Contrarian Fallacy – FT#150

28 May Contrarian Fallacy – FT#150

Show Notes

The Contrarian Fallacy occurs when someone reflexively opposes something without any attempt to offer evidence or counter arguments.

Trump

We started out by discussing this clip of Trump denying his own tax returns:

And then we looked at this clip of Trump lying about his opposition to the Iraq invasion:

Finally, we discussed his quest to overturn anything that Obama did.

Mark’s British Politics Corner

Mark talked about this brilliant clip of Boris lying about the existence of the cameras which were filming him at the time:

He followed that up by talking about Boris denying that he was going to step aside

Fallacy in the Wild

In the Fallacy in the Wild we looked at this clip from Monty Python’s Flying Circus:

Then we discussed this clip from Community:

And finally, we talked about this clip from Horse Feathers:

 

Fake News

Here are the statements from this week’s Fake News game:

Since it’s our 150th episode, it’s a bit different this week. Here are nine products Trump has tried to sell Trump-branded versions of in the past. I’m not talking about the tat available on his online store – these were distinct business ventures (which all failed). I made up three of them (one out of 1-3, one from 4-6 and one from 7-9). Which ones did I make up?

1. Trump Insurance
2. Trump Vitamins
3. Trump Urine Tests

4. Trump Pasta Sauce
5. Trump Deodorant
6. Trump Water

7. Trump Board Game
8. Trump Condoms
9. Trump Energy Drink

Mark got it mostly wrong this week, and is on 52%!

 

The Trump Trial is still not a logical fallacy

We talked about the closing days of the Trump trial.

 

The stories we really didn’t have time to talk about

• Biden released a video last week challenging Donald to two debates and trolled him into accepting by saying “Let’s pick the dates Donald, I hear you’re free on Wednesdays”. Trump reacted like Marty McFly when someone calls him a coward, and now I’m disappointed Joe didn’t spend more time over the past few weeks trying to taunt him into testifying in his hush money trial. A few well placed gibes might have seen him sweating up in the witness box trying to avoid perjury traps, or questions, as other people call them. Anyway, Donald replied “Just tell me when, I’ll be there. ‘Let’s get ready to Rumble!!!’,” which to Americans, evokes boxing MC Michael Buffer, but to Brits of a certain age, will forever be associated with PJ and Duncan from Byker Grove, and it’s far funnier if you imagine that’s what he was going for. With two debates agreed, the terms were announced. The first debate will be on CNN on June 27th, way earlier than usual, the second on ABC in September. Much to Trump’s chagrin, there’ll be no studio audience, and the moderators will have the ability to cut off each microphone when the other person is talking to avoid the shitshow of the 2020 debates. Naturally, this led Lara Trump to proclaim that the debates are rigged so heavily in Biden’s favor, but still claims her father-in-law will outperform him. Robert Kennedy, meanwhile, is unlikely to qualify for either debate due to some rule about having a snowball’s chance in hell but of course he claims he’s being frozen out because the other two are afraid he would win.
• In true – (can we use that word when the next word is Trump?) – In true Trump fashion i.e it’s a message not a mistake, and left in plain sight long enough for the message to sink in, and then blame some poor sap elsewhere; Truth Social posted a video that showed mocked-up newspaper headlines – hey let’s just call it fake news hey! – of Trump winning the next election yadayadayada – and the strapline under the heading ‘What’s Next for America’ was the phrase ‘Strength significantly increased by the Creation of a Unified Reich’ yep for real! – and then was shown again at the end of the video under a headline MAGA. The video was posted last Monday whilst the Fuhrer von Schitzenpants himself was in court. “Ooh it was posted by accident by an unwitting staffer on Monday afternoon” bleated Trump Central – although it was left up online overnight to be sure to catch all the time zones hey! Biden of course pointed out what we’re all thinking “A unified Reich? That’s not the language of an American president, that’s not the language of any American. It’s the language of Hitler’s Germany,” but nooo Karoline Leavitt, a campaign spokesperson, said in a statement “This was not a campaign video, it was created by a random account online and reposted by a staffer who clearly did not see the word, while the President was in court,” – “The real extremist is Joe Biden.” Yeah right turns out the maker was a Turkish graphic designer who sells templates online for $21 and used the Reich statement merely as placeholder text. Since Attaturk adopted the Latin alphabet for Turkey rather than Cyrillic in 1928 the graphic designer surely would’ve known about Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit as standard placeholder text – so either he’s taking the piss out of Trump or just following orders!  We see you Donald, we all know what you’re fucking doing, and he’s doing it in plain sight – wake up people see the scary clown for what he is before it’s too late!! 
• Last month Trump attorney and hair dye model Rudy Giuliani was indicted by an Arizona Grand Jury for his part in the fake electors scheme in 2020, and the Attorney General’s office spent the next three weeks trying to find him to serve him with papers. After successfully hiding out he decided to taunt them on Twitter on Friday May 17th, with a post that read “If Arizona authorities can’t find me by tomorrow morning; 1. They must dismiss the indictment; 2. They must concede they can’t count votes”, along with a photo of him with several other people and party balloons, because he was at his 80th birthday party in Palm Beach. As he left the party, he got served with the subpoena but he wasn’t happy about the way it was done, saying later “one guy, he walked in between a couple of people who didn’t know who he was. And he handed me a folded-up, crumpling piece of paper. It was a crumpling piece of paper. It wasn’t, like, done stylishly,” and for once, I’m with Rudy. I mean, come on Arizona AG Kris Mayes, how often do you get the chance to dress up as a showgirl and hide in a giant cake that gets wheeled into an 80th birthday party, then jump out and yell “Surprise!” as you hand America’s Mayor a subpoena? At the rate he’s being indicted in various states, you’ve probably only got two or three more chances, and that’s if Wisconsin AG Josh Kaul hasn’t already bought his showgirl costume. 
• In much the same way as Boris (and latterly Sunak) got a real awakening when faced with actual people who aren’t sycophants and planted in the audience to ask the right questions tory-councillors-in-biscuit-worker-hi-vis-jackets. Trump got a real shock when he turned up at the Libertarians annual conference in the hope of showing the TV audience that even in enemy territory in Washington everyone will love him, nominate him and vote for him. The MAGA team tried to sweeten the room Trump was due to talk in by flooding it with Trump supporters in the front rows whilst the legitimate delegates were listening to other speakers elsewhere. On returning to the hall the Libertarian delegates understandably got a bit het up when they found their ticketed and reserved seating was occupied by red-hat wearing Trump sycophants. Security were called and things got loud. But not as loud as the incessant, and I mean voluminously incessant booing that befell Trump as he arrived 30 minutes late expecting to  face a sea of Trump placards and friendly right-wing extremist faces. His usual apricot hue turned more and more burnt carrot/beetroot as embarrassment gave way to anger and downright insult-ment of the audience in an attempt to charm(?) them into voting for him cos basically he’s a Libertarian. “Yeah vote for me if you wanna win, or you could get the same 3% you get every four years”. Way to go Donnie ya chump! But man it was the most deliciously sweet sound to hear at last; some televised expression of non-maga cult follower’s vitriol against such a hateful specimen of, I hesitate to say, humanity. Weird though the Libertarians are, they did oust RFK Jr in the first round and they booed like I can’t get enough of listening to!    
• New MAGA conspiracy theory just dropped. According to Steve Bannon, the FBI raid on Mar-a-Lago, otherwise known as the lawful execution of a search warrant, was an “attempted assassination attempt” on Donald Trump, who, by the way, wasn’t at Mar-a-Lago when the FBI was there. This has been confirmed by trustworthy voice of reason Marjorie Taylor Green, who tweeted The Biden DOJ and FBI were planning to assassinate Pres Trump and gave the green light. And of course, Trump joined in, with a fundraising email headed in all caps “BIDEN’S DOJ WAS AUTHORIZED TO SHOOT ME!” You might be thinking “Huh?” and you’d be right. This all comes from the fact there was a massive dump of previously sealed court motions in the MAL documents case and right-wing nutjob/one of the stars of Dinesh D’Souza’s Police State, Julie Kelly, misunderstood one of the filings and unashamedly shouted her misunderstanding to the rest of the right wing in presumed exchange for money and fame. An FBI Policy Statement appended to the search warrant laid out the rules for the Use of Deadly Force. The rule being you can use it “only when necessary, that is, when the officer believes that the subject of such force poses an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to the officer or another person.” This is a standard part of search warrants and it’s designed to limit the use of force, not authorize it. But that’s not as much fun to yell about if your entire self worth is based on the validation you get from idiots begging you to tell them the world is ending, which is how you get Charlie Kirk telling the idiots “They were authorized to kill Trump employees, possibly even assassinate Trump himself, to exact their political revenge.” and Fox’s Jeanine Pirro, who definitely knows this is a standard clause, saying “my mind as a prosecutor goes to maybe they wanted the engagement of physical force. Maybe they wanted to come in without FBI, without DOJ, without all of that identifying so that they could engage in deadly physical force.” This kind of bullshit leads to bad actions, whether it’s MAGA assholes taking revenge against the FBI or DOJ on behalf of their God King, or the targets of similar search warrants readying themselves for a gun fight in the mistaken belief that the FBI are ready to attack. As such, Jack Smith is seeking an additional partial gag order to prevent Trump spreading this particular lie, but sadly he’s far from the only one enjoying the glow of idiot adulation.
• Not satisfied with the effectiveness of shouting into the booing faces of non-cult members Trump’s supporters The America First Conservatives Election Department sent out mailers recently to voters in the Texas primary, kinda academic cos all of Trump’s opponents for the nomination have dropped out of the contest. In a mashup of Orwell’s fiction novel 1984 and the Godfather albeit via Monty Python’s Vince and Dinsdale Piranha, the mailer says “We see you haven’t voted yet. Your voting record is public. Your neighbors are watching and will know if you miss this critical runoff election. We will notify President Trump if you don’t vote. You can’t afford to have that on your record.” “We will contact you after the election to make sure you voted. Please don’t make us report you to President Trump! We are sending an official list of Republicans who fail to vote in the upcoming runoff to President Trump. Public records show that YOU HAVE NOT VOTED. President Trump will be VERY DISAPPOINTED.” The mailer appeared just days after Trump said that, if he wins the 2024 presidential election, he would consider nominating the anti-LGBTQ+Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton for U.S. attorney general. Ooh quelle coincidence n’est-ce pas! Paxton is a Trump loyalist who aided Trump’s baseless attempts to overturn his loss in the 2020 presidential election. He also filed several unsuccessful lawsuits challenging Trump’s 2020 election loss in four battleground states, and the Texas Bar Association currently has a lawsuit filed against Paxton for the baseless lawsuits. “This is a nice law practice you have here Mr Paxton – it’d be a shame to see anything happen to it, you know what I mean? Oh dear I appear to have had you struck off, how clumsy of me I do apologise!” 
• Florida governor and almost convincing human Ron DeSantis has declared that it’s Freedom Summer in Florida. It’s a term he stole from the civil rights movement and he’s used in previous years to promote an annual tax holiday for the state’s residents in July, but this year, he’s taking Freedom even further. Florida Transportation Secretary Jared Purdue is really excited about it, tweeting “Thanks to the leadership of @GovRonDeSantis, Florida continues to be the freest state in the nation.” What’s Ron done to make this year the freeest ever, you may ask? And the answer is he’s banned parts of the visible spectrum! Yes, from Memorial Day through to Labor day, Florida’s bridges will be lit up with red white and blue. BUT ONLY THOSE COLORS. No other colors are acceptable during Freedom Summer, especially if you arrange them in a rainbow configuration because if there’s one thing that’s anti-freedom, it’s the refraction of light. Also maybe Kermit. And definitely gay people. So in order to ensure freedom, the state government has mandated exactly which frequencies of light you are allowed to encounter when crossing water or highways. Yes, technically Freedom Summer does include Pride Month but I’m sure that’s just a coincidence, and for now at least Florida’s LGBTQ+ community are perfectly free to leave Florida and be proud somewhere else because nowhere is freer than Florida goddamnit!
• Fuckin’ finally on Wednesday last week Sunak called a general election for July 4th. It took some people by surprise so much so that those MP’s who had blithely thought when they said they wouldn’t be standing at the next election that they’d have a paid summer holiday to look forward to, were a bit miffed that this wasn’t part of the plan. So miffed were they it seems they forced Sunak to announce the thing not indoors in the nice warm dry £1.8 million press briefing room built during Covid but out in the street in the pouring rain! Drowned rat and sinking ship metaphors continued when he hit the campaign trail the next day by visiting the dockyard that built the Titanic, and was pictured in his jet standing beneath the Exit sign and outside a Morrisons supermarket where the photographer neatly shot him at the podium ensuring Sunak’s head obscured the middle ‘ris’ in the sign leaving just a great big Moron in full view. Despite Michael ‘Slithy Tove’ Gove stabbing yet another leader in the back and announcing he’d be standing down in the loudest signal yet that the Tories are doomed, Sunak has guaranteed certain victory by saying he’d bring back National Service for 18-year olds in order to expose the yoof to a wide variety of racial and cultural backgrounds – you know, that very thing that Tory Membership deemed to have damaged British society – thereby actually alienating both the youth vote and those people over 80 who, having endured national service, think hanging’s too good for the youth of today. Give it a week I reckon and that’ll be back too. Meanwhile, Jeremy Corbyn is standing as an independent candidate in the constituency of Islington North where he’s been the incumbent MP for 40 years, against the very Labour party he was leader of a mere 4 years ago. Although 40 years ago he was the Labour upstart standing against the incumbent Independent Labour candidate Michael O’Halloran. All Starmer needs to do now is continue to tightrope between not saying anything too progressive and frighten off Tory voters, nor too Tory and scare off progressive voters for a few more weeks before landsliding into power, nationalising water, rail, energy, taxing the rich till their pips squeak to fund schools, defence, health, and rejoining the EU all by the end of play on July the 5th. Well we live in hope!

