It's getting worse for him.

The Barbarian said:

Do you think they didn't have translators?

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The Barbarian said:

Maybe so, but I doubt if even the Trump administration would forgo translators.
Trump's people may not have been the best, but the career people would not stand for it.

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The Barbarian said:

It just fits his other confabulations he makes up to impress people.

Trump began his presidency by lying about the weather.
It rained during Trump’s inaugural address. Then, at a celebratory ball later that day, Trump told the crowd that the rain “just never came” until he finished talking and went inside, at which point “it poured.”
This was the first lie of Trump’s presidency. Like his lies that same week about his inauguration crowd, it hinted at what would come next.

This was more like a family of lies than a single lie. But each one – the lie that the virus was equivalent to the flu; the lie that the situation was “totally under control”; the lie that the virus was “disappearing” – suggested to Americans that they didn’t have to change much about their usual behavior. A year into the crisis, more than 386,000 Americans have died from the virus. We can’t say with precision how the crisis would have unfolded differently if Trump had been more truthful.

Trump tweeted in 2019 that Alabama was one of the states at greater risk from Hurricane Dorian than had been initially forecast. The federal weather office in Birmingham then tweeted that, actually, Alabama would be unaffected by the storm.
Not great, but fixable fast with a simple White House correction. Trump, however, is so congenitally unwilling to admit error that he embarked on an increasingly farcical campaign to prove that his incorrect Alabama tweet was actually correct, eventually showcasing a hurricane map that was crudely altered with a Sharpie.

The slapstick might have been funny had White House officials not leaped into action behind the scenes to try to pressure federal weather experts into saying he was right and they were wrong. The saga proved that Trump was not some lone liar: he was backed by an entire powerful apparatus willing to fight for his fabrications.

When I emailed the Boy Scouts of America in 2017 about Trump’s claim that “the head of the Boy Scouts” had called him to say that his bizarrely political address to the Scouts’ National Jamboree was “the greatest speech that was ever made to them,” I didn’t expect a reply. One of the hardest things about fact checking Trump was that a lot of people he lied about did not think it was in their interest to be quoted publicly contradicting a vengeful president.
The Boy Scouts did. A senior Scouts source – a phrase I never expected to have to type as a political reporter in Washington, DC – confirmed to me that no call ever happened.
Yep, the President of the United States was lying about the Boy Scouts.

Trump, an incorrigible exaggerator, rarely chose to use an accurate number when he could instead use an inaccurate bigger number. So he said well over 100 times that, before his presidency, the US for years had a $500 billion annual trade deficit with China – though the actual pre-Trump deficit never even reached $400 billion.
Trump made versions of the “$500 billion” claim so many times that it became almost physically painful for me to fact check it any more.

We’ve established that Trump was not your traditional political liar. One of his distinguishing features is that he lied pointlessly, dissembling about trivial subjects for trivial reasons.
But he also lied when he needed to. When he told reporters on Air Force One in 2018 that he did not know about a $130,000 payment to inappropriate content performer Stormy Daniels and that he did not know where his then-attorney Michael Cohen got the money for the payment, it was both audacious – Trump knew, because he had personally reimbursed Cohen – and kind of conventional: the President was lying to try to get himself out of a tawdry scandal.

Trump’s re-election campaign was consistently and consciously dishonest, especially in its attempts to cast Joe Biden as a frightening radical. When Trump claimed in September that Biden would destroy protections for people with pre-existing health conditions – though the Obama-Biden administration created the protections, though the protections were overwhelmingly popular, though Biden was running on preserving them, and though Trump himself had tried repeatedly to weaken them – Trump was not merely lying but turning reality upside down.

Trump could have told a perfectly good factual story about the Veterans Choice health care program Obama signed into law in 2014: it wasn’t good enough, so he replaced it with a more expansive program he signed into law in 2018.
That’s not the story he did tell – whether out of policy ignorance, a desire to erase Obama’s legacy, or simply because he is a liar. Instead, he claimed over and over – more than 160 times before I lost count – that he is the one who got the Veterans Choice program passed after other presidents tried and failed for years.
And why not stretch? He knew he probably wouldn’t be challenged by a press corps drowning in other Trump drama. It wasn’t until August 2020 that he was asked about the lie to his face.

He promptly left the room.

https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/16/politics/fact-check-dale-top-15-donald-trump-lies/index.html

So what? Some would say that he's just a blowhard, who lies over trivial things. But there's a problem when the blowhard occupies the oval office:

Lancet Study Finds 40 Percent of U.S. COVID-19 Deaths Could Have Been Avoided​

The British medical journal the Lancet, on Wednesday, published a damning assessment of Donald Trump’s presidency and its impact on Americans’ health, concluding that 40 percent of the nearly 500,000 COVID-19 deaths in the U.S. over the past year were avoidable. The journal came to the conclusion by comparing the U.S. health outcomes on the coronavirus—the country leads the world in COVID deaths and confirmed cases with more than 27 million—with the weighted average of other G-7 nations. So it’s not a wildly abstract conclusion to draw: the U.S. could have saved hundreds of thousands of lives if it had just performed similarly to its economic peers.

Lancet Study Finds 40 Percent of U.S. COVID-19 Deaths Could Have Been Avoided

The report assailed Trump but also emphasized that America’s destructive health policy decisions predated him.

slate.com

It's not harmless lies. Hundreds of thousands of Americans died because of his dishonesty.

Trump told Bob Woodward he knew in February that COVID-19 was 'deadly stuff' but wanted to 'play it down'​

"It's not just old people," Trump told Woodward, acknowledging the gravity of the disease, The Washington Post reported.

