Trump, the man with a dream of a Wall

[L'Emmerdeur]

Most viewers of a State of the Union address ever--'highest number in history'! I'm not sure how spin might be applied to this lie to make it 'arguably truthful,' but I'd be interested to see it done.

'President Trump Said His State of the Union Was the Most Watched in History. It Wasn't'

President Donald Trump touted the ratings from his State of the Union Thursday morning, tweeting that the numbers were record-breaking. But they actually weren’t.

...

Trump’s right about the numbers. Per Nielsen data, approximately 45.6 million viewers tuned in to watch his speech. And he’s also accurate that Fox News garnered the highest ratings, although, per Nielsen data, the network actually had 11.5 million viewers, not 11.7. But he’s not right when he called the numbers the “highest number in history.”

Trump’s three immediate predecessors — former Presidents Barack Obama, George W. Bush, and Bill Clinton — all amassed higher ratings from their first State of the Union than he did: 48 million people tuned in to watch Obama in 2010; 51.7 million tuned in to Bush in 2002; and 45.8 million tuned in for Clinton in 1994.

[pErvinalia]

That falls under the category of inconsequential lie.

[Forty Two]

The assertion is probably based on this:

The TV landscape has changed dramatically since Obama’s speech in 2010. The Consumer Technology Association, for example, estimates that the number of people that watch free and paid streaming video in the United States is greater than Pay TV, meaning these ratings likely don’t count for several million people who watched the speech on streaming platforms and social media. Pew Research Center also estimates that roughly 60% of U.S. adults in U.S. primarily use online streaming to watch TV

. https://www.axios.com/trump-state-of-un ... e5c90.html And, he could argue that streaming viewership is far higher now than 8 years ago in 2010.

But, on the other hand, I don't think he can argue that based on his tweet. He says "45.6 million watched, the hightest in history." That statement is incorrect, as 45.6 million is not the highest in history. He would have done better to tweet that his TV viewership was 45.6 million and that estimates would place his streaming viewers at a level to make his the most viewed.

This kind of thing bugs me about Trump. He just says shit that he doesn't have to say. It doesn't matter. Nobody gives a fuck if it was the "highest in history" and the numbers are half bullshit anyway. But he gives his opposition another irrelevant piece of bullshit to bitch about.

Part of me thinks he relishes this. Like - here, watch this, I'm going to tell them mine was the highest watched in history, and let's let the little peons run around cackling about how it wasn't. There will be 1000 articles arguing about it, mentioning my name. Half the public can't name the Vice President. How many really care who is right on this point?

[Tero]

[Seabass]

This kind of thing bugs me about Trump.

That's what bugs you about Trump?!?

[pErvinalia]

Even that should be enough to put him off him. The fact that he's so self-obsessed and willing to lie or exaggerate so much, should tell you a lot about his suitability to be in charge of such a serious and important job.

[L'Emmerdeur]

The assertion is probably based on this ...

It's almost admirable how assiduously you work to find a tiny sliver a plausibility and put it forward as if it might be accepted as justification, even when you can't actually swallow it yourself.

Part of me thinks he relishes this. Like - here, watch this, I'm going to tell them mine was the highest watched in history, and let's let the little peons run around cackling about how it wasn't. There will be 1000 articles arguing about it, mentioning my name. Half the public can't name the Vice President. How many really care who is right on this point?

Ah, the infamous '3D chess' sycophancy. Yeah, no. To anybody who isn't denying reality, Trump is a habitual liar. The most charitable interpretation in this instance is that he spoke out of ignorance. However, if he didn't know whether or not his audience was 'the highest in history' he was fabricating; lying. He lies about 'inconsequential things' and he lies about important things. Perhaps it will eventually be his downfall. We already know that Trump supporters don't care that his natural modus operandi is lying or won't believe it no matter how blatant the evidence, but I certainly hope that the rest of the US is not so complacent.

[L'Emmerdeur]

Ah, sweet, sweet deregulation--getting government off the backs of the great American wealth producers:

'The Trump Administration Just Made Life Easier for Racist Lenders'

[D]iscriminatory lenders — and the discriminatory laws that empowered them — are among the primary causes for our nation’s gargantuan (and growing) racial wealth gap. In the run up to the 2008 financial crisis, lending offices at major banks pushed black clients to take out subprime loans, even when their credit histories qualified them for prime ones. At Wells Fargo, loan officers referred to the African-American they targeted for usury as “mud people.” When this frenzy of speculation and predation crested and collapsed, 43 percent of all African-American wealth disappeared with it.

To prevent the recurrence of such a disaster, Congress created the Office of Fair Lending and Equal Opportunity (OFLEO), a division of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau dedicated to policing discriminatory lending.