Create your podcast today! #madeonzencastr

That’s almost all for this week, but here’s our AI-aided and minimally hand-edited transcript which is at least quite accurate, but not totally:

Contrarian Fallacy – FT#150 Transcript

Jim: Hello, and welcome to fallacious Trump, the podcast where we use the insane ramblings of an ipsodixitist to explain logical fallacies. I’m your host, Jim.

Mark: And I’m your other host, Mark. A, logical fallacy is an error in reasoning that results in bad or invalid arguments. And the logical fallacy we’re looking at this week is the contrarian fallacy. Okay, ipsodixitist.

Jim: Yes.

Mark: It’s a thing with ten in there. It’s got to be a ten, actually.

Jim: Dixitist is someone who says something. Ipsa, is oneself. So, it is someone who is. Who asserts something is true because they said it themselves, essentially. Oh, it’s just a thing that they said that with no evidence to back it up.

Mark: Right. Some people have said. Well, they said, yeah, he said it.

Jim: Yeah, yeah, yeah. It says. There’s a legal phrase that comes from it as well. Ipsidics.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Which is essentially that the thing has been said, an assertion without any evidence.

Mark: And the only evidence is that he said it.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Which kind of fits sort of in with the contrarian fallacy.

Jim: Exactly, because the contrarian fallacy is where someone reflexively opposes an argument without any evidence to back it up. They just basically disagree, kind of, arguably, just for the sake of disagreeing sometimes.

Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jim: It’s not the same as playing devil’s advocate, because there is a point to that, and it can be, although some people do it because they’re assholes, it can be a useful tool for figuring out if an argument is valid or not or, in fact, backed up by sufficient evidence.

Mark: And you’re trying to elicit some further evidence on the part of the. Of the other arguer. Yes.

Jim: And it can be useful to find out. Ah, actually, if you have the ability to back up your argument.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Devil’s advocate, just in case anyone doesn’t know what it is, essentially is someone who questions something, even though they probably agree with it, they don’t necessarily hold the position that they are advocating for.

Mark: Right.

Jim: They’re questioning it for the sake of questioning it and in doing so, attesting the position.

Mark: And it must have a biblical derivation.

Jim: It does. When people are up for sainthood.

Mark: right.

Jim: There is a kind of trial held in the Vatican where priests will advocate for canonization and they’ll say, these are the three miracles that this attributed to this person, and here’s the reasons why. But they also have to have the other side perks. Otherwise I wouldn’t be fair, would it? So, yeah, so one person is the devil’s advocate, and they put the other side arguing, on the opposite, arguing that the person.

Mark: Satisfication. Yeah. There you go. Wow. That’d be a good job, wouldn’t it? Yeah. What is your job? M. I’m m. The devil’s.

Jim: Yeah. It’s not, I don’t just get freelance devil’s advocates. Yeah.

Mark: Yeah. You get to go to the Vatican. Yeah. Quite cool. Yeah. Hang about in St. Peters.

Jim: Probably just someone who’s already knocking about there. They just.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Let’s bring Graham in from next door.

Mark: No, don’t. Really. Brilliant. You’ll be perfect. Yeah. Yeah. In fact, there’s a. Isn’t there a new saint going through the process?

Jim: There is like a teenage saint or.

Mark: Teenage influencer or something. The first teenage influencer. Saint.

Jim: I. Yeah.

Mark: Interesting to see what miracles happened.

Jim: Some unboxing miracles, presumably.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So our first Trump example is kind of a representation of him doing this a lot with one very specific phrase that he likes to use.

Reporter: There’s a New York Times story that. Came out about an hour ago that says that when you came to the White House, you were paying about dollar. 750 a year in federal income tax. They are not releasing what? They’re not publishing the tax, they’re not. showing that out there. They’re saying to protect their sources. In your tax return, sir, does that sound like you were paying a couple hundred dollars a year of middle income tax?

Donald Trump: It’s totally fake news made up. Fake. We went through the same stories. You could have asked me the same questions four years ago. I had to litigate this and talk about it. totally fake news.

Jim: So fake news. When he uses it to say, I disagree with the thing that is being asserted and, ah. Doesn’t offer any kind of evidence on his side against the thing that is being asserted. He’s essentially just doing this.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: He’s essentially just going, nuh

Mark: Yeah, that’s right. Let me just stop you there. Yeah.

Jim: In his defense, playing devil’s advocate.

Mark: yeah.

Jim: I mean, he’s being asked a question about a news story that just broke, so it wouldn’t be reasonable necessary for him to have evidence that he could present about this on the other side. Yeah, but this is representative of many times where he has done this, where he’s talked about things which have been widely asserted or debunked.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Depending on which side he’s on.

Mark: Yes. Yeah.

Jim: And he will just say, oh, it’s fake news. And that is supposed to be enough for you to accept his side of it.

Mark: Yeah, yeah. So he’s, so he’s denying it and he’s also dismissing the other guy’s side of the argument with no evidence.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: So he’s killing it. Both sides.

Jim: And it’s, I think a part of this is that it seems, at least often, to be reflexive. It’s something which he just, as soon as there’s something that he doesn’t like, he calls it fake news. There’s a new story that’s come up that is in any way damaging to him. Fake news is the reaction to it. He doesn’t need to address the argument that’s being made or the claim.

Mark: Yeah, yeah.

Jim: It’s just straight away fake news. In the same way, when he was debating with Hillary Clinton in 2016, he reacted to her saying this once again.

Hillary Clinton: Donald is implying that he didn’t support the invasion of Iraq. I said it was a mistake. I said that years ago. He has consistently denied what is

Donald Trump: wrong.

Hillary Clinton: A very clear fact that before the invasion, he supported it. And, you know, I just want everybody to go google it. Google Donald Trump Iraq. And you will see the dozens of sources which verify that he was for the invasion of Iraq

Donald Trump: wrong.

Hillary Clinton: And you can actually hear the audio of him saying that.

Mark: Yeah, yeah. So even though she’s saying, here’s, here, here’s the thing. And then he, here’s. So she asserts, she makes a claim, asserts something, he just says, oh, that’s wrong. And then she says, okay, well, here you. All you’ve got to do is go look it up.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: There is all this evidence you could go look at. And he just keeps saying, wrong, wrong. No, no, didn’t. No, didn’t. No, didn’t.

Jim: I mean, she is arguably being kind of slightly over, enthusiastic about the amount of evidence that there is that he was for the invasion of Iraq. He was pretty lukewarm on the invasion. He was not against it. That’s the key, because he has claimed extensively that he was against it.

Mark: He was way against it.

Jim: Not only that, in the earlier debates, in the republican primary debates, he said that he fought very, very hard against us going into Iraq. He said he could provide 25 different stories to prove his opposition. And he even said that he was visited by people from the White House in an attempt to silence him because he was getting a disproportionate amount of publicity for his opposition to the war, none of which is in any way true. All of that is a lie. The very first time he said anything even slightly negative about the war was a couple of months into the war, and he was just like, it’s quite. It’s expensive. It’s costing. Wow. At no point did he have any kind of moral or military objection to it whatsoever.

Mark: No.

Jim: And when he was asked about it, when. When kind of plans were in place, he was asked by Howard Stern, actually, if he supported going to war with Iraq.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And he said, yeah, I guess so. And that was. That was basically as strong as it got in support, but definitely, never objected at all until well into the war, by which point, lots of people in America were saying, actually, this war isn’t great. Not a good thing.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So, yeah, he.

Mark: So he was kind of solving the tide was going and then followed the crowd.

Jim: Yeah, absolutely.

Mark: Yeah. Ran to the front and said, follow me. Yeah.

Jim: But in the debate, his answer is wrong.

Speaker B: Wrong.

Jim: That’s it. That’s all he has.

Mark: it’s just that it’s that annoying kid, isn’t it, in the classroom or the debating society or the playground, who would just go, no, no, I’m not. No, I didn’t. Wrong. You’re wrong. You’re wrong. Yeah. And you just want to punch him in.

Jim: Absolutely.

Mark: And then they kind of go, oh, oh, he hit me. I didn’t say anything. And if the teacher’s got any sense, it’s just go, yes, you’re dead, and congratulate you for punching him.

Jim: So our third example is essentially just a pattern of behavior of all of his legislation, pretty much was obsessed with undoing anything Obama did. And some of that could be justified as doing things that were for kind of conservative causes. You know, obviously, Obama being largely progressive, a lot of the stuff that you would do to roll back some of the things that he did would be supported by the right. So it’s, you know, playing to his base or actually having policies or anything like that could be an argument, but a lot of it, certainly it was never seen as that by other people. Buzzfeed talked to european, diplomats, one of whom said, it’s his only real position. He’ll ask, did Obama approve this? And if the answer is affirmative, he’ll say, we don’t. He won’t even listen to the arguments or have a debate. He’s obsessed with Obama.

Mark: Yeah. To the extent that he now mistakes Biden for Obama and continues to like Biden was saying, oh, yeah, we’ll do these things to strengthen the border in Mexico. We, can’t do that.

Jim: Yeah, absolutely.

Mark: And there’s, even though it’s exactly what they want, there’s things that, it’s really.