Trump told Bob Woodward he knew in February that COVID-19 was ‘deadly stuff’ but wanted to ‘play it down’

"It's not just old people," Trump told Woodward, acknowledging the gravity of the disease, The Washington Post reported.

www.nbcnews.com

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dzheremi said:

Both of the candidates in this race are aged to the point where mental decline is evident. Assuming he wins and survives to the end of a second term, Biden will be 86 when leaving office. Trump would not be far behind, as he is only 4 years younger.

I'm not going to claim that old people cannot meaningfully contribute to society, but I do think that we need to end this gerontocracy if we want to have any hope of reversing our obvious decline as a nation. It is not right that old men and women (Pelosi was 82 last year when she finally retired, thank the good Lord) maintain power past the period which they are able to understand the country and world in which they are making major decisions. Doing so results in government which is not as responsive or capable as it could be. For example, congress is currently (for at least the second time) debating legislation which would ban the app Tiktok from being downloaded or used in the United States, out of fear of its connection to a Chinese parent company and what that could mean for the safety of user data and, similarly, U.S. security interests. I'm not going to comment on the the app itself (as I do not have it on any device I own), but it strikes me as hopelessly outdated to focus excessively on the security concerns related to this one app because of its "Chinese connection" when so many similar apps owned by big U.S. tech companies such as Meta/Facebook/Instagram have proven to be so vulnerable on this front. Remember the Cambridge Analytica debacle with Facebook? I'm going to guess most of our representatives in congress do not, or if they do, such situations are stuck on the backburner because "Oh no, CHINA!" Well, China may be a problem (in fact, I highly agree that they are in the area of technological espionage and the like), but again, this is clearly a remanent of the "Cold War" mentality that much of our government still holds because the people running it largely grew up in the 1950s and 1960s when fears of a war with the Communist world were very reasonable to have. They're less reasonable today, at least on the grounds that the states involved are communist (read: It is still reasonable to have concerns about China; it is less reasonable to have concerns about China because China is "communist"). Yet that's what we're stuck with because of the mentality of the 65+ set who rule us. Younger people could make (and have made) the point that the USA should deal with Tiktok via more wide-reaching legislation that brings all social media apps (not just those owned by non-U.S. companies) up to the data privacy standards of other first world nations, such as the protections provided to social media users in much of Europe. Of course, that's not going to happen, because making it harder for scummy businesses to treat their customers like sheep to fleeced is another thing that brings out shrieks of "COMMUNIST!" from a not-insignificant chunk of the elder set, for the reasons already given above.

So yes, Trump is getting worse, Biden is probably also getting worse (didn't watch his address yesterday, so I can't comment on that), but more to the point, the whole dang system is getting worse, because it all suffers from this problem. Too many old/inflexible/unresponsive/practically comatose people in power is never good for anyone.

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The Barbarian said:

It's a lie, but as you see, Trump is pretty much unable to distinguish his lies from reality. Like his "windmills cause cancer" gaffe, he seems to have not realized how cognitively-competent people would see it. It's very likely that he actually believes that windmills cause cancer.

And yes, telling a foolish lie is a gaffe.

gaffe — definition, examples, related words and more at Wordnik

All the words

www.wordnik.com

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The Barbarian said:

It's a lie, but as you see, Trump is pretty much unable to distinguish his lies from reality. Like his "windmills cause cancer" gaffe, he seems to have not realized how cognitively-competent people would see it. It's very likely that he actually believes that windmills cause cancer.

And yes, telling a foolish lie is a gaffe.

gaffe — definition, examples, related words and more at Wordnik

All the words

www.wordnik.com

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The Barbarian said:

You really oppose more funding for the Border Patrol and for more immigration courts to more rapidly process asylum requests? Why? I know that Trump opposed them in part because Biden proposed them. But shouldn't the good of the country come first?

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The Barbarian said:

Yes, idiots have been passing that around for a long time. Trump isn't the first. But one of those guys in the Oval Office is a recipe for disaster. Like those hundreds of thousands of Americans who would not have died if Trump was honest with us about COVID-19.

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The Barbarian said:

Damning analysis of Trump's pandemic response suggested 40% of US COVID-19 deaths could have been avoided​

• A report on the Trump administration's policies suggested 40% of US COVID-19 deaths were avoidable.
• Compared with six similarly wealthy countries, the US failed to protect citizens' health in the pandemic.
• Trump publicly downplayed COVID-19 and often undermined health guidelines.

The report, published by the Lancet Commission, excoriated Trump's handling of the pandemic and general approach to public health. "He expedited the spread of COVID-19 in the US," the authors wrote.

"Many of the cases and deaths were avoidable," they said, adding that "instead of galvanizing the US populace to fight the pandemic, President Trump publicly dismissed its threat (despite privately acknowledging it), discouraged action as infection spread, and eschewed international cooperation."

The US has recorded about 27 million COVID-19 cases and at least 471,000 deaths, though public-health experts have said those official tallies are likely undercounted.

Damning analysis of Trump's pandemic response suggested 40% of US COVID-19 deaths could have been avoided

A medical journal compared the number of US COVID-19 deaths — the highest in the world — with the deaths in similarly wealthy countries.

www.businessinsider.com

The United States had a pandemic response team in place. Trump disbanded it:

Did Trump Administration Fire the US Pandemic Response Team?​

As a new coronavirus spread in 2020, so did concerns about the United States' preparedness for a potential pandemic.
It's thus true that the Trump administration axed the executive branch team responsible for coordinating a response to a pandemic and did not replace it, eliminating Ziemer's position and reassigning others, although Bolton was the executive at the top of the National Security Council chain of command at the time.

Did Trump Administration Fire the US Pandemic Response Team?

As a new coronavirus spread in 2020, so did concerns about the United States' preparedness for a potential pandemic.

www.snopes.com

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