incompetent as they are or we'd be in real trouble."
Maybe this reiterates what it is to be a "showman". The written transcript leaves a terrible impression, without audiovisual reinforcement. The perceived sincerity in his tone, facial expressions, and gestures seduced much of America. He's a very good liar, I generally can't tell when he's doing his own original lies vs. when he isn't and he's just been set up to regurgitate somebody else's. I'm a believer in the "fake it 'til you make it" mentality, but, y'know, please make sure you can make it before you fake it. Also, probably don't try it with, like, a presidency.
Well that's... reassuring? It's painful to read this interview. Trump knows how to bully people by talking relentless nonsense. The other day some random guy came up to me and started talking about how he had been on a team that invented the microcomputer. And about some secret satellites that he claimed to know by name, because he worked on some tech around their launch. I was thinking "maybe he's crazy, or maybe there's a grain of truth in it, or maybe he's a smart guy who has fallen on hard times." I didn't want to dismiss him out of hand. Talking to him for a few minutes I felt like some of the things he said were maybe true, others were elaborations, others were invented. But I couldn't quite tell which was which. So I felt at a disadvantage because I couldn't really give an honest response to anything. In the circumstances you're not an equal participant. You smile and nod when you can, you try to keep listening, you're on guard for inadvertently nodding to something outrageous. You can't fact-check on the spot. You can't relate any of the conversation to anything that exists in your world. If you try, he takes your point and runs with it right back into his jungle of confusingness. I guess that's what they call "gaslighting". So I get the same feeling off Trump as I did off this guy, except with the addition of feeling bullied. The guy I met wasn't malicious as far as I could tell, just in a world slightly more of his own making than usual. But at some level Trump knows what he's doing; however unconsciously, this is strategic for him - it's a weaponized form of rambling nonsense, from a guy who's now in charge of everything.You know because of a couple of them said, "He didn't call them a currency manipulator." Well, for two reasons. Number One, he's not, since my time. You know, very specific formula. You would think it's like generalities, it's not. They have — they've actually — their currency's gone up. So it's a very, very specific formula. And I said, "How badly have they been," ... they said, "Since you got to office they have not manipulated their currency." That's Number One, but much more important, they are working with us on North Korea. Now maybe that'll work out or maybe it won't. Can you imagine? ...
