Was the whole TikTok drama a bait-and-switch to make Trump look good?
Was the whole TikTok drama a bait-and-switch to make Trump look good?
Skeptics have highlighted how Trump was the one who initially called for the Chinese-owned social media app to be banned in 2020
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The original idea came from him. To me it just makes trump a hypocrite
How so? It was politically convenient to go after TikTok when he did it, and it's politically convenient to reverse course now. That's a pretty consistent gameplan from Trump, attack something when it's popular, reverse when reversing is popular.
Hypocrisy: The practice of professing beliefs, feelings, or virtues that one does not hold or possess; falseness.
Holding a position when politically convenient and reversing your stance on that position due to political convenience is hypocrisy. It may be typical and expected, but it's still hypocrisy.
But Trump has no values or beliefs, the only thing he's consistent about it putting his name in headlines. So reversing is absolutely consistent with his values.
Hypocrisy: The practice of professing beliefs, feelings, or virtues that one does not hold or possess
Having no values or beliefs and being self-consistent with ulterior personal values does not change the definition of the word.
If one professes beliefs, feelings, or values that one does not possess, one is a hypocrite.
He's also a habitual liar.
Can you really call it "professing" if nobody actually believes you and you know nobody will believe you?
Yes.
Profess: 1) To affirm openly; declare or claim. 2) To make a pretense of; pretend.
If one makes a pretense of holding beliefs, feelings, or values that one does not hold, one is a hypocrite.
Whether anyone else understands the pretenses of the hypocrite or not does not change the definitions of the words.
So what you're saying is he professes to have beliefs which he doesn't actually have?
Nobody believes that anything he says constitutes a belief...
That's irrelevant. When he says "I believe X", he is professing that he believes something. Just because we know he's lying doesn't mean he isn't saying it.
That kinda logic scares the hell out of me, btw. People are just so numb to it that it's like their brains are short circuiting.
That's kind of like random people confessing to killing Brian Thompson. Is it really a confession if everyone knows you're lying? Likewise, is it really a protestation if neither the speaker nor listener believes it?
Yes it is, and saying it isn't is normalizing a terrifying thing.
The crux of your argument is that someone isn't lying is nobody believes them. Ergo, Donald Trump isn't a liar.
This is the EXACT fucking playbook you see in Russia and North Korea. The way you are thinking right now is SPECIFICALLY how dictators WANT you to think. It excuses lies and paves the way to the concept of there being no such thing as objective truth because everyone is lying anyways, but they're not even lies because you were never going to believe it anyways. You'll just exhaustedly shrug and choose a dissonance that's a lower energy mental state.
It's less about lying though.
Hypocrisy, at least colloquially, means saying one thing and doing another, such as governors giving stay at home orders and hosting large parties during COVID mitigations.
Saying we should ban TikTok and then saying we shouldn't ban it isn't hypocrisy. If we're being charitable, it's him changing his mind, and if we're not, it's simple populism. There's a good reason the ban was scheduled for just before inauguration, they knew it would be unpopular and didn't want it to impact the elections.
Trump is absolutely a liar, probably worse than most politicians. He's also often a hypocrite. I just don't think "hypocrite" applies in this instance.
Not the same at all
It used to be that politicians suffered in the polls when they flip flopped, but the only one Trump would suffer is if he went against his base.
Like when he floated that maybe the covid vaccine was ok.
Honestly, his base tends to follow him, so as long as it's not a core belief, he could flip on a number of things without incident.
It's disgusting and I really don't understand why his base tolerates it.
I really don't understand why his base tolerates it.
Because the relationship between him and his "base" isn't one between citizens and politician, it's a literally a cult following their leader.
It is more in line with a puppet, that has zero understanding of anything, being told what to say as it is convenient.
When he came with the ban idea he used the same argument of national security that is the hypocritical part. Like you say the real reason is just political convenient
He also claimed national security when he messed with tariffs. At this point, it's just an excuse to do something to grab headlines.
If we were talking about a sane person, I don't see why a person cannot change his mind.
Trump is just playing the fools.
Trump doesn't have a mind to change. I doubt he even remembers he ever proposed a ban and this is just some advisor telling him that doing the opposite of Biden will get him likes.
Trump's basically a fractal hypocrisy, which is, as I understand it, why and how the grift keeps grifting.
