21 Jan Fault as Virtue – FT#166
Show Notes
The Fault as Virtue Fallacy occurs when someone disingenuously reframes a flaw in themselves or a situation as a good thing to support their argument.
Trump
We started out by discussing Trump claiming not paying taxes makes him smart:
Then we looked at Trump claiming his history of corruption is a good thing:
And finally we talked about Trump puting a positive spin on Birtherism:
Mark’s British Politics Corner
Mark talked about Liz Truss’s claim that she was right all along:
He followed that up by talking about Nadine Dorries making excuses for Partygate
Then he talked about Angela Rayner reframing a loss as a win:
And he finished with this example of a Rishi Sunak fan fetishizing Rishi’s immense wealth:
Fallacy in the Wild
In the Fallacy in the Wild we looked at this clip from Futurama:
Then we discussed this clip from Annie Hall:
And we finished up with this clip from Better Call Saul:
Fake News
Here are the statements from this week’s Fake News game:
- We will settle the horrible war in Ukraine very quickly. We have to do it, and I will get it done in a very short period of time. Frankly, it should never have happened. It would never have happened if I was your president. People are being shot and really killed in numbers nobody’s ever seen. Even a mediocre deal maker could have stopped it. And the time to stop it was before it got started. I spoke to Vladimir Putin. I told him very strongly not to even think about doing anything. And he didn’t do it until he saw how weak America was under Sleepy Joe.
- I don’t know what it is with electric – this guy loves electric. We’re going to be ending the electric car mandate quickly, by the way. This guy loves electric and he… we don’t have enough electricity, and then we have AI where we need more, and he wants to get… he wants everybody to have an electric heater instead of a gas heater. Gas heater is much less expensive, the heat is much better. It’s a much better heat. As the expression goes, you don’t itch. Does anybody have a heater where you go and you scratch and that’s what they want you to have.
- The 625 million acres – people can’t realize, that’s like… the whole ocean. Take an acre. You know, an acre. You have a house on a half an acre, or a quarter of an acre, or an acre. If you have an acre you have a big… deal. Now you multiply that by 625 million acres. It’s like – feels like the whole ocean. And that’s our strength, you know, people can say we manufacture. We don’t manufacture. Thing we have, we have oil and gas – more than anybody in the world and we’re going to have more of it too
Mark got it right this week, and is on 51%!
Day One is not a logical fallacy
We talked about some of the crazy shit Trump promised to do on day one.
The stories we really didn’t have time to talk about
- Well, Trump got sentenced for his 34 felony convictions, and continued his 78 year run of facing absolutely no consequences for anything he’s ever done because his bought-and-paid-for Supreme Court helped him run out the clock. I’m actually upset that Judge Merchan’s options didn’t extend to the ability to order a literal slap on the wrist for Trump because that would have been far more punishment than the unconditional discharge he imposed. To be clear, the reason Trump got away with it is that Non-MAGA Americans continue to think that integrity matters, and the right thing to do is to allow Trump to begin his second term without a sentence hanging over him, to theoretically be imposed when (and if) he leaves office in four years. Which, of course, he would find some way to dodge anyway. Despite getting away scot free, Trump insisted “We’re going to appeal anyway, just psychologically, because frankly, it’s a disgrace”. I’m not sure how you appeal psychologically, but I’m sure the calibre of lawyers Trump employs will be able to figure it out. Those lawyers weren’t able to prevent Special Counsel Jack Smith from releasing his report on the January 6th case, however. I’ve no idea why Trump tried so hard to stop it, since none of his followers are going to read it and those of us who have been paying attention already know almost all of the contents. We did learn that Smith considered charging Trump with “incitement to insurrection” but that they hadn’t developed “direct evidence – such as an explicit admission or communication with co-conspirators – of Mr. Trump’s subjective intent to cause the full scope of the violence that occurred on January 6.” Ultimately, they decided they already had plenty of other powerful charges that they could prove more easily. We also learned that the various unnamed, unindicted co-conspirators mentioned in Trump’s indictment were still in danger of being indicted all the way until Trump won the election. Those six, including Giuliani, John Eastman, and Sidney Powell, could theoretically still face prosecution but they won’t because *gestures broadly at everything*. On the plus side, The last three years have been great practice for Jack Smith for when he is appointed as Special Counsel again in 2029 to look into all the new crimes Trump will have committed by then.