OFLEO quickly discovered that the housing crisis had not soured finance’s taste for fleecing racial minorities. Its investigators found that GE Capital was excluding 133,400 borrowers from debt relief because of their ethnicity — and won $201 million settlement for the consumers the firm had exploited. They caught PNC Bank charging higher mortgage interest rates to black and Latino borrowers, and Hudson City Savings Bank denying African-American communities access to credit — and hit the former with a $35 million fine, and forced the latter to provide $25 million in loan subsidies to its victims. OFLEO discovered rampant discrimination in auto-loan financing and won some $143.9 million in penalties from the predators.

But to the Trump administration, this catalogue of enforcement actions does not add up to a small triumph for racial justice, but a tyrannical attack on the “free market.” And the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau now lies in the hands of Mick Mulvaney, who devoted much of his congressional career to defending the interests of predatory lenders in general — and racist ones, in particular. And so, this week, Mulvaney stripped OFLEO of its enforcement powers:

The Trump administration has stripped enforcement powers from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau office that specializes in pursuing cases against financial firms accused of breaking discrimination laws, according to two people familiar with the matter and emails reviewed by The Washington Post.

...

Civil-rights advocates have, of course, lambasted this development.

“Mulvaney’s decision falls squarely in line with the approach that the Trump Administration has taken regarding civil rights — undermine critical civil rights safeguards and those in government responsible for enforcing them under the guise of ‘efficiency’ and ‘accountability,’” Shanna L. Smith, president of the National Fair Housing Alliance, said in a written statement. “But by taking away the Office of Fair Lending’s enforcement authority, the Trump Administration has sent a signal to the financial services industry that they can operate without fear of repercussions for discriminatory policies, practices, and products.”

[Hermit]

Ah, sweet, sweet deregulation--getting government off the backs of the great American wealth producers:

'The Trump Administration Just Made Life Easier for Racist Lenders'

[D]iscriminatory lenders — and the discriminatory laws that empowered them — are among the primary causes for our nation’s gargantuan (and growing) racial wealth gap. In the run up to the 2008 financial crisis, lending offices at major banks pushed black clients to take out subprime loans, even when their credit histories qualified them for prime ones. At Wells Fargo, loan officers referred to the African-American they targeted for usury as “mud people.” When this frenzy of speculation and predation crested and collapsed, 43 percent of all African-American wealth disappeared with it.

To prevent the recurrence of such a disaster, Congress created the Office of Fair Lending and Equal Opportunity (OFLEO), a division of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau dedicated to policing discriminatory lending.

OFLEO quickly discovered that the housing crisis had not soured finance’s taste for fleecing racial minorities. Its investigators found that GE Capital was excluding 133,400 borrowers from debt relief because of their ethnicity — and won $201 million settlement for the consumers the firm had exploited. They caught PNC Bank charging higher mortgage interest rates to black and Latino borrowers, and Hudson City Savings Bank denying African-American communities access to credit — and hit the former with a $35 million fine, and forced the latter to provide $25 million in loan subsidies to its victims. OFLEO discovered rampant discrimination in auto-loan financing and won some $143.9 million in penalties from the predators.

But to the Trump administration, this catalogue of enforcement actions does not add up to a small triumph for racial justice, but a tyrannical attack on the “free market.” And the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau now lies in the hands of Mick Mulvaney, who devoted much of his congressional career to defending the interests of predatory lenders in general — and racist ones, in particular. And so, this week, Mulvaney stripped OFLEO of its enforcement powers:

The Trump administration has stripped enforcement powers from the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau office that specializes in pursuing cases against financial firms accused of breaking discrimination laws, according to two people familiar with the matter and emails reviewed by The Washington Post.

...

Civil-rights advocates have, of course, lambasted this development.

“Mulvaney’s decision falls squarely in line with the approach that the Trump Administration has taken regarding civil rights — undermine critical civil rights safeguards and those in government responsible for enforcing them under the guise of ‘efficiency’ and ‘accountability,’” Shanna L. Smith, president of the National Fair Housing Alliance, said in a written statement. “But by taking away the Office of Fair Lending’s enforcement authority, the Trump Administration has sent a signal to the financial services industry that they can operate without fear of repercussions for discriminatory policies, practices, and products.”

What say you about this, Forty Two?

[pErvinalia]

Probably something about Obama or Hillary...

[Forty Two]

This kind of thing bugs me about Trump.

That's what bugs you about Trump?!?

It's one of the things. I've mentioned others. His personality. His braggadocio. His vulgarity. His disregard for etiquette. His management style. Some other stuff too. I've said several times I suspect I would hate working for him, and I'd likely end up loathing him personally.

[Forty Two]

The assertion is probably based on this ...

It's almost admirable how assiduously you work to find a tiny sliver a plausibility and put it forward as if it might be accepted as justification, even when you can't actually swallow it yourself.