Jim: A lot harder to see where there’s anything other than just him fighting against Obama, like withdrawing through Trans Pacific Partnership. The trade deal which he pulled out of. Economists largely say it would have benefited the US. His argument was that it was a way for China to get a backdoor into trade with lots of other countries. China wasn’t involved in it at all. There was nothing in there that would allow China to take part in it. It was about other Pacific rim countries trading with the US and with each other. And it required countries like Malaysia to improve their human rights records and stuff like that so that they could continue to be a part of it. There was lots of the original agreement that was generally very positive in terms of helping people as a whole in those countries to avoid oppression and low wages and all of that kind of stuff. And also help the US to be able to trade internationally and do good and cheap deals without tariffs and things like that getting in the way. Yeah, but he pulled out of it because it was a thing that Obama signed. And, yeah, when he did it, he reversed an Obama, ban on importing elephant trophies from Zimbabwe, like hunting trophies, like ivory and stuff like that, which again, there’s, there’s, sure there’s going to be a few republican elephant hunters, but that can’t have been a massive swayed of his base that felt that was a necessary thing to do. It was just because Obama had banned them. So he was like, oh, fuck that. well, let’s, let’s allow them to bring in tusks and things again from Zimbabwe. He rolled back a regulation on nursing homes, which made it easier. The regulation that Obama put in place made it easier for nursing home residents to sue for negligence or abuse.

Mark: Ah, right. Yeah.

Jim: And Trump was like, fuck the old people and took that away.

Mark: Roll that back.

Jim: Yeah, took that away and made it easier for nursing homes to not bother about kind of infectious diseases and things like that, which led in part to problems when Covid came along.

Mark: Covid happened.

Jim: but yeah, it was things that Obama had put in place that would affine nursing homes for not keeping up with infectious disease regulations. And the abuse and, ah, negligence thing was about, arbitration agreements where nursing homes previously were allowed to force people to enter into arbitration agreements when they went into the home.

Mark: Right.

Jim: So they could say, like, if you’ve got a problem, you’re not allowed to sue, it has to go to arbitration.

Mark: Whoa. Yeah.

Jim: yeah, exactly. When people are going into nursing homes, it’s usually a pretty traumatic time and they’re not necessarily the best time to be making those kinds of decisions. So the Obama administration basically went, protected them against that. You can have rules where you can offer them arbitrary, if something comes up, you can say, we can deal with this through arbitration and offer them that as an option, but you can’t force them to choose that in advance as their only option. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that, again, was generally seen as a good thing. And Trump was like, nah, fuck that. So what I’m saying with this is that while there were things that you can reasonably point to and say, well, yeah, that’s a conservative view. Yeah, there’s a lot that seems to have been done just because Obama did it.

Annoyed Dad: Whoa.

Mark: and he, and he does seem to have filtered into, I think that’s why he keeps saying Obama, even though, you know, Obama’s not been in power quite some time, because there are things he doesn’t like, or he wants to recall the specter of Obama because that was sufficient in his mind to convince other people that we ought to do away with this just because Obama did it. And all his sycophants went, oh, yeah, all right. He’s bringing the ghost of Obama to bear on things like the border, strengthening the republic. The cross party thing wanted to happen and the Democrats are going, yeah, yeah, we’ll go for that.

Jim: I mean, the border thing, arguably, he’s stopping anything happening on the border because it would help Biden in the election. Arguably.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: I’m not even sure how much it would, but the ability to claim there is a crisis would go away if they actually did something about the crisis.

Mark: Yes, yes.

Jim: So, yeah, I’m, not. That’s less, I mean, there’s plenty of other things. I mean, just Obamacare as a whole, basically, Americans are. I mean, Americans are in favor of Obamacare, but a lot more Americans are in favor of the Affordable Care act.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: It’s just that they don’t know that is Obamacare. If you ask them, do you agree with Obamacare? Do you think that’s a good thing? You get much less people agreeing with it than you say. If you say, do you agree with that?

Mark: Oh, no, that’s communist.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So he effectively weaponized the Obama name against Obamacare, even though he couldn’t actually do anything about it. You know, he destroyed the individual mandate and a few other aspects of it, but he couldn’t overturn it and didn’t have a plan if he was going to overturn it. He just wanted to get rid of it because it was a success that Obama had had there so many options for examples of times when he was like, who did this? Obama. Right, let’s f it up.

Mark: Let’s get rid of that then. Yeah.

Boris Johnson: And now is the time, I think, for Marx, british politics over here.

Mark: a general election has been called. So we’re in kind of like the end of term. it’s brilliant. So, I’m going to take you back in time before the last general election in 2019 so that we can have another outing of this delicious clip, which we did. I can’t remember when, some time ago, which shows Boris Johnson to simply deny stuff straight in the face of reality. Forget, you know, targeting a particular predecessor or just gain, saying, automatically gainsaying the leader of the opposition. He just doesn’t agree with reality. So, on the 18 September 2019, Boris was out in the wild and he was confronted by a parent at Whipp’s Cross hospital in north London.

Annoyed Dad: There are not enough people on this ward There are not enough doctors, there are not enough nurses. It’s not well organized enough. Right. The NHS have been destroyed. It’s been destroyed. It’s been destroyed. And now you come here for a press opportunity.

Boris Johnson: Well, actually, there’s no press here.

Annoyed Dad: What do you mean, there’s no press?

Mark: So this is being filmed. So I think it’s like, at the moment, he says, you come here for a press alter duty and looks around and Boris looks around, and that’s when all the cameras fire. And then Boris just goes, there’s no press here. We’ve just looked at them. Well, who are these people, then? It’s just brilliant. Despite the evidence of everybody’s eyes and ears. Yeah, you can hear all cameras he just flatly denies actuality, the other end of his premiership. Lets relive to the day when 60 of his own mp’s resigned on the 6 July 2022 to force his departure. Many of them were whilst Boris was in front of a select committee chaired by Bernard Jenkins, who is a conservative, who is concerned that, Boris doesnt call a general election when he inevitably has to go. So we’ve got no flat denial in the face of mounting pressure. Evidence reality this time. But here’s Boris just being characteristically contrarian. You can hear him doing that squirming, wriggling linguistic thing like the greased pig that he is.

Bernard Jenkins: I wish you to be clear about one thing. That if you have lost the confidence of your MP’s, you will not seek a dissolution. You will stand aside and allow a leadership election to take place so the prime minister may send for an alternative leader. that’s the proper procedure, isn’t it?

Boris Johnson: What I’m going to do is get on with no where. You’re quite right where I passionately agree.

Bernard Jenkins: I need you to answer this question, prime minister,

Boris Johnson: with you is that. I see absolutely no.

Bernard Jenkins: I’m going to ask you once an election, if you have lost the confidence of your MP’s and you’re required to step down as leader of the conservative party, you will not seek to dissolve parliament. Please. Because we need. But this house.

Boris Johnson: But I’m not going to step down. And the last thing this country needs, frankly, is election. Because this house. What this. On the contrary, I think the risk is. The risk is, that people, continue to focus on, this type of thing. And I think that is a mistake. How we need to do. And how would it help get on with stable.

Bernard Jenkins: How would it help the crisis in Ukraine, and the cost of living crisis, if we were plunged into an general election that nobody wants out? You’ve ruled it out.

Boris Johnson: The earliest date that I can see for a general election, is been two years from now, or 2024, I think is the most likely date for the next, election.

Mark: He’s simply got to say, okay, yes, I will step aside. I won’t force a general election. I’ll step aside and there will be a leadership election. Basically, Bernard Jenkins is kind of going, look, if we have an election now, we’re toast. So he’s concerned that that doesn’t happen. So what happens is Liz Truss gets in and then Richard Sunak, and, now they’re toast. All he needed to say was yes, but he can’t say it. He is agreeing with him ultimately, but then he kind of said, well, I just said, I just said, I’m going to do that. But he sneaks in, I’m not going to step down. And he tries not to leave. It takes him until the following morning on the 7th, I think, by which time nearly a hundred mp’s have said they will go unless he clears off. And, he says, well, I’m not going. I’m not going to go. And he said, well, I just want you to do well. On the contrary. What are you on the contrary of? Just. He eventually gets there and says he somehow, no, I won’t do it.

Jim: He somehow was contrary about a question. That’s impressive.

Mark: Yes. Yeah. And then turns it around so that he. It looks like here’s his idea and the other guy is the one that’s disagreeing. It’s just, ah, It’s a. It’s an object lesson in Boris’s contrarism and his wriggling. He lives in the land of nuance between plausible deniability and actual lying.

Jim: Deniable plausibility.

Mark: Undeniable plausibility. Yes. His absolute. Yeah. Okay, so example three, before we get there, we’ve got to have a quick history lesson. So, in 2001, Margaret Thatcher was accused of islamophobia when she said, I’ve not heard enough condemnation of 911 from muslim priests. In 2012, Linton Crosby was reported as saying Boris Johnson’s mayoral campaign should not try to gain support from fucking Muslims, instead focusing on wavering voters in the outer suburbs. 2018, Michael Fabricant, Conservative MP, another one with crazy blonde hair apologized for tweeting a photoshopped image depicting a balloon caricature of Sadiq Khan mimicking the Trump baby balloon having sex with a pig. In August 2018, Boris Johnson said that those women wearing burkas and the niqab looked like letter boxes and bank robbers. In October 2018, the London mayor candidate Sean Bailey argued that accommodating Muslims and Hindus is one factor which robs Britain of its community, and that, the collapse of community is turning the country into a crime riddled cesspool, a statement which Nigel Farage made again this weekend on Sky News. In March 2019, it emerged that Martin York, conservative councillor for Wellingborough, and Dorinda Bailey, a former conservative party council candidate, have facilitated or supported islamophobic Facebook comments, including calls from mosques to be bombed. Len Milner and Chris Smith of the east sufficient council also quit the party in March after they liked a cartoon on Facebook which depicts a mock beheading of London mayor Sadiq Khan in April 2019. Housing minister Roger Scruton was dismissed from the role after an interview was released where he stated that Islamophobia was invented by the Muslim Brotherhood in order to stop discussion of a major issue. A 2019 poll of conservative party members found 69% believed there are areas in Britain that operate under sharia law 45% believe there are areas in Britain in which non Muslims are not able to enter 39% believe islamic terrorists reflect a widespread hostility to Britain. Amongst the muslim community, 76% thought the party was already doing everything it needed to combat Islamophobia, with only 15% thinking more action was required. And another poll found 56% of members surveyed said Islam was generally a threat to the british way of life and 42% thought having people from a wide variety of racial and cultural backgrounds has damaged british society. And a report into how the party dealt with accusations of Islamophobia, released in May 2021, said two thirds of all incidents reported to the conservative party’s main complaints team related to islamophobic incidents. And as we know, in February 2024, Lee Anderson had his Tory whip removed for not apologizing for having said that Islamists were now in charge. And incumbent Labour mayor Sadiq Khan had given our capital city away to his mates. Islamist mates. And in the same month, Susan Hall, Tory London mayor or candidate, was censured for claiming that jewish Londoners are frightened of Sadiq Khan, endorsing a tweet from a far right figure, calling Khan the mayor of London, liking a tweet about Khan’s strategy to tackle violence against women and girls that said that labor traitor rat likes that sort of thing, in an apparent reference to female genital mutilation. And she responded to the censure by saying islamophobic tweets were just hurty, words. So despite all of this, Rishi resorts to an immediate, straight up contradictory position when being asked about Leander toll in February 2024.

Reporter: We want to start with the developments over the weekend, given the comments made by former conservative party deputy chairman Lee Anderson. Has the conservative party got islamophobic tenderness, prime minister?

Rishi Sunak: No, of course it doesn’t. And I think it’s incumbent on all of us, especially those elected to parliament, not to inflame our debates in a way that’s harmful to others.

Mark: Yeah, no, of course it doesn’t.

Jim: Of course not. Where would you get that idea from?