- Before we got the turncoat horror JD “Trump is America’s Hitler” Vance as VP we nearly got Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo cos “She was great with the big-donor Wall Street types and she knew how to do TV, Trump told his team,” as Politico’s Alex Isenstadt reports in his forthcoming book Revenge: The Inside Story of Trump’s Return to Power. You remember Bartiromo? She was one of the most prominent defenders of Trump’s false assertions that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him due to “rigged” voting machines. Her amplification of these baseless election conspiracy theories eventually resulted in Fox News paying out $787.5 million to settle a defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems. I guess if your favourite reporter on your favourite channel can cost your favourite channel ¾ of billion dollars and Tucker Carlson’s job she can’t be all bad!! I mean what could possibly have gone wrong Trump is such an astute judge of business character right! Despite her obsequiousness and mailing the softball questions to Trump’s team ahead of any and all the interviews she held with him, eventually, the president-elect’s campaign team convinced him to move on as there “was no time to vet Bartiromo,” and they had spent months looking at other candidates. And as incoming White House communications director Steven Cheung stated. “Vice President-elect Vance was the perfect choice to be President Trump’s running mate.” And I really don’t know what to make of that!
- Trump has handed out some pretty weird Ambassadorships this time round, putting clinically insane former Senate candidate Herschel Walker in charge of America’s relations with the Bahamas, and leaving France to Jared Kushner’s tax-evading, witness-tampering, prostitute-hiring-to-seduce-his-brother-in-law-filming-them-having-sex-and-sending-the-tape-to-his-sister, dad Charles. He also made Kimberley Guilfoyle Ambassador to Greece, immediately after her relationship with Don Jr ended, which is probably the nicest thing he’s ever done for one of his children. However, the weirdest Ambassador announcement so far came out last week, when Trump appointed Mel Gibson, Jon Voight and Sylvester Stallone, Special Ambassadors to Hollywood. He claimed in a Truth Social post that the purpose of this is “bringing Hollywood, which has lost much business over the last four years to Foreign Countries, BACK—BIGGER, BETTER, AND STRONGER THAN EVER BEFORE. These three very talented people will be my eyes and ears, and I will get done what they suggest.” Quite what the fuck this will result in is anybody’s guess. I assume there will be tariffs imposed on Warner Brothers if they don’t greenlight a remake of Three Men and a Baby starring Messrs Voight, Gibson and Stallone as Grandpas tasked with looking after a baby who was abandoned by her woke leftist mother who was forced to carry the baby to term after her attempt to use abortion as birth control was foiled by Trump himself, who will appear in a cameo enforcing the laws of New California, which Republicans recently took back after the first ever fair election which resulted in 98% of voting-age Democrats being prosecuted for voter fraud. I mean, I’m not saying I wouldn’t watch it…
- Donald Trump Jr. was sent to Greenland – no don’t cheer and whoop and jump for joy just yet – it’s not permanent, he came back. It was all part of the thing to convince – oh god I don’t know! the people to whom Don Snr promised he’d bring down the price of eggs and bacon perhaps? I really don’t know – to convince someone or other that the Greenlanders themselves were all for having America buy, invade or annex Greenland cos they were all pissed off and under-served and keen to make Greenland Greener Again or something. And sure enough several genuine-looking Greenlandic people duly said as much to people pointing cameras at them while Don Jr was making “yeah you see!” gestures. Of course Charlie Kirk was there – and of course he was stoked to be in the presence of another useless Trump offspring and more than happy to be in photos with maga-hat wearing Greenlanders inviting America’s Hitler to invade. Only trouble is the MAGA cohort reportedly rounded up homeless people from the area—including one person from under a bridge—promising them a meal at the Hotel Hans Egede in exchange for their participation in the pro-Trump photo circuit. Despite describing the Greenlandic participants as “the local community in Nuuk,” several local sources that spoke with Denmark’s DR News described the photographed individuals as “homeless and socially disadvantaged” people who are often outside the supermarket directly across from the hotel where the Trump event was held. I watched Hypernormalisation again this week and the point put forward by Adam Curtis is that the powers that be are supposedly in total control of the way we see things – part of the problem for Trump is that Denmark and Europe is a bit older and more savvy than Trump and his target audience, and over the millenia have set a lot of store by actual facts rather than stupid wishes. Oh do you think Don Jr thought he was going to where Wicked was shot and that everyone was going to be Green? And magic wands work?
- Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is very very bad at his job. I know, we’re supposed to be doing news in this part of the show, and that sure as fuck isn’t news to anyone, but even someone as bad at the job as Johnson must understand that with a majority as slim as his, you don’t want to piss off any of your own members. So he must have a pretty good reason for summarily firing Ohio Congressman Mike Turner as Head of the House Intelligence Committee. If Johnson does have a good reason for it, he’s not saying. When asked his rationale, he said “It’s a new Congress. We just need fresh horses in some of these places, but I’m a Mike Turner fan. He’s done a great job.” Depending on who you ask, there might be other reasons. Turner says that when Johnson explained his decision he cited “concerns from Mar-a-Lago”, but Politico claims that Johnson didn’t obsequiously obey Trump, he obsequiously obeyed the hard right factions of the party who disagree with Turner’s support for Ukraine aid and for surveillance powers for Intelligence Agencies. Either way, while Turner isn’t exactly popular within his party, he does have some close allies, and Mike Johnson will need every single Republican vote in order to get any legislation through in the next few months, so it’s not a great time to make an enemy. Not that it matters really – once the confirmation hearings are done, Johnson will accidentally use a pronoun and get ejected in favor of several months of new Speaker election shenanigans.
- In the manner of acting on behalf of some kind of dictator-for-a-day, or a fragile, needy narcissistic despot perhaps, incoming senior Trump administration officials have begun questioning career civil servants who work on the White House National Security Council about who they voted for in the 2024 election, their political contributions and whether they have made social media posts that could be considered incriminating by President-elect Donald Trump’s team. McCarthyite UnAmerican Activities anyone? Trump’s pick for national security adviser, Florida Rep. Mike Waltz, in recent days publicly signaled his intention to get rid of all nonpolitical appointees and career intelligence officials serving on the NSC by Inauguration Day to ensure the council is staffed with those who support Trump’s agenda. At a stroke this will of course denude the administration of considerable expertise and institutional knowledge – hey but what the hell nobody knows more about the Middle East and Ukraine and Sudan and Yemen and Iran than Trump anyway! And with all those never-Trumpers out the way there’ll be a lot more posts for yes-people who a) won’t have a clue and most importantly b) won’t disagree – just how Uncle Joe Stalin, sorry Donald J Trump likes it. White House Security Adviser Jake Sullivan noted when Biden took office in 2021, he inherited most of his NSC staff from the outgoing Trump administration.“Those folks were awesome,” Sullivan said. “They were really good.” Which just makes me go huh! Are these then the people Trump now wants to get rid of? I guess we all see where Trump’s coming from though cos during his first term two career military officers detailed to the NSC raised their concerns about Trump’s 2019 call to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in which the president sought an investigation of Biden and his son Hunter. Which as we know led to Trump’s first impeachment. Remind me again; is it three impeaches and you’re out?
- One of the fun things about being right wing, I imagine, is finding new things to be outraged about. Tiny-faced idiot Charlie Kirk used to just wait for more important outrage manufacturers like Tucker Carlson to tell him what to be upset about, and would then wring his hands over the lack of clear genitalia on a Mr Potato Head or the toned-down sexual appeal of the M&M mascots until the well ran dry. With Tucker now downgraded from a primetime Fox News host to a cut-rate Dr Jacobi on Twitter, massive-headed community-college-dropout Kirk needs to make up his own reasons to cry, and he’s not very good at it. His latest, nestled among various conspiracy theories about the California wildfires, is that ASL interpreters make it hard for him to concentrate. On his eponymously titled show, he said “Can we please just go away with half the screen during these emergency briefings to the sign language interpreters? I have nothing against, obviously, people that cannot hear, but there’s closed captioning. I mean, this is just over the top. We can’t do this. We gotta get back to how it used to be. It’s just, oh, it’s just too much. It’s a distraction is what it is. The reason is they do these emergency briefings for fires or terrorist attacks, and you’re looking at this and you’re not listening. I don’t like it.” Yeah, fuck deaf people, I find it slightly harder to pay attention to what people are saying so you should be made to rely on the error-prone live-captioning keeping up with everything that’s being said, and miss out on the emphasis, tone, and emotion that can’t be conveyed in text, but is integral to ASL. Yeah, let’s Make America Great Again by getting rid of this woke attempt to pander to a tiny proportion of Americans just because it’s required by the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 which was signed by radical leftist George H W Bush. And no, Charlie, closed captioning isn’t enough, because aside from all the stuff I’ve already mentioned, some people don’t speak English, and ASL is not just a flappy arm version of English, but it’s own unique language which is understood by half a million Americans. You can’t see me right now, but I’m signing something extremely rude about Charlie Kirk that even the explicit tag on Apple podcasts wouldn’t cover.
