It's getting worse for him.

[com7fy8]

Last night, Joe went about an hour and seven minutes speaking quite energetically and clearly, and during that time he directly answered to a few people. So, if that was rigged and scripted, he was at least able to stick to a plan. But he seemed pretty natural even during exchanges. Plus, he spent some while talking with individuals before and after the speech. And he did jumble a couple of words, but corrected himself, right away. So, possibly, some people have been bearing false witness about his ability to speak and think. I do not mean what he is saying and thinking is right, but I do not believe in lying about his abilities, or being incompetent in evaluating and representing his abilities.

And I have seen a recent video of Donald, and he seemed pretty clear and clever at that time.

So, may be either one can slip up, but they can also do a lot of other talking, I guess I could say.

Were they both able to talk straight during the debate? I missed it. And did they have better order so each candidate could speak without being badgered and interrupted?

 

[BeyondET]

Do you think they didn't have translators?

You can find videos of the Taliban leader speaking English.

 

[The Barbarian]

You can find videos of the Taliban leader speaking English.

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.

 

[BeyondET]

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.

What the leader said shows that his English etiquette isn't perfect like alot people who's first language isn't English.

 

[dzheremi]

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.

 

[The Barbarian]

I have a feeling those were created by those who claim he's worshiped. Do you really think that statue was an attempt at flattery?

It showed up at CPAC, which welcomed it. And Trump pretty much owns CPAC. I suppose he didn't realize how a golden image of himself would play with Christians.

The picture of the man in the red shirt bowing to the statue appeared to be a genuine photograph. A video of a man with similar features kneeling before the statue was also broadcast on MSNBC.

Did CPAC Attendees Pray and Bow to a Golden Trump Statue?

The appearance of the gold-colored statue at the 2021 Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) resulted in at least two questionable pictures.

www.snopes.com

There were other images of the idol that had been Photoshopped to show others praying to it, but at least one person actually bowed before the golden image of Donald Trump.

The statue is perhaps the most extreme celebration at CPAC of the former president, who will speak here on Sunday in his first public appearance since leaving office. Zegan says every aspect of the statue – which puts Trump in a suit jacket, American-flag-themed shorts and flip-flop sandals – is intended to be symbolic.

“The coat and tie is the fact that he’s a professional, he’s a businessman,” Zegan said. “The red tie symbolizes he’s a Republican. The red white and blue is that he’s a patriot. The fact that he’s wearing thongs and shorts is that he’s at the age where he should be retired. He should be at the beach right now.”

But when asked if he would like for Trump to ease into retirement or run for President again in 2024, Zegan was emphatic.
“I would be, yes, ecstatic,” he said. “If he wants it to happen, it will happen.”

https://www.cnn.com/2021/02/26/politics/trump-gold-statue-cpac-2021/index.html

I know, it all seems crazy. But every cult looks crazy from the outside.

 

[BeyondET]

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

This is way off topic of the supposed gaffe of Highness in your opening post.

 

[The Barbarian]

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.

I merely note that Biden was able to out-negotiate a much-younger Speaker of the House on the budget talks, so there is that. Even republicans admitted that Biden managed McCarthy handily.

Biden seems to have made a career out of getting opponents to underestimate him.

 

[The Barbarian]

This is way off topic of the supposed gaffe of Highness in your opening post.

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

 

[BPPLEE]

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.

I just hope that the US can survive four more years under either until we get to the next election. I have to go with Trump because of the border issue but I am not happy about either being president

 

[BeyondET]

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

So are you saying the Taliban leader didn't say Highness? Where's the proof he didn't and Trump lied about it?

 

[The Barbarian]

I just hope that the US can survive four more years under either until we get to the next election. I have to go with Trump because of the border issue

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?

 

[The Barbarian]

So are you saying the Taliban leader didn't say Highness? Where's the proof he didn't and Trump lied about it?

Inference from behavior. the winner of a war doesn't call the loser "your excellency." And given the numberous lies he's told in the past to feel better about himself, it's not hard to figure out.
Those guys aren't stupid. They are well aware of diplomatic nicities, and the head of the Taliban is a scholar of religious law and history. So not some bumpkin.

 

[BeyondET]

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

I'll agree he isn't perfect and should look more into the stuff he reads about.

windmills causing cancer Isn’t something knew but decades old.

Can Windmills Cause Cancer?

There have long been rumors that windmills cause cancer, a claim repeated by President Trump. Is there is any evidence?

www.verywellhealth.com

 

[BPPLEE]

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?

There’s some other issues with that bill

 

[The Barbarian]

windmills causing cancer Isn’t something knew but decades old.

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.

 

[BeyondET]

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.

So what was Trump holding back that could of reduced covid-19 mortality. Last year covid deaths fell quite substantially but the last couple of years before that had also been in the hundreds of thousands.

47,343 in 2023,
246,166 in 2022,
463,267 in 2021,
385,676 in 2020.

When a virus goes global there's not much anyone can do. It will run its coarse. Now last years drop just might be a sign it won't survive much longer. Humans can try to battle the virus but some like the flu its here to stay its mutation ability to tolerate or buffer is undefeated so far. Not saying it can't be possible one day.

 

[The Barbarian]

So what was Trump holding back that could of reduced covid-19 mortality.

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

 

[The Barbarian]

When a virus goes global there's not much anyone can do.

Compared with six similarly wealthy countries, the US failed to protect citizens' health in the pandemic.
I've done graduate work in immunology and epidemiology. Your assumption is incorrect. And there are different outcomes in nations, depending on their response or lack of it.

 

[BeyondET]

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

The Word suggested is the only consideration I need to know about on what evidence the authors are truly displaying. The report or His words and the latter is obvious. It's media the mind game.