Mark: Yeah, you know, it’s not like it’s not possible to look all of that up. No. No. Just no. Just no. And is incumbent on us in public life, to use our words carefully. Well, yeah. And it has been for the past 24 years since Thatcher said, oh, I’ve not heard anything condemning it. So one last quick example. This is Rishi getting a bit angry on the Today programme on the 23 May, which is when? The day after he launched the general election, when Nick Robinson asked him about why he’s caused the general election before. The flagship Rwanda plan has not even sent one person to Rwanda.

Nick Robinson: Will anybody get on a plane to. Go to Rwanda, before the election?

Rishi Sunak: The flights will go in July. And that’s the choice of this election.

Nick Robinson: After the election.

Rishi Sunak: If you believe in stopping the boats. Yes, if you believe in stopping the boats.

Nick Robinson: So you’re having an election. You can demonstrate that your plan has worked.

Rishi Sunak: No, we’ve put the preparations in place. We’ve hired the caseworkers. We’ve got the airfield on standby. The flights are booked.

Mark: You’re having an election before your plan works. And then he says, no. Well, you are.

Jim: Yes, they very much are.

Mark: And the fact that he’s kind of now saying, okay, vote for me and it will happen. Well, you were already in power and it could have happened. You could have had it happen and call the election next January.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: The reason he did it is because inflation rate went down.

Jim: There was one day of positive economic news and the conservatives were like, it’s never going to get better than this.

Mark: Yeah, it’s never going to get any better than this. Nothing whatsoever to do with them. Nothing, that they put in place had anything to do with inflation going down. Mainly it was to do with the price of energy dropping.

Mark: Annie Oakley there from Annie get your gun with anything you can do. Of course.

Jim: Now, we talked about this and you said it was gonna be hello, goodbye.

Mark: Hello, goodbye. Well, it wasn’t contrary enough.

Jim: What? You say, hello, I say, goodbye.

Mark: You say, why? I say, I don’t know.

Jim: I say, yes. You say, no. It felt like the ideal one, but no, fine, you just be contrary about it.

Mark: Anything you can say, I can say the opposite.

Jim: No, I come up with a great idea for you and you just leave something else.

Mark: No, you didn’t.

Jim: So, in the fallacy. In the wild, we like to talk about the fallacy of the week from a non political perspective, and our first example this week is really the only possible first example you could have for this fallacy.

Man: Is this the right room for an argument?

Mr. Vibrating: I’ve told you once.

Man: No, you haven’t.

Mr. Vibrating: Yes I Have.

Man: When?

Mr. Vibrating: Just now.

Man: No, you didn’t.

Mr. Vibrating: Yes, I did.

Man: I didn’t.

Mr. Vibrating: I’m telling you I did.

Man: You did not.

Mr. Vibrating: I’m sorry, is this a five minute argument or the full half hour?

Man: Oh, oh, just a five minute one.

Mr. Vibrating: Fine. Thank you. Anyway, I did.

Man: You most m certainly did not.

Mr. Vibrating: Now, let’s get one thing quite clear. I most definitely told you.

Man: You did not.

Mr. Vibrating: Yes, I did.

Man: You did not.

Mr. Vibrating: Yes, I did.

Man: Didn’t.

Mr. Vibrating: Yes, I did.

Man: No, this is an argument.

Mr. Vibrating: Yes, it is.

Man: No, it isn’t. It’s just contradiction.

Mr. Vibrating: No, it isn’t.

Man: Yes, it is.

Mr. Vibrating: It is not.

Man: It is. You just contradicting me.

Mr. Vibrating: No, I didn’t.

Man: Oh, you did.

Mr. Vibrating: No, no, no,

Man: you did. Just.

Mr. Vibrating: No, no, nonsense.

Man: Oh, look, this is futile.

Mr. Vibrating: No, it isn’t.

Man: I came here for a good argument.

Mr. Vibrating: No, you didn’t. You came here for an argument.

Man: Well, an argument’s not the same as contradiction

Mr. Vibrating: can be.

Man: No, it can’t. An argument’s a connected series of statements to establish a definite proposition.

Mr. Vibrating: No, it isn’t.

Man: Yes, it is. It isn’t just contradiction.

Mr. Vibrating: Look, if I argue with you, I. Must take up a contrary position.

Man: But it isn’t just saying, no, it isn’t.

Mr. Vibrating: Yes, it is.

Man: No, it isn’t. Argument’s an intellectual process. Contradiction is just the automatic gain saying. Of anything the other person says.

Mr. Vibrating: No, it isn’t.

Man: Yes, it is.

Mr. Vibrating: Not at all.

Man: No, look.

Mr. Vibrating: Thank you, thank you.

Mark: Oh, it’s just perfect.

Jim: Brilliant, brilliant writing.

Mark: I think. I think that’s my absolute favorite python sketch. I remember going on holiday with the. With the boy scouts one summer, and we had golden earring on one tape and a. Ah, python record on another tape, and we learned the argument sketch, so we kind of like we’re going out singing, radar love by golden earring and doing the argument sketch. Just so. I just love that it’s not just contradiction, just noticeable. It’s just perfect, isn’t it?

Jim: Yeah. And at first, I thought a few times in there. Oh, is he. Is he making an argument? But he doesn’t really make an argument at all. He doesn’t present evidence.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: He just kind of reinforces his contradiction by explaining a bit why he’s being contradictory.

Mark: Yeah, it’s so good. Yeah.

Jim: And our second example is from community. And Britta, I mean, she’s not exactly this one personified, but she’s a protester by nature. That’s kind of her thing.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: But she’s also a hipster, and hipsters are, I think, by. By their nature, quite contrarian, because they are anti mainstream. They are like, if anything is popular, they’re against it, essentially. And that’s what Britta is doing here.

Britta: When’s our culture gonna outgrow this wedding thing?

Annie: You’re anti wedding now?

Jeff: No, she’s just pro anti

Britta: No to everything you both said.

Mark: No to everything you both said. That’s brilliant. This is not m anti. She’s just pro anti.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: No to everything you both said. Oh, that’s great. I want to get a t shirt with that one. No to everything you just said.

Jim: Yeah. And our, final example is from the Marx Brothers film Horse Feathers. And this is a song. Early on in the film, Groucho is playing the new head of a college, and the other professors have some suggestions for him, and this is how he responds.

Professor Quincy Adams Wagstaff: Your proposition may be good, but let’s have one thing understood. Whatever it is, I am against it. And even when you’ve changed it or condensed it, I’m against it.

Mark: Just makes one thing perfectly clear. Yeah. Yeah, I’m against it. Yeah.

Jim: absolutely.

Mark: Fair enough. So we’re gonna. We’re gonna play fake news, folks. I love the game. It’s a great game. I understand the game as well as anybody. As well as anybody.

Jim: Yes. It’s time for fake news. The game where I read out three Trump quotes, two of which are real, and one I made up, and Mark M has to figure out which one is fake news.

Mark: Because the thing is. Well, no, it isn’t. Is that it isn’t. The game is rigged. No, it can’t be. And no matter. Yes. Madder what I do. No, you don’t. It’s seemingly. No, it’s perfectly cleared. I. That is designed. No. Is hastily scribbled. To prevent me allow you from winning to lose, is it not? No. Yes, it isn’t.

Jim: I disagree. I can’t say that since it’s our 150th episode.

Mark: Yay.

Jim: It’s, a bit different this week because I like to mix it up sometimes. And so what we have here is nine products that Trump has tried to sell Trump branded versions of.

Mark: Okay.

Jim: In the past. And this isn’t the tat available on the Trump store because there’s such a lot of Trump branded bullshit that is available at Trump’s store.

Mark: Can you get Trump bullshit?

Jim: Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised. It’s possible. These are things which. They were distinct business ventures which all incidentally, no longer exist.

Mark: No longer. Yeah.

Jim: I made three of them up. As with our, standard format from Christmas. It’s one of the first three, one of the second three, and one of the third three I made up. So.

Mark: Okay.

Jim: Yeah, first one. Which of these three is not a real thing? Trump insurance, Trump vitamins or Trump urine tests.

Mark: Right. Right. Not a real thing. Okay.

Jim: Two of them are real. Wow.

Mark: Well, but I think Trump insurance, he would do that because that involves money and they would never pay out because he’s got history of doing that kind of thing. Trump vitamins sounds. Sounds feasible. Bit too health based, I suspect. Trump urine test is real. so maybe actually Trump insurance isn’t, so. Well, Okay, I think. I think Trump vitamins is the one you made up. Number two.

Jim: Okay, so you’re going with Trump vitamins.

Mark: Is the one I made up for that three. Okay, so we’ll come back next three to that.

Jim: The next three. Trump pasta sauce, Trump deodorant or Trump water?

Mark: Oh, I think he’s probably done. Trump water. Trump passed the source. That’s a bit like Lloyd Grossman type thing, isn’t it? Trump deodorant. Yeah. Because the strap line would be don’t sweat it or something, wouldn’t it? Trump pasta sauce. okay. I think. I think deodorant and water are probably real. And pasta sauce is the one you made up.

Jim: Okay.

Mark: The number four. Yeah.

Jim: And finally.

Jim: A Trump board game.

Mark: Right.

Jim: Trump condoms or Trump energy drink.

Mark: Right. Trump board game. Oh, if that exists. We definitely got to find that that were kind of monopoly type tycoon type game or an apprentice spin off. Trump energy drink. or Trump condoms. Okay. Right. I suspect that actually didn’t do the Trump board game. So I’m going with number seven. So two, four and seven with Trump vitamins.

Jim: Trump passed a source that’s the source.

Mark: And Trump board game. Okay. Yeah. The board game.

Jim: So.

Mark: Right, okay. Only because of what the other ones to be real. Yeah. Yeah.

Jim: Of the first three.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Trump vitamins and Trump urine tests were kind of both part of one venture.

Mark: Right.

Jim: Called the Trump network, which was basically a kind of multi level marketing type thing.

Mark: Okay. Yeah.

Jim: And so you could buy, you could buy Trump vitamins. You could buy just generic Trump vitamins. But, yeah, if you wanted to pay extra, you could get a specific Trump branded urine test that would then give you a kind of customized, you know, vitamin diet.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Essentially they would. Based on your urine.

Mark: Okay.

Jim: You would know which vitamins you need and then you would, you could buy those custom vitamins from. Wow. From the Trump network. So those two were, were real. Trump insurance was the one I made up.

Mark: Oh, really?

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Wow.

Jim: Not do.

Mark: I’m surprised by that.

Jim: He has, he has tried mortgages. He asked. There was a Trump mortgage company, but not.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Insurance.

Mark: I thought about that. Yeah. You see, I thought that I should go with the first gut feel. You fool. You idiot. I told you that.

Jim: So.

Mark: Bloody hell. Oh, there must be somewhere a Trump urine test would be great to sign up for, wouldn’t it? Oh, man. And I hope the strap line is we’re taking the piss.

Jim: So. Right, the next three. Trump pasta sauce, Trump deodorant. Trump, what do you think? Pasta sauce is not true.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And you’re correct. There’s no pasta sauce. Trump deodorant was a thing.

Mark: Oh, it must stink.

Jim: It was called success by Trump.

Mark: Oh, it was, yeah. Did it come in a gold roll on?

Jim: It was a black, was it, black packaging with a gold tee and success. Yeah. Success by Trump. It was a roll on. It wasn’t a spray, as far as I can. Yeah. Well, they didn’t, as far as I can tell, never marketed it with the smell of success. You surely would, wouldn’t you? The sweet smell of success or something like that.

Mark: Yes.

Jim: Yeah. No, never. Never, as far as I can tell.

Mark: Idiots.

Jim: And yes. Trump bottled water. There’s a Trump ice. It was called Trump natural spring water. It was initially sold only at Trump owned casinos and other select markets, but in 2003, they branched out to national grocery chains.

Mark: Wow.

Jim: It was discontinued in 2010, so.