- In amongst the usual bat-shittery that is British politics outside of the Labour party, inside the Labour Party Treasury minister Tulip Siddiqi resigned cos of possible links to her aunt who was ousted last year as Bangladesh’s prime minister. Whilst standards adviser Sir Laurie Magnus, to whom Tulip referred herself, said he had “not identified evidence of improprieties” but said it was “regrettable” that Siddiq had not been more alert to the “potential reputational risks” of the ties to her aunt. Which to my ears resignation thus sounds quite a noble thing to have done considering the size of the distance from actual wrongdoing. Meanwhile of course those very much closer to actual wrongdoing – Boris and Truss are flogging volumes of bound toilet paper in the form of biographies (I genuinely got a roll of Boris toilet paper for christmas – such a joy to use!) and the Tory party and the Reform party are continuing to have a go at Rachel Reeves fiscal feasibility as Chancellor. She’s at fault as the pound apparently slumps a bit more against the dollar – probably more to do with market anticipation of trammels being undone by Trump than anything Reeves is doing, and the cost of borrowing by the government remaining high – probably more to do with Liz Truss than with anything Reeves is doing to fill the hole left by said Lettuce! Even the Independent newspaper reported that more millionaires than ever are leaving Britain under this government than before, not really a problem seeing as they are the ones that did all they could to not pay tax in the UK anyway by registering their businesses offshore. The actual problem is that millionaires like Sunak and Farage remain in the UK especially since the latter promised that he would leave if Brexit failed and yet somehow he’s the only one still touting that it’s been a success and we should all move on! Well after you Nige, after you!
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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:
Fault as Virtue – FT#166 Transcript
Jim: Hello, and welcome to Fallacious Trump, the podcast where we use the insane ramblings of Trump to the revenge 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 rather depressed week. His fault as virtue. Yeah.
Jim: A fairly depressed four years.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: four plus. Who knows? Who knows whether it’ll lend in for you.
Mark: Yeah. Quite good, Trump to the range. This time’s even more personal.
Jim: Yeah, yeah.
Mark: So ye.
Jim: Yeah. Falters virtue.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: Is when someone kind of disingenuously reframes a flaw in either a situation or in their personality as actually, if you think about it, a positive when you.
Mark: Come to think of it. Yeah, yeah.
Jim: It works for their audience because of cognitive dissonance, basically, because holding multiple ideas in your head that compete with each other is uncomfortable psychologically. And so if people. Let’s take Trump as an example, people who like Trump, if they hear negative things about him, those two things, or I like him, but I’ve heard this bad thing. Yeah, that’s uncomfortable. So if you reframe that undesirable thing as actually a good thing, they’re like, oh, yeah, it’s a plus, actually, now I come to think of it. So.
Mark: So you can. You can hold both of those things.
Jim: Yeah. Reduces that cognitive dissonance, makes you feel all happy again.
Mark: Yeah, yeah.
Jim: And it works. Yeah, Quite easily to do that. So they are prepared to accept any old shit that makes, a bad thing actually sound like a good thing.
Mark: Yeah. Because they haven’t got to do the work then.
Jim: Yeah, yeah.
Mark: As well. That’s the other thing, isn’t it? That certainly when Trump does it, he kind of takes care of the. Of the thought process. He said, yeah, stick with me, kid. I’ll do all the thinking for you.
Jim: Yeah, yeah.
Mark: Y. I’m got to worry. You no longer have to question him.
Jim: Yes.
Mark: You’re. You’re freed of that because you.
Jim: Because that’s what they want already. Like, they’re looking for positive things, positive traits, good things. And so the negative thing, if it can be turned into a good thing, then it fits into their, the thing they’re looking for anyway. The thing they want to believe.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: So it’s easier to believe. So our, first example from Trump is in his first debate with Hillary, right. Where she talked about the fact that he didn’t really pay any federal income taxes for quite a while.
Hillary Clinton: Or maybe he doesn’t want the American people, all of you watching tonight, to know that he’s paid nothing in federal taxes because the only years that anybody has ever seen were a couple of. Years when he had to turn them. Over to state authorities when he was trying to get a casino license. And they showed he didn’t pay any federal income tax.
Donald Trump: So that makes me smart.
Hillary Clinton: Zero. That means zero for troops, zero for vets, zero for schools or health.
Jim: So she’s making quite a good point, I would say, that you, you little workers who like him, you have to pay your income taxes.
Mark: Y.
Jim: You have to pay your state taxes and your federal income taxes and, and those go to pay for public services that you might actually then benefit from. And even if you don’t, then other people are paying for the ones you do benefit from as well as you and all that kind of stuff. Ye. but he just gets away with it. He didn’t do it. He just, yeah, couldn’t be bothered, basically. And that’s not a good thing. But, but he cuts through all of that with that makes me smart because I, you know, I was able to get away with it.
