UKC

In response to a question from a Washington Post journalist about climate change the leader of the free world responded thus :-

DAWSEY: You said yesterday when you were leaving that you were skeptical of a climate change report that the government had done. Can you just explain why you're skeptical of that report?

TRUMP: One of the problems that a lot of people like myself — we have very high levels of intelligence, but we’re not necessarily such believers. You look at our air and our water, and it’s right now at a record clean. But when you look at China and you look at parts of Asia and when you look at South America, and when you look at many other places in this world, including Russia, including — just many other places — the air is incredibly dirty. And when you’re talking about an atmosphere, oceans are very small. And it blows over and it sails over. I mean, we take thousands of tons of garbage off our beaches all the time that comes over from Asia. It just flows right down the Pacific, it flows, and we say where does this come from. And it takes many people to start off with.

TRUMP: Number two, if you go back and if you look at articles, they talked about global freezing, they talked about at some point the planets could have freeze to death, then it’s going to die of heat exhaustion. There is movement in the atmosphere. There’s no question. As to whether or not it’s man-made and whether or not the effects that you’re talking about are there, I don’t see it — not nearly like it is. Do we want clean water? Absolutely. Do we want clean air to breathe? Absolutely. The fire in California, where I was, if you looked at the floor, the floor of the fire, they have trees that were fallen, they did no forest management, no forest maintenance, and you can light — you can take a match like this and light a tree trunk when that thing is laying there for more than 14 or 15 months. And it’s a massive problem in California.

You can draw your own conclusions ...

I saw that this morning .

All of Trumps transcribed interviews are just word salads and total nonsense.

It's very scary stuff.

Thank goodness he's so intelligent

Imagine what he'd sound like if he was the dimmest specimen to ever grace the US presidency.....

Can you remember when everyone thought George W Bush was thick? 

Hmm, Reagan?

Ronald Reagan helped end the sodding cold war. He had good advice and articulate speech writers. 

From his wife Nancy and her Astrologers? 

It is worrying that this sort of incoherent gibberish will be accepted by many of his followers.

I wonder if he thinks this is a serious counter argument to the report. If so, that is worrying too.  

Dave

Could I just take this opportunity to point out that not all Americans are cretins.

Or fat.

Well I can't speak for the yanks, but lately that degree of competence and integrity in any branch of government just seems like an impossible dream to me!

I concur

Hmm, have to think on that one - mind you, the average UK person is unfortunatly catching up

Text book Dunning Kruger effect. He has absolutely no idea how ill informed he is and lacks the intelligence to recognise his lack of IQ.

To think Scott Adams believes Trump is playing 13D chess....

This makes less sense to me than talking to my 7 year old son about pokemon.

Nevertheless, running through it like the words in a stick of rock, is the message 'I don't give a f*ck'.

The word that run through it are probably that he is quite ill psychologically. Reagan made more sense when he was suffering the  early stages of dementia.

If you listen to interviews with Trump from ten years ago he was still an arse but a quite an articulate one.

Jesus wept.

I also wonder whether the political environment in the US (and UK) tends to select for people with extremely high levels of self-belief and low capacity for introspection. I'm thinking of the years it takes to climb the greasy pole, as well as the tendency of cable news soundbites and social media posts to favour short "truthy" assertions over nuanced positions. Any real capacity for self-knowledge and reflection is just going to be hammered out of politicians by their frantic need to appear assured and in control.

Is he genuinely ill, or just completely out of his depth and unaware of it?

Theres clearly been a mistake.

I reckon some prankster printed off a well considered rebuttal, cut up all the words and chucked them in the air, after which he said "Mr President, please read that when questioned".

We tend to select leaders on confidence - thats how religion got a foothold in humanity.

Look at Rees Mogg and BoJo - Whykehamist Fallacy in full effect. We fall for posh accents and military experience (Davis), even though the distribution of tw*ts in posh demigraphics and the military will follow the normal. There'll be other factors but posh and military stroke the Tory horn.

That's a difficult argument to sustain given that the last President was probably one of the most thoughtful and intellectually gifted leaders that any country has ever had.

"The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people so full of doubts."