Mark: Wow. Some of this stuff, when he, when he goes to jail, this stuff’s gonna be worth a fortune, isn’t it? Wow.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And finally. Yeah, so you’ve got one m out of two possible points now. Finally, Trump board games, Trump condoms and Trump energy drink. You think.

Mark: Yep.

Jim: The board game is the one I made up.

Mark: Yes.

Jim: Trump the game.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Is.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: A real thing. Oh, man. It is, as you suggested, quite similar to Monopoly.

Mark: Right.

Jim: It was not popular.

Mark: More orange. Right. Imagine. Yeah. I want that. I want it.

Jim: I want. They had a couple of go, making a thing. It came out in 1989, and it was about, you know, buying and selling property, but also doing kind of business deals was a part of it.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And did not get good reviews. it’s got 4.4 out of ten on board game geek.

Mark: Oh, my God.

Jim: And then when the Apprentice came along and he got a kind of bump in popularity, they re released it with adding, like, a new picture of Trump, because it was, you know, 15 years on and kind of incorporated. You’re fired in there somewhere. But still basically exactly the same game and go to jail still didn’t do well. They sold less than half of what they were hoping to sell over both releases. And, it’s now widely available. Oh, man.

Mark: That’s got to be worth getting just to play, surely. Oh, yeah. We’ve got to try and get one of them. Yeah.

Jim: Trump condoms, a thing are, not a thing. That is a thing we made up. Wow. But the Trump energy drink technique, well, it is a thing. It’s definitely a thing. It’s not technically a thing. It’s a real thing. But it. It was a limited release in as much as it was a polish energy drink that was sold in Israel.

Mark: Right.

Jim: I don’t know.

Mark: With his name on it.

Jim: Yes, with his name. It was Trump energy drink. It was a kind of black and gold can with a kind of Louis Vuitton type pattern thing going on. Right. But a big t for Trump.

Mark: It wasn’t called, orange bull.

Jim: No. Just called Trump. Trump energy drink. And I. There’s some speculation because he also did a vodka that was quite successful in Israel, and the branding of the energy drink is kind of similar to the vodka. So there’s some m theory that maybe they were like vodka Red Bull. Yeah, let’s kind of capitalize on that. But apparently only available in Israel still and not anymore, but occasionally. Ah. An empty can of Trump energy drink will show off on eBay, apparently. Oh, wow.

Mark: Yeah, I’m getting. Yeah, I’m gonna be all over to get that board game. Wow.

Jim: So we have a few answers on the socials. We’ve got miles on Facebook says Trump vitamins. He clearly has no idea what they are. Just another radical Democrat hoax. Trump deodorant, a big part of using deodorant is for other people’s benefit. And the orange shit given has never given a shit about other people. And, and Trump condoms. Based on reports from people like Stormy Daniels, I don’t think Trump could handle the narcissistic injury of confronting the data. On average, penis size, so.

Mark: Perfect. Yeah, well, they’d all be marked extra large, wouldn’t they? Of course.

Jim: So one out of three there on Patreon, Willem says urine tests, deodorant and condoms. So again, one out of three. Although I have zero clue, the true answers can’t put anything past that. Snake oil salesman Renee Z says urine test, deodorant and condoms as well. Maybe that’s why he didn’t use the ones with stormy Daniels. No Trump branded ones available.

Mark: There you go. Yeah.

Jim: She adds, my husband went to a business meeting at the Trump building in Chicago a long time ago. He came home with a Trump branded water bottle. It sat around in our house unopened for several months. And when I looked at it, mold was growing in the unopened bottle. Of course, great quality control.

Mark: I just dipped it down the toilet bowl and superglued the lid on. Yeah.

Jim: And Schmootz says, insurance. How could he possibly get authority to sell deodorant? He stinks. An energy drink. He doesn’t need those because of everything else he’s on. So.

Mark: Well, yeah, that was my thinking, was energy drink. Well, yeah, because he’s such a big. But then I thought he would embrace that. Yeah.

Jim: So everyone, basically, everyone who took part in this got one. Correct.

Mark: Wow.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Well done. Well done. Yes. So, and yes, because that Trump insurance one, that’s, that, for me, was kind of too obvious. I thought, oh, yeah, it’s about money. He would be, he would love that. Yeah. And then I thought, the Trump board game. Yeah, we wouldn’t get beyond the idea stage one. Obviously. Sorry that he did, but I’m gonna desperately find one.

Jim: I mean, a few other things that he did that failed. I mean, obviously you’ve got the NFTs and the sneakers and all of that stuff. But also Trump shuttle, which was, short flights between Boston, New York and DC, that didn’t last very long. Trump mortgages. go. Trump luxury travel search engine that lasted about year. Trump coffee, vodka, wine, Trump eyeglasses. Trump stakes, famously through. He sold through sharper Image and Trump magazine. That lasted for a little over a year.

Mark: Wow. Nothing but pictures of Trump.

Jim: I mean, the only one I’ve seen had a Vanka Trump on the COVID Right. yeah, it was all about kind of the luxury lifestyle and stuff like that.

Mark: Okay. Yeah. That would have been on the coffee table in Trump town.

Jim: Absolutely. Yeah. Nothing but, wow.

Mark: It’s just, it’s. It’s a. It’s a litany of eighties excess, isn’t it? And just chanting your arm in every. It’s the scatter gun approach.

Jim: Slap your name on every.

Mark: Wow.

Jim: Maybe people will buy it.

Mark: Exactly.

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Jim: And it’s time for the part of the show that this week, at least, is called the Trump trial is still not a logical fallacy because it’s still going on. For now. It’s nearly done.

Mark: Yep.

Jim: As we stand now, they are, they’re summing up on Tuesday, closing arguments. Yeah. And then the, jury will be given the jury instructions, and then they will retire to make their decision.

Mark: Well, we don’t even need to leave the room. Really? Yeah. That’s a little bit impolite. They ought to go through the thing of going into the room.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: They’ll sit about and go, what, you want 30 minutes? Give me 30 minutes.

Jim: Since last we met, Michael Cohen testified. So Monday, May 13, day 16 of the trial, he was on the stand for 5 hours, talking about basically the whole scheme. He was laying out the scheme as, as they’ve already heard from all of.

Mark: The other people that were involved in.

Jim: The steps, David Becker and, and people like that, and talking about the whole catch and kill scheme, tying trump basically, to the whole thing. To the whole scheme, specifically to the hush money payment that was paid to stormy Daniels and that it wasn’t just a thing he decided to do himself, essentially.

Mark: Yeah, yeah.

Jim: Bring the receipts.

Mark: There would be a repayment. He’s going to pay the money out, and then they would reimburse him. Yeah. And all that kind of stuff. Yeah.

Jim: The main things I think that people took away from the first day, at least, of Michael Kohn’s testimony was the fact that actually he was pretty chilled because there was a bit of concern over whether he would be a kind of rambunctious new, yorker who, was easily riled and could be pushed into outbursts by the defense team. But actually, he didn’t. And not just the first day, he, not at all throughout the entire thing, he stayed calm and respectful and factual and just talking kind of matter of factly about the stuff, even when it’s negative stuff that he was involved in, he was kind of taking responsibility for it and saying, yep, that’s the thing I did, and here’s why I did it. And, you know, it’s for the benefit of Mister Trump was a thing that came off and they’ve only got.

Mark: He’S kind of the witness really, that can tie it all together. So he’s got to be eminently believable, despite the fact that he’s a convicted felon and liar and perjurer. And so they’ve got to get over those bits. So even the bits when he was accused of. Yes, but you are a known liar. He was like, well, yeah, I did do that on behalf of Trump. Yeah. So it was all for Mister Trump. Yes.

Jim: Yeah. So one of the things also that stood out at the beginning of that week was the fact that suddenly there were people coming to the court to support Trump, because previously, I think Eric had been there before. Don Junior wasn’t there until the end of this week, just gone. Melania hasn’t been there at all. But several Congress people and Trump and Trump supporters have, were showing up weirdly, often dressed kind of as Trump, in the same kind of dark blue suit and red tie and white shirt that he typically wears. And when you collect a group of them together, all dressed the same it starts to look very, very weird and stupid.

Mark: Yes. A little bit suspicious.

Jim: Yeah, yeah. But they were there, ah, to essentially get round the gag order by saying all the things Trump can’t say.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And there was a fairly strong feeling among some people that this is also against the gag order because the gag order required him not only not to make, but also not to direct others.

Mark: Yeah, yeah.

Jim: Those statements. And obviously, it’s pretty difficult to tell that he’s definitely directing them to do it. So if JD Vance and Vivek Ramaswamy and Doug Bergam and people like that come and say, or the judge’s daughter, she’s a Democrat operative, and it’s all very bad, it’s hard to know that it’s at, ah, his direction, or if they’re just like thinking, well, he’ll love this. If I do this, I’m in with a chance of being VP maybe.

Mark: Yeah, yeah.

Jim: So one of the things was that one of the journalists that was in the court said on, I think it was CNN, might m have been MSNBC, that he was close enough, sitting close enough to Trump to see, kind of look over his shoulder and he could see that he was right. He was like annotating the stuff that those people outside the courthouse were saying. Like, before they said it, he was working through the kind of, the script of things that they were saying and like making notes on them, which kind of sounds pretty directy to me, directional.

Mark: Yes, yes.

Jim: Since the second 3rd week of the trial, the prosecution haven’t made any motions to have Trump sanctioned for violating the gag order.

Mark: Right.

Jim: Partly because he has actually slightly backed off statements he was making by himself. Also, I’ve heard some people suggest that partly it’s just like, because it’s coming to the end of the trial, the benefit that you would get from it, of him possibly going into jail for an hour, there would be far more blowback, far more negative aspect of it, formal potential for someone to see that as judicial overreach, perhaps, or something like that. Then the benefit you get from, from chastising him for being arguably involved in these other people making statements outside the courtroom looking like Trump clones or clowns. In any case, that kept happening through the week and people kept coming. Vivek was there, Lauren Boebert turned up at one point. She didn’t go to her son’s trial, she came to Donald’s. What.

Mark: In order to stand there and go, yeah, it’s all, it’s all a scam whilst her son’s on trial.

Jim: So yeah, they, showed up, said negative things outside the courthouse, didn’t really make much of a difference to anyone, and went away. but they must have been there. I don’t know if they get a, free entry or something, because I know that on the cleanup one or 45 podcast, Alison said that she went to New York to be in the court house to kind of listen in one of the days of testimony. And they have a thing in New York, I expect other places as well, where you can pay people to stand in line for you, hold your place in line. And so she got two people because she’s kind of member of the press as a podcaster.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So she got someone to stand in the press line from 09:00 p.m. the previous night and, and also in the public line. And the person in the public line was, was like 8th in line or something. Didn’t get it. Like, that wasn’t. Wow. They only let six members of the public in, and the person in the press line was like second in line. But they did let her in as a member of the press. So they have a press line in the public line. I don’t know if they also have an elected officials line.

Mark: Right.

Jim: Like, if you’ve traveled from DC, you can just get in.

Mark: Ah.

Jim: Or if Lauren Boba is camping out on the street from 09:00 p.m. or two. Or paying, paying someone to do it. Yeah.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: So I don’t know how that works, but I’m curious now.

Mark: Ah, particularly because there’s a whole bunch of it, you know, they’re kind of lurking behind Trump when he comes out, stands by the bike racks.

Jim: And I must admit I have been very slightly tempted to consider, like, flying out into New York. I would so love to. Like, if I could predict when the jury would come back, because it might be. I think it’s going to be Friday. I think it’s going to be this, this Friday that the jury came back. But I could be wrong. If I fucking fly to New York and, and, and then I kind of camp out overnight on confused, and then the jury stays deliberating all of Friday, I’m like, ah, bollocks. That would be a massive waste of time and money, so I’m not going to do it. But it has crossed my mind that it would be a very cool thing to be there when the, when the verdict comes back. How cool would that be?