Why not? That's called "thinking." I thought the question posed, which was something to the effect of "how could this possibly be spun to be considered the truth...?" Or something like that. I thought that question was quite a good one. How indeed? It is such a verifiable number, I thought to myself. It is either arguably true, or not arguably true. So, I did a quick google to find out what, exactly, he said, because sometimes people call him a liar when he didn't say exactly what is being attributed to him. That's not the case here, I found out. He gave a specific number, and said that number was the most in history. O.k., I asked myself, is there some dispute as to the accuracy of the numbers?

Not really - there is no reasonable dispute. The number Trump used was the Neilson number, and if he uses that number than he's admitting its accuracy for the purposes of his assertion. He can't usethe number, and claim it's inaccurate at the same time. That makes no sense. So, I looked into it and it seems that there were at least 3 other speeches that had higher viewership based on Neilson numbers. So, Trump is wrong - 45.6 million is not the highest in history.

So, the next thought I had was, what possibly could make someone think that a number which was so clearly not "the most in history" was in fact the most in history. The only thing I could think of was the fact that the Neilson numbers only take into account television viewership, and TV viewership has been steadily dropping annually for 20 years, and online viewership has been steadily rising. So, ARGUABLY, a case could be made that today, as compared to 8 years ago, there are far more - millions more - people who watch their programs streaming online - whether be on PDAs, tablets, laptops, etc. That number would not be counted in the Neilson number.

Now, I don't know what the number of streaming watchers are, and I don't know if there are good numbers out there. And, frankly, I don't think this hypothesis could be proved, because to get to the highest number of views, he'd have to add like 19 million more people, and I don't know what possible info he could have been looking at to suggest that he had that many more non-TV viewers.

It's just answering the question posed. What could possibly be the justification? And, since I like to come to my conclusions AFTER thinking about a question, rather than just assume the answer, I gave it some thought and my final conclusion was that I could only guess he was thinking about total viewership which would be a bigger, mushier number that a sales guy would use however he wanted, but that even that didn't make sense in light of exactly what he said.

Part of me thinks he relishes this. Like - here, watch this, I'm going to tell them mine was the highest watched in history, and let's let the little peons run around cackling about how it wasn't. There will be 1000 articles arguing about it, mentioning my name. Half the public can't name the Vice President. How many really care who is right on this point?

Ah, the infamous '3D chess' sycophancy. Yeah, no. To anybody who isn't denying reality, Trump is a habitual liar. The most charitable interpretation in this instance is that he spoke out of ignorance. However, if he didn't know whether or not his audience was 'the highest in history' he was fabricating; lying. He lies about 'inconsequential things' and he lies about important things. Perhaps it will eventually be his downfall. We already know that Trump supporters don't care that his natural modus operandi is lying or won't believe it no matter how blatant the evidence, but I certainly hope that the rest of the US is not so complacent.

I didn't say it was some genius move he thought about in advance as a calculated thing. I said I think he "relishes" it. It's that relish on his part that causes him to repeatedly do shit like this and wing out comments without regard for the technical accuracy of what he says.

The thing about politicians lying is that it has long since ceased to matter, if it ever really did. They all lie. Every one of them. It's not as if Trump is the one outlier who lies, when everyone else does their best to tell the truth. They all lie. Nobody cares. The real issue is what are they lying about and to whom.

Everybody lies.

[Sean Hayden]

It makes sense to me. I mean of course he knows it drives them crazy. He's got nothing to lose by acting this way. He has nothing to gain by changing his behavior. If he did change then at most we'd find a handful of people who'd say and do something like "I was so glad to see a change in Trump, but it was still Trump you know, so I couldn't vote for him. But I'm glad he changed.".

I think he might have a lot to gain by continuing to troll the shit out of us. Even I'm sick of hearing the grand whine coming from the left. And I'm talking about Trump again --fuck off.

[Forty Two]

It makes sense to me. I mean of course he knows it drives them crazy. He's got nothing to lose by acting this way. He has nothing to gain by changing his behavior. If he did change then at most we'd find a handful of people who'd say and do something like "I was so glad to see a change in Trump, but it was still Trump you know, so I couldn't vote for him. But I'm glad he changed.".

I think he might have a lot to gain by continuing to troll the shit out of us. Even I'm sick of hearing the grand whine coming from the left. And I'm talking about Trump again --fuck off.

LOL, yes... there is that sort of reaction when so many articles pop up in the news arguing about a small thing. Crowd size at a speech. Biggest tax cut or second biggest tax cut. How much does he weigh. How tall is he. He has well done steak, with ketchup. He eats Taco Bowls. He asks for a second scoop of ice cream when everyone else gets one. It starts to become eye-rolling.

[Scot Dutchy]

How in the hell did they count the viewers? America is just like the UK they dont have a clue who is in or out of the country. With mobiles, computers and every other communication crap just how do they count them?
Just more lies in the brainwashing process.