Except, of course in Trump's case he isn't a career politician and, in his business career, got a pretty good start thanks to his old man. Also, self-belief or not, I'd venture that a lot of his behaviour on social media points to quite a high degree of insecurity. He's a narcissist, that's for sure.

With a bit of luck (and some diligence on Mueller's part), he isn't going to last a full term and we can look back at his presidency as an unfortunate but short-lived aberration.

Good point. Perhaps Obama was just a temporary aberration...

You can't argue with that.

It is a striking fact that a nation that chose Obama could then choose Trump straight afterwards. Had those who voted for Trump not heard Obama's 2004 DNC speech?

youtube.com/watch?v=eWynt87PaJ0&

 An amazing piece of oratory. Compare that with anything Trump says, if you can bare to listen, and you want to cry.

Those missing the Scott Adams reference (author of Win Bigly), should read the following where it will become apparent that one can over interpret the rantings of a weak, ill educated, crude, deluded, clumsy, racist, misogynistic, narcissist and thus confuse it with said sport of 13D chess;

http://uk.businessinsider.com/dilbert-creator-scott-adams-explains-trumps-p...

Choose is a very loaded word. The American electoral system is weird and has been loaded against the left by years of foul play. Expect the newly reloaded supreme court to carry on that nasty work.

Fair comment. I simplify in using the word. But even so, that Trump got any votes, coming as he did after Obama, saddens me immensely.

Isn't Whykeham Winchester? They both went to Eton.

If that's the case, then I'm now genuinely impressed by chump's reading talent, because I really struggled to read it fluently and he just spat it out with no hesitation! I couldn't talk like that if I tried...

We might also end up looking back on it with a degree of nostalgia, as we see a wholly more focussed and coherent kind of bigotry from President Pence.

Of course. some are Canadian and others live in Latin America.

Wykehamists are indeed Winchester College pupils. Rees-Mogg is a Carthusian  (Charterhouse) and Bojo an Etonian. 

The language issue has been analysed quantitaively in several scientific articles, and the trend clearly points at early stage dementia (the psychopathy aside, that can only be seen in the content). Over the years, Trump's vocabulary has clearly regressed, his sentences have become shorter, very characteristic grammatical errors, especially the inability to return to the structure of the main sentence after a subclause, have become more common, etc...

The same pattern could significantly more often be found in patients whose dementia was subsequently clinically confirmed relative to controls.

In fact, one of the articles I am thinking of and have linked to previously compares the corresponding metrics for Trump and Reagan. In Reagan's case he was clearly still lucid during his time in office. Dementia hit him afterwards, but the early, linguistic telltale signs were already there while he was still the man with the finger on the button.

CB

If this is really the case ought we be more sympathetic? I wonder if he could be diagnosed and removed from office without some awareness on his part that he might be suffering?

Good idea. What's your plan? And how can we help?

It is quite possible to have dementia or mental illness and also be an utter arsehole. In many cases, cognitive decline exaggerates any personality disorders or traits that were there before.

On the point of his word salads .  

This level of nonsensical rantings is the reason the white house submitted written answers to Robert Mueller's questions.

There's no way he would have answered the questions without getting himself in more trouble or made any actual sense.  So in conclusion a lawyer sat down and wrote something for him to try and keep him out of prison.

I’ve found if start this quote with ‘yeah but no but yeah’ and replace a few words here and there with ‘smoking’ ‘fingering’ and ‘bike sheds’ it all makes perfect sense! 

It's easy if you imitate him. Remember to raise your right arm up and down for emphasis, perferably with the index finger and thumb tip to tip as you recite it.

Well, quite, but attacking someone for being a clamouring arse is much trickier if they also have a degenerative disease. But then usually such people aren't in almost unique positions of power either

I don't suppose 'impeach him, he's got dementia' would be an approach that would be very well received by his supporters, And presumably it's easy to overlook or deny the possibility in oneself (rather like the issue of sociopathy in general, and his in particular), so it'd be difficult to make him aware, or agree to testing/assessment

Halcyon days indeed!

Yes. He has certainly "trumped" George Bush Jnr.