Mark: That would be very cool. Anyway, I think you should do it anyway. He could work from there. Surely. It’s all digital.

Jim: Theoretically, it could, but, yeah, there isn’t. There is an outlay to consider.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, there is that.

Jim: Uh-huh.

Mark: Yeah, that’s true. I think Philip glass is playing, so you can just go.

Jim: I wouldn’t be hurting for activities, I don’t think.

Mark: Yeah, plenty of activities, but, yeah.

Jim: So I’m not planning on doing that, but, you know.

Mark: No, fair enough.

Jim: Never say never.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah.

Jim: I mean, frankly.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: We’re gonna get other opportunities. This isn’t the only. This isn’t the only time that there’ll be an opportunity to hear a jury tell Trump he’s guilty of something.

Mark: It’s not the only rodeo. Yes, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Fair enough. Yeah.

Jim: So there was direct examination of cohenous on the Monday and Tuesday, and then cross examination began on the Tuesday afternoon.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Todd Blanche was essentially trying to get Cohen to admit to stuff that he happily admitted to about lies he’s told in the past and why he done it, which. The process which the direct examination had already examined, because that’s the point of the direct examination from kind of experts I’ve listened to, podcasts I’ve listened to. They said that cross examination, typically, you want to kind of get in there, disrupt some of the stuff that came out on direct, and then get out again and kind of do it quick, but make it clear that there’s. There’s definitely questions about some of the big things.

Mark: Right.

Jim: Whereas what Todd Blanche did was questioned and essentially reinforced everything. He went on and on and on.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And didn’t really overturn anything, didn’t really throw up anything big. The one thing that came up was a yemenite call that Cohen had made to Keith Schiller. Keith Schiller’s Trump’s bodyguard, valet kind of person who would always pretty much be with him. And Cohen was talking about various calls that he’d made to Trump, sometimes via Keith Schiller, about the whole stormy Daniels thing and kind of keeping him up to date with what was going on and what moves he was making and all of that kind of stuff. The prosecution were showing all of the call records of these things to show. Okay, look, here is, you can see that there was a call made between Cohen and Trump’s number or Keeshala’s phone at this time. And he says, this is what they were talking about. Obviously, we can’t. There’s no verification beyond what Cohen’s saying about what they were talking about. But we can corroborate that this call, a call happened at this time. So Todd Blanche did a thing where there was a call between Cohen and Kiesela which lasted about 90 seconds, where Cohen said he called, he asked to speak to Trump and told him basically, you know, everything’s going fine. We’re waiting to hear back from Stormy Daniels.

Mark: Right.

Jim: The defense brought up some text messages that were around the time of this call where Cohen and Keith Schiller were talking about a different thing. They were talking about someone who was calling up and kind of maybe pranking Cohen and. And claimed they were a teenager or something like that. And Cohen kind of said, I’ll get the FBI on you. I’ll, you know, go away. Fuck off. I’ll, kind of get secret service on you or something. And so he. He tried to get Keith Schiller. He was basically telling him, dude, we need to do something about this.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And there was a text from Schiller to Cohen saying, give me a call before this call that Cohen said was about something else. He said it was about the, stormy Daniels thing. So as far as Blanche was concerned, this was proof that he lied about what that call was about, because they had the text that put it into context, and it was actually about this other thing. Didn’t figure out that maybe you can talk about more than one thing on a call, but that was the thing that was proof. And frankly, they haven’t got much to work with. So he got very excited about the fact that he thought he’d caught Cohen in a lie.

Mark: Right.

Jim: On redirect. The prosecution addressed this basically by showing a still from a news report that was taken at, basically five minutes before that call happened or thereabouts. It was kind of almost exactly the same time, just showing that Keith Schiller and Trump were together at that point. Okay, so it was saying, look, it’s. It is plausible based on this.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: That Cohen called Schiller and. And on that call was able to talk to Trump because Keith Schiller could have just handed Trump the phone, the phone, as was their want. That’s how they generally did business, is he would say, let me talk to the boss, and he’d do it. So essentially they said 90 seconds. It’s a reasonable amount of time. And he was right there with, with Trump at the time. So, you know, we can’t say that what Cohen says happened didn’t happen. And Susan Hoffinger, the prosecutor, said to Cohen, is your testimony still that on this call you did at some point speak to Trump and talk about this? And he says, yes. So essentially they dealt with that. Although there’s that question, essentially, that Blanche put in the jury’s mind of, you know, if, if Cohen is not telling the truth about this one call, what else is he lying about? Kind of thing, right?

Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Jim: But that’s all he could do. That’s the, that’s the extent of where the cross examination of Cohen turned into anything at all. One thing that came out was that Cohen admitted to stealing 30 grand from Trump, essentially because he was fed up.

Mark: With, because his bonus.

Jim: Yes.

Mark: That he was going to get for fixing the fix had been slashed. So he. So he kind of got a bit miffed and went, right, ill just steal some by other means.

Jim: That allowed the prosecution then to ask about the Finch consulting money because that 30 grand came out of the money that he was supposed to be paying to Finch, who he then, only ended up paying them 20 grand out of the 50 that was assigned to them in the paperwork, essentially. And that hadn’t come up. They hadn’t talked about what that was for because the defense had opened the door to that, essentially, by questioning him about that money. The prosecution were then allowed to examine what was that money for. And so it came out in court, as Cohen described it, that Redfinch were rigging the pole of, like, who’s the best New York businessman thing for that money. That’s what they were doing, was tweaking their algorithm. Incidentally, Trump didn’t even come top in that poll. He was, he was like. 8th or something. It was just that that only gets 20 grand. Only gets you. 8th yeah. Otherwise he wouldn’t have been on the list of, like, top New York businessmen. So they had to pay them for that. So, yeah, that was the, that was Monday. And then the prosecution rested. That was the end of Cohen’s testimony and the end of the prosecution’s case.

Mark: Didn’t blanche get really angry in the middle of all that stuff? He was kind of yelling, shouting.

Jim: And Cohen. That he lied about the phone call. Yeah, that. But that was the only thing he was able to make any hay out of yell about.

Mark: Yeah, yeah. And at which point I was, I’d be thinking, you know, if it’s like there’s an episode of Quincy or something, or crown court, or you just read the, you cut to the jury and they’d be looking at each other, what the, fuck is he doing? Why is he getting so heated up about it? Because it’s the only point that they had. So he was desperate to hammer it home by making lots of noise about it, literally.

Jim: But on that Monday, defense started their side of the case and it was never going to be lengthy. The defence side really, they had one kind of document witness essentially, who testified to, some phone calls of like, where they came from, that kind of thing, but not substantive at all. And then one fact witness, which is Robert Costello, who was a lawyer, in fact, Giuliani’s lawyer.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And, he wanted to be Michael Cohen’s lawyer, but Cohen didn’t, want him to be his lawyer. He wanted to get his own lawyer that wasn’t affiliated to Trump so much and wasn’t being paid for by Trump or have Trump’s interests at heart. But Costello was really keen on having Cohen as a client and kind of helping him through this quagmire that he found himself in. His main reason for being there, I think from a, ah, defence point of view was that Cohen had told him early on in their kind of negotiations of whether he was going to be his lawyer, that he didn’t have anything on Trump.

Mark: Right.

Jim: Because Costello claims that he said, you’re not the target of this investigation, they’re going after Trump. You roll over on Trump, it’ll be over in a week.

Mark: Right.

Jim: Which is not what happened. I mean, he did, he did testify against Trump and it wasn’t over in a week and he was the target of the investigation and he did go to prison. But, so it was bad advice to start off. But in that process, Costello claims that Cohen said to him that he had nothing on Trump.

Mark: Right.

Jim: Cohen’s argument about that is, well, I didn’t trust him, so I lied to him. Yeah, I’m a liar. You might have noticed.

Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ve got form.

Jim: Yeah. But this is the, the moment that the defense wants you to believe Cohen was telling the truth when he was talking to Robert Costello and said, I’ve got nothing on Trump, that at that point he was telling the truth. Everything else he says he’s an inveterate liardeh.

Mark: Right.

Jim: But that set for that bit, that instance that when he’s talking to fine.

Mark: Upstanding citizen Bob Costello. Yeah, that’s the moment.

Jim: That was what they were going for in terms of having, I think at least that’s what they were going for. But it got overshadowed a little bit by the fact that Bob Costello, unlike Michael Cohen, did not keep his cool.

Mark: No, it struck me that because of his behavior, he was the kind of person that the defense would desperately not want to put on the stand.

Jim: It was an extremely bad idea.

Mark: M in the same way, in the same way as you desperately would not want to put Trump on the stand because he would just huff and tut and roll his eyes and disagree with the. Think that he was in charge of the proceedings and disagree with the judge. Wasn’t there a moment where the judge sent the jury out?

Jim: Yeah, because Costello, when Quan merchant ruled against the defense when they objected about something. Yeah, I think. I can’t remember if it was ruled against the defense or ruled for the prosecution when the prosecution objected. I think actually, right then he said, jeez, quite loudly and, like, looked pissed off. And the judge, kind of looked at him and went, what? What are you doing? And, yeah, he sent the jury out and he said, you will not exclaim when I make a ruling if you disagree with me. You don’t say G’s, you don’t roll your eyes. You just kind of take it. You know, you’re fucking lawyer. You know this.

Mark: Yeah. And you’re a witness. You’re not one of the.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: You’re not. You can’t kind of, have a sidebar meeting.

Jim: Yeah, yeah.

Mark: Or anything. You’re a witness.

Jim: So, yeah, so. But he sent the jury out before. He admonished Costello, and then he was getting the jury back in the. And Costello was, like, staring him down. And so he. Machan stopped the jury from coming back in and said to him, are you, are you staring me down? And then cleared the courtroom of everyone. Like, So press had to leave and everyone, it was just the lawyers were left in there before he basically told him off for that and said that this is, your behavior basically is contemptuous. This is not acceptable. And if you continue to do this, I will have you removed and strike your entire testimony from the record. Wow.

Mark: Wow.

Jim: And in fact, several of his answers were stricken because of objections from prosecutors. So it was things that defense shouldn’t have asked, or he answered in a way that shouldn’t have. That wasn’t an answer to the question.

Mark: Yeah, yeah.

Jim: And all it ended up being was the jury was seeing someone who was acting like an asshole very clearly in favor of Trump and didn’t have Michael Cohen’s best interests at heart when he was offering his services, which is exactly what Cohen had said. Essentially. He said, you know, this, this guy, he’s a Trump guy. I wasn’t interested in having him do this work for me. I didn’t trust him. And he’s just shown that Cohen was.

Mark: A good judge of character, was right in saying so. Yeah. Because that the judge sent the jury out so that they wouldn’t hear that and it wouldn’t be seen to be queering their perception of the witness. So go out because I’ve just got.

Jim: To do some, I’m just gonna have a quick work.

Mark: Quick work. Got do some procedural stuff here. But then when he, when they came back in and he was doing the staring bit, so they saw him being. And they got sent now again, so they, so the point of sending them out to avoid that was in Bob Costello’s favor, but he didn’t do himself any favors. Bye. Misbehaving in a Trump like way.

Jim: Well, and the thing is, they saw him acting in the way that got him admonished. And they also saw him, answering in ways that the prosecution continued to object to and those objections were sustained. And they saw him disrespecting the judge, basically. And kind of juries are, they like judges. The juries kind of see the judge as like the teacher. You know, they’re the person in charge. They’re the ones who, who treat you with respect and tell you what you’re supposed to be doing. They’re the one that you look to, to know what’s going on. And they, they keep everything under control. If someone disrespecting them, that’s, you don’t look on that person kindly. You don’t think that one is one you should be paying attention to. So, yeah, it didn’t go well for the defense, basically. They’re their single wit.

Mark: Exactly. Yeah. And there was all sorts of furore on the pro Trump channels that were saying, you’re all of this kind of objection. So why don’t they just let the witness say the thing or they just let the defense lawyers tell the story. Why don’t they just let them do that? Well, no, because of the rules of manipulate. Yes, because they’re manipulating the truth and they’re doing unsubstantiated stuff because in a court, it’s fairly alien environment. And the judge is the one that’s got the jury’s interests at heart. And certainly in this case, he demonstrated that right from the beginning and said, right, I am going to protect your anonymity because, you know, this is a, it’s potentially dangerous if people know who you are, and I don’t want that to happen to you. So he’s taken charge of the proceedings and taken charge of the safety of the jury. So, of course, they look to him to make sense of this madness, this alien environment. And if they see the judge pulling up dodgy witnesses for their behavior, that’s going to be. Ah, right. The overarching takeaway for them from Costello is he had to be admonished for misbehaving.

Jim: Yeah, yeah.

Mark: Not what he said.

Jim: Yeah. And I mean, the prosecution basically demolished any, whatever was left of Costello on cross examination, with evidence with, like, emails that he’d say, saying stuff like, oh, you know, I can, I can handle Cohen. We can get him, to say what we need to get him to say that kind of stuff, as I’m paraphrasing, but it’s essentially was. It was. All of the stuff that they brought up was like, is this an email you sent? He’s like, yeah, they. It was, it was all bad. It was all showing that he was never on coincide and always looking out for Trump. And on the Tuesday, it lasted, 90 minutes, his testimony and then it was done and defense rested. Trump didn’t. Didn’t testify, which was a shame because it would have been.

Mark: Because he said. He said he was going to.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: There was no way the defense was going to let him do that because that would be even worse than Costello. He said he was going to do it and then he protested that he wasn’t allowed to because there were rules that had put in place. Yeah. And they would want to bring up all of my past. And, and also he said, I don’t mind talking about my past. I’ve had a great past.

Jim: Great past.

Mark: Yes.

Jim: So nobody has a past. Like me.

Mark: Like me. Yeah. Yeah. So, And I could talk about it. Nobody could talk about my past like the way I can talk about my past. But I didn’t want m. But I’m not going to talk about my past, even though it’s a great past, because they would want to talk about. So he said he would testify, then the defense team said, no way on earth are you getting out there. We’ve had Costello, we’re not letting you up there. Jesus.

Jim: Yeah. Yeah. So that was. And that was it. And so on the Tuesday, the defense rested after Costello’s testimony. On Wednesday they had. Oh, no, Wednesday, court doesn’t sit. confused they had a charge conference, which is when the lawyers get together with the judge and decide on jury instructions. The jury charge, which is sometimes called jury instructions, which is. I think it would be read to the jury, but they’ll also get it. but it gives them the instructions for what they need to find, if they are going to find him guilty or not guilty, what the various rules are like, for example, if they need to decide unanimously what law he was trying to cover up when he falsified business records, which, as we understand it, they do not need to unanimously agree on which law he was breaking or covering up in order to. When he falsified the business records. It’s just, if there was a law that if some of them agree that he was covering up one law and some agree that he was covering up a different. That all counts, that’s fine. It’s.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: I heard, an analogy on one of the news shows that if you’re arrested for having cocaine and you say, oh, it’s not cocaine, it’s. It’s heroin, and half the jury believes you, and so it’s in possession of heroin, and half of them think you’re in possession of cocaine, you don’t get off. That’s not. They don’t go like, I can’t agree which drug.

Mark: I.

Jim: So I. Yeah, because I’m not being.

Mark: Yeah, I’m being. I’m here for possession of cocaine, but actually I’m in possession of.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Heroin.

Jim: So. So the fact that. The fact that the jury doesn’t necessarily agree which law you were, you’ve broken, that you were then covering up by falsifying the business records, if they agree. Ah. You falsified business records in order to cover up a different crime.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Then that’s fine. It doesn’t matter. They don’t all agree which crime you are covering up.

Mark: Yeah. Because there’s 13 of them to choose from, aren’t there? Something like that.

Jim: Wow. yeah. So they’ll. They will get those jury instructions after hearing the closing statements. So that will happen this week, is Tuesday, will be closing statements or summary from each side.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: And then probably the jury charge will be read to them on Wednesday, confused. then they’ll retire to make their deliberations and they might come back quickly. They might.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: They might take several days. It might splinter the following week. But there’s, like, a tendency towards Friday where people, like, they’ve been deliberating for a bit and they’re like, oh, we don’t want to, you know, it’s the weekend. We don’t want to come back next week, too.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah.

Jim: So there’s a tendency. There’s a tendency for juries to kind of come to some agreement on a Friday afternoon.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: It’s possible it’ll come back then, but it may not. It may be quicker, it may be into the following week.

Mark: Let’s just go. Yeah, don’t bother. Send us out.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Guilty. Guilty charge.

Jim: You know, yes, it could be. It’s. It’s not to be, acquittal. That would be crazy. It’s not. That’s not happening.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Could be a hung jury. If there’s one person who is absolutely not going to change their mind.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Yeah. Eleven that say guilty. And also, there’s 34 counts in this case.

Mark: Right. I.

Jim: And they have to decide on each of them. So it could be they find him guilty on ten and not guilty on six and. And hang on.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: The remainder.

Mark: Right.

Jim: They could hang on everything. They could find him guilty of everything. They’re not going to find him not guilty of everything.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: But, yeah, if they hang on everything, then my understanding is the first thing that the judge will do is say, go back and keep trying.

Mark: Right.

Jim: And so they’ll have to. They’ll have to deliberate for longer, but if after a few goes at, that they. They say, look, we. We are not going to come to an agreement. There are members of the jury who are just not prepared to change their minds and they’re intransigent, then the jury will hang, essentially. It would be declared a mistrial, and then it’s up to the prosecutors whether they decide to have another do it.

Mark: Yep. Yep. Wow.

Jim: which obviously wouldn’t happen immediately, so that would delay the next steps of it, but, yeah, that would require them to hang on every single count.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: In a way that there’s nothing that can convince them to change their minds about stuff, so. Wow.

Mark: They’re gonna have to have something. Yeah. There’s 34 of them. M. It’s possible if they’ve got one, you know.

Jim: Yeah, yeah, yeah. If there’s one. Magnum who has. Has successfully hidden quite how trumpy they.

Mark: Are, Magnus, the magnitude of their mechanist.

Jim: And they are just like, no, there’s nothing that will convince me.

Mark: Yeah. They’ll, have to wheel out Henry.

Jim: Fonda if they’re the maga. Henry Fonda.

Mark: Yeah. Yeah.

Jim: Then, yeah. Then they could just be saying, yeah, no, not change my mind, and that’s it. So that is possible. Hanging doesn’t happen a lot, but it does happen. But if they did a good job of picking their jury, and picked people who somehow have no opinion on Trump.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: Yes.

Mark: Or have at least got an open mind visa vis looking at the evidence and how it was presented.

Jim: Yeah. Well, the evidence is pretty fucking clear.

Mark: Yes. I mean, the. They’ve got to get past the fact that, and I think the prosecution did a good job of it. They’ve got to get past the fact that the only witness that ties together all the other witness statements in a cogent whole is Cohen. And they’ve got to be convinced that the defense was, ah, unable to prove that he was a liar on the one thing that they wanted him to be a liar about.

Jim: I mean, the thing is, even if they’re inclined not to believe Cohen, most of what he said was backed up by other people who have no reason to lie. Most of them, a lot of them are trump allies.

Mark: Right. Exactly.

Jim: Like hope Hicks and Madeline estate and David Pecker and people like that. So, yeah. yeah, it’s really hard to see how they could think, well, Cohen’s a liar. Therefore, I can dismiss all of the other stuff that other people said he was right about. Yeah, yeah. Only, yeah.

Mark: So that. Yes, and that was. That’s going to be a lot of the closing arguments from the prosecutors, isn’t it? They’re going to say, you know, even if you don’t believe.

Jim: Yeah.

Mark: Going, then it’s all backed up.

Jim: You know, they’ve got paper trails as well. They’ve got Allen Weisselberg’s own handwritten notes on the bank statements.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: You know, they’ve got such a lot of stuff that they can point to and say. Everything that Cohen said that you might question is backed up by something else. It’s backed up by paperwork or by another person saying the same thing independently. So I was a very strong case. Obviously, I’m biased. I wouldn’t get on the jury.

Mark: Yeah.

Jim: But I think it’s a very strong case. And the defense presented one witness who was fucking crazy, which was thoroughly enjoyable.

Mark: Yeah. And finally, some things we really don’t have time to talk about.

Jim: Biden released the video last week challenging Donald to two debates and trolled him into accepting by saying, let’s pick the dates, Donald, I hear you’re free on Wednesdays. Trump reacted like Marty McFly m when someone calls him a coward. And now I’m disappointed Joe didn’t spend m more time over the past few weeks trying to taunt him into testifying in his hush money trial. A few well placed jibes might have seen him sweating in the witness box, trying to avoid perjury traps or questions, as other people call them. Anyway, Donald replied, just tell me when. I’ll be there. Let’s get ready to rumble. Which to Americans evokes boxing emcee M Michael Buffer. But to Brits of a certain age will forever be associated with PJ and Duncan from biker Grove. And Grove far. Ah, funnier if you imagine that’s what he was going for. With two debates agreed, the terms were announced. The first debate will be on CNN on June 27, way earlier than usual, the second on ABC in September. Much to Trump’s chagrin, there’ll be no studio audience, and the moderators will have the ability to cut off each microphone when the other person is talking to avoid the shit show of the 2020 debates. Naturally, this led Lara Trump to proclaim that the debates are rigged so heavily in Biden’s favour, but still claims her father in law would outperform him. Robert Kennedy, meanwhile, is unlikely to qualify for either debate due to some rule about having a snowball’s chance in hell. But of course, he claims he’s being frozen out because the other two are afraid he would win.

Mark: In true, can we use that word when the next word is Trump? In true Trump fashion, that is. It’s a message, not a mistake. And then left in plain sight long enough for the message to sink in and then blame some poor SAP. Elsewhere, truth social posted a video that showed mocked up newspaper headlines, hey, let’s just call it fake news, huh? Of Trump winning the next election. Yada, yada, yada. And the strap line under the heading what’s next for America? Was the phrase strength significantly increased by the creation of a unified Reich? Yeah, for real. And then that was shown again at the end of the video under a headline maga. The video was posted last Monday whilst the Fuhrer, von Schittz and pants himself was in court.

Jim: Ooo.

Mark: It was posted by accident by an unwitting staffer on Monday afternoon, bleated Trump Central, although it was left up online overnight to be sure to catch all the time zones. Biden, of course, pointed out what we’re all thinking. A, unified Reich. That’s not the language of an american president. That’s not the language of any american. It’s the language of, Hitler’s Germany. But no, Caroline Leavitt, a campaign spokesman, said in a statement, this was not a campaign video. It was created by a random account online and reposted by a staffer who clearly didn’t see the word whilst the president was in court. The real extremist is Joe Biden. Yeah, right. Turns out the maker was a turkish graphic designer who sells templates online for $21 and used the Reich statement merely as a placeholder text. Since Assaturk adopted the latin Alphabet for Turkey rather than Cyrillic in 1928, the graphic designer surely would have known about Lorem ipsum dolor sit amit consectator adipisching elite as standard placeholder text so either, he’s taking the piss out of Trump or just following orders. We see you, Donald. We all know what you’re fucking doing, and he’s doing it in plain sight. Wake up people. See the scary clown for what he is before it’s too late.

Jim: Last month, Trump attorney and hair dye model Rudy Giuliani was indicted by an Arizona grand jury for his part in the fake elector scheme in 2020, and the attorney general’s office spent the next three weeks trying to find him to serve him with papers. After successfully hiding out, he decided to taunt them on Twitter on Friday, May 17, with a post that read, if Arizona authorities can’t find me by tomorrow morning, one, they must dismiss the indictment. Two, they must concede that they can’t count votes, along with a photo of him and several other people and party balloons, because he was at his 80th birthday party in Palm beach. As he left the party, he got served with the subpoena but wasn’t very happy about the way it was done, saying later he walked in between a couple of people who didn’t know who he was and he handed me a fold up crumpling piece of paper. It was a crumpling piece of paper. It wasn’t like done stylishly. And for once, I’m with Rudy. I mean, come on. Arizona AG Chris Mays, how often do you get the chance to dress up as a showgirl and hide in a giant cake that gets wheeled into an 80th birthday party, then jump out and yell surprise as you hand America’s mayor a piece of at, ah. The rate he’s being indicted in various states, you’ve probably only got two or three more chances. And that’s if Wisconsin AG Josh call hasn’t already bought his showgirl costume.

Mark: Yeah, you jump out and go in much the same way as Boris and latterly. Sunak got a real awakening when faced with actual people who aren’t sycophants and planted in the audience to ask the right questions. Tory councillors in biscuit workers hi fizz jackets Trump got a real shock when he turned up at the libertarians annual conference in the hope of showing the tv audience that even in enemy territory in Washington, everyone will love him, nominate him and vote for him. The MAGA team tried to sweeten the room. Trump was due to talking by flooding it with Trump supporters in the front rows whilst the legitimate delegates delegates were listening to other speakers elsewhere. On returning to the hall, the libertarian delegates understandably got a bit het up when they found their ticketed and reserved seating was occupied by red hat wearing Trump sycophants. Security were called and things got loud. But not as loud as the incessant, and I mean voluminously incessant booing that befell Trump as he arrives 30 minutes late expecting to face a sea of Trump placards and friendly right wing extremist faces. His usual apricot hue turned more and more burnt carrot slash beetroot as embarrassment gave way to anger and downright insultment of the audience in an attempt to charm them into voting for him. Because basically, he’s a libertarian. Yeah, vote for me if you want to win, or you could get the same 3% you get every four years. Yeah, way to go, donnie, you chump. But man, it was the most deliciously sweet sound to hear. At last, some televised expression of non Maga culture followers vitriol against such a hateful specimen of, I hesitate to say, humanity. Weird though the libertarians are. Ah, they did oust RFK junior in the first round and they booed. Like I can’t get enough of listening.

Jim: To new MAGA conspiracy theory just dropped. According to Steve Bannon, the FBI raid on Mar a Lago, otherwise known as the lawful execution of a search warrant, was an attempted assassination attempt on Donald Trump, who, by the way, wasn’t at Mar a Lago when the FBI was there. This has been confirmed by trustworthy voice of reason Marjorie Taylor Greene, who tweeted the Biden, DOJ and FBI were planning to assassinate President Trump and gave the green light. And of course, Trump joined in with a fundraising email headed in all caps, Biden’s DOJ was authorized to shoot me. You might be thinking, huh? And you’d be right. This all comes from the fact there was a massive dump of previously sealed court motions in the Marago documents case and right wing nutjob slash. One of the stars of Dinesh Dsouza’s police state, Julie Kelly, misunderstood one of the filings and unashamedly shouted her misunderstanding to the rest of the right wing in presumed exchange for money and fame. An FBI policy statement appended to the search warrant laid out the rules for the use of deadly force, the rule being you can use it only when necessary. That is, when the officer believes the subject of such force poses an imminent danger of death or serious physical injury to the officer or another person.

Jim: This is a standard part of search warrants, and it’s designed to limit the use of force, not authorize it. But that’s not as much fun to yell about if your entire self worth is based on the validation you get from idiots begging you to tell them the world is ending. Which is how you get Charlie Kirk telling the idiots they were authorized to kill Trump employees, possibly even assassinate Trump himself to exact their political revenge. And Fox’s Janine Pirro, who definitely knows this is a standard clause saying, my mind as a prosecutor goes to, maybe they wanted the engagement of physical force. Maybe they wanted to come in without FBI, without DOJ, without all of that identifying, so they could engage in deadly physical force. This kind of bullshit leads to bad actions, whether it’s maga assholes taking revenge against the FBI or DOJ on behalf of their God king, or the targets of similar search warrants readying themselves for a gunfight in the mistaken belief that the FBI are ready to attack. As such, Jack Smith is seeking an additional partial gag order to prevent Trump spreading this particular lie. But sadly, he’s far from the only one enjoying the glow of idiot adulation.

Mark: Nice. All that identifying. Let’s not bother with all that identifying. Yeah. Not satisfied with the effectiveness of shouting into the booing faces of non cult members, Trump’s supporters, the american first conservatives election department, sent out mailers recently to voters in the Texas primary. Kind of academic because all of Trump’s opponents for the nomination have dropped out of the contest. In a mashup of Orwell’s fiction novel 1984 and the Godfather, albeit via Monty Python’s Vince and Dinsdale Piranha, the mailer says, we see you haven’t voted yet. Your voting record is public, your neighbours are watching, and we will know if you miss this critical runoff election. We will notify President Trump if you don’t vote, you can’t afford to have that on your record. We will contact you after the election to make sure you voted. Please don’t make us report you to President Trump. We are sending an official list of Republicans who failed to vote in the upcoming runoff to President Trump. Public records show that you have not voted. President Trump will be very disappointed. The mailer appeared just days after Trump says that if he wins the 2024 presidential election, he will consider nominating the anti lgbtq Texas attorney general. Ken Paxton for us. Attorney general okay, well, coincidence nest par Paxton is a Trump loyalist who aided Trump’s bases attempt to overturn his loss in the 2020 presidential election. He also filed several unsuccessful lawsuits challenging Trump’s 2020 election loss in four battleground states, and the Texas Bar association currently has a lawsuit filed against Paxton, for those baseless lawsuits. This is a nice law practice you have here, Mister Paxton. Be ashamed to see anything happen to it. You know what I mean? Oh dear. I appear to have had you struck off. How clumsy of me.

Jim: I do apologise, Florida governor and almost convincing human Ron DeSantis has declared that it’s freedom summer in Florida. It’s a term he stole from the civil rights movement and he’s used it in previous years to promote an annual tax holiday for the state’s residents in July. But this year hes taking freedom even further. Florida Transportation Secretary Jared Purdue is really excited about it, tweeting, thanks to the leadership of Governor Ron DeSantis, Florida continues to be the freest state in the nation. Whats Ron done to make this year the freest ever, you may ask? The answer is hes banned parts of the visible spectrum. Yes, from Memorial Day through to Labour Day, Floridas bridges will be lit up with red, white and blue. But only those colors. No other colors are acceptable during freedom summer, especially if you arrange them in a rainbow configuration. Because if there’s one thing that’s anti freedom, it’s the refraction of light. Also maybe kermit and definitely gay people. So in order to ensure freedom, the state government has mandated exactly which frequencies of light you’re allowed to encounter when crossing water or highways. Yes, technically, freedom summer does include pride month, but I’m sure that’s just a coincidence. And for now at least, Florida’s LGBTQ community are perfectly free to leave Florida and be proud somewhere else. Because nowhere is freer than Florida. God damn.

Mark: It doesn’t rain and is sunny immediately.

Jim: Afterwards in Florida in summer. It never rains in Florida in summer. No. Every afternoon at about four.

Mark: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. Yeah. Fucking finally, on Wednesday last week, Sunak called a general election for July 4. It took some people by surprise. So much so that, those mp’s who blindly thought when they said they wouldn’t be standing at the next election, that they’d have a paid summer holiday to look forward to for a bit. Myth this wasn’t part of the plan. So miffed were they? It seems they forced Sunak to announce the thing. Not indoors in the nice, warm, dry, 1.8 million pressed briefing room built during COVID But out in the street in the pouring rain, drowned rat and sinking ship metaphors continued when he hit the campaign trail the next day by visiting the dockyard that built the Titanic and was pictured in his jet standing beneath the exit sign and outside of Morrison’s supermarket, where the photographer neatly shot him at the podium, ensuring Sunak’s head obscured the middle ris in the sign, leaving just a great big moron in full view. Despite Michael’s slysy tove go stabbing yet another leader in the back and announcing he’d be standing down in the loudest signal yet that the Tories are doomed, Sunak has guaranteed certain victory by saying he’d bring back national service for 18 year olds in order to expose the youth to a wide variety of racial and cultural backgrounds. You know, the very thing that Tory membership deemed to have damaged british society, thereby actually alienating both the youth vote and those people over 80 who, having endured national service, think hanging’s too good for the youth of today. Give it a week, I reckon, and dad will be back soon. Meanwhile, Jeremy Corbyn is standing as an independent candidate in the constituency of Islington north, where he’s been the incumbent mp for 40 years against the very Labour party he was leader of a mere four years ago. Although 40 years ago, he was the Labour upstart, standing against the incumbent independent Labour candidate, Michael O’Halloran. All Starman needs to do now is to continue to tightrope between not saying anything too progressive and frightening Tory voters. Nor too Tory and scare off progressive voters for a few more weeks before landsliding into power, nationalizing water, rail, energy, taxing the rich till their pipsqueak to fund school, defense and health and rejoin the EU, all by the end of play on July 5. Well, we live in hope.

Jim: I just. What the fuck is the national service thing?

Mark: What is. What can we do to just claw back something from the far right? It’s a very reform kind of, you know, Brexit party.

Jim: It’s aimed specifically at, like, Al Murray, the pub landlord. Yes, it’s him and Nigel Farage and Jeremy Clarkson. They’ll all definitely vote for Rick, but, yeah, what, like, does. Does he not care about any youth voting for him at all? They’ve already said they’ve already made student ids. Not one of the things you’re allowed to use as photo id. Yeah, but, yeah, that I thought was so that they didn’t vote at all, not so that they m. Make an effort to get photo id so they can specifically vote against him.

Mark: Yeah, they definitely will now.

Jim: Fuck. Well, that’s all the bad arguments of faulty reasoning we have time for this week. You’ll find the show show notes@fallacioustrump.com and if you hear Trump say something stupid and want to ask if it’s a fallacy our contact details are on the contact page.

Mark: If you think we use a fallacy ourselves, let us know. And if you’ve had a good time, please give us a review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get podcasts. Or simply tell one other person in person about how much they’d like our podcast and you can support the show@patreon.com. ftrump just like our newest patron, Sharon Robinson, our, strawman level patrons, Colleen Lyella, Richard Thunder Hopkins, Will M. Scott, Ozzy on bank, Laura Tomsick, Schmootz Spark Nike, and Amber Rbcannon, who told us when we met her at QED, we could just call her Amber, though another listener recognized her at QED last year because we keep reading our full name all the time. And our true Scotsman level patrons, Renee Zed, Melissa Saitek, Stephen Bickel, Janet Yueta, Andrew hall, and our top patron, Kaz, to thank you so much for your continued and new patronage. It’s really very much appreciated. Thank you.

Jim: And you can connect with those awesome people as well as us and other listeners in the Facebook group@facebook.com.

Mark: Groups Felacioustrump all music is by the outbursts and was used with permission. So until next time on Felicia Strump, we’ll leave the last word to the Donald. That’s right, go home to mommy. Bye bye.