Mark: Yes. That was his entire. So you. So everybody says, aha. And in fact, we’ve heard people say that since. Yeah, he’s a smart guy. He worked out a way of not having to pay any tax and think. No, what it does is make you of, tax avoider and commit fraud. And, and we know all that because of, because of. We’ve. We’ve read every single book about him. You know, all of the, the reframing of the Trump management companies such that, you know, he inherited the skills and the legitimacy to do that from his dad.
Jim: Absolutely. Yeah.
Mark: That’that’s. How he made his fortune. That’s because his dad gave it to him as a tax dodge. That.
Jim: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Mark: That makes me smart. Yeah.
Jim: So our second example is when it was pointed out in the Republican, primary debate, same, same election, 2016 election, that, he was actually
00:05:00
Jim: pretty corrupt in terms of, the money that he gave to politicians and the influence that he Bought y by doing that.
Ted Cruz: Donald told you for 40 years he’s been sitting at that table using his money to buy influence, supporting liberal Democrats like Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, but also supporting the Republican establishment and funding their effort to crush the Tea Party. And now his argument is after four decades of being part of that influence mining, after Hillary Clinton spending decades being part of that influence selling that suddenly he will change. But the interesting point is tonight he hasn’t pointed to a single special interest he’s willing to take on. He didn’t take on Wall street when he supported the TARP bailout in Wall Street. He won’t take on ethanol. And my campaign by contrast was funded by 1.1 million contributions all over this country. I want to go toister Trump $2 at TedCruz.org.ator that’s who you got to be accountable to the people.
Donald Trump: Ted was given to PACs, I mean packs, you know. These super PACs are a disaster by the way folks. Very corrupt. It’s going to lead to lots of disasters. But ted has super PACs and you have to look at the people that are giving to those super PACs. Number one. It’s very important to do that. there is total control of the candidates. I know it better than anybody that probably ever lived and I will tell you this. I know the system far better than anybody else and I know the system is broken. And I’m the one because I know it so well because I was on both sides of it. I was on the other side all my life and I’ve always made large contributions and frankly I know the system better than anybody else and I’m the only one up here that’s going to be able to fix that system because that system is wrong.
Mark: So basically he’s the poacher turned game.
Jim: Absolutely. Yeah. Because he knows about or how all of these, how you get round the law. Yeah, he knows where the loopholes are, and therefore how to close them up. Not that he did or had ever had any intention to do so.
Mark: Yeah, yeah. And we’ve seen constestant, examples of that because he still does it.
Jim: Yeah. And Democrats have campaigned on campaign finance reform.
Mark: Yah.
Jim: On many occasions. You know, he was doing the sloganring of draining the swamp and stuff like that and never did anything.
Mark: No.
Jim: About campaign finance or super PACs or you know, money influencing politics. Because if he had we wouldn’t be in a situation where the richest man in the world is part of basically bought a quasi government role.
Mark: Yeah. It’s A quango, isn’t it? Yeah, exactly.
Jim: And I, at no point do I want to be, aligned in any way with Ted Cruz.
Mark: Yes, I know.
Jim: That was the kind y sort of.
Mark: That uncanny valley kind of thing as he’s just going o no, I’m almost agreeing. He’s almost, almost making sense as a human being, but not quite.
Jim: Yeah, that’s cognitive dissonance for you.
Mark: Ye.
Jim: So our third example is from the debate with Hillary again.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: And he was asked about the fact that he did all the birtherism stuff and questioned Obama’s citizenship.
Lester Holt: We’re talking about racial healing in this segment. What do you say to Americans of color?
Donald Trump: Well, it was very. I say nothing. I say nothing because I was able to get him to produce it. He should have produced it a long time before. I say nothing. But let me just tell you, when you talk about healing, I think that I’ve developed very, very good relationships over the last little while with the African American community. I think you can see that. And I feel that they really wanted me to come to that conclusion. And I think I did a great job in a great service, not only for the country, but even for the president in getting him to produce his bur.
Jim: Secretary Clinton. So, yeah, it was, it was a service for Obama constantly questioning whether he was actually born in Kenya and the.
Mark: Entire black, American y citizenry kind of go, yeah, wadering all this time.
Jim: He did a great job.
Mark: He did do a good job.
Jim: They had questions.
Mark: Oh, God, yeah.
Jim: You know, you only questions that he raised and pushed repeatedly. Yeah, but the questions were out there and he got the answer to the.
Mark: Question as, as a consequent. Yeah, people. I’ve heard people say, yeah, yeah, it was you all along. We’ve got four more years of this.
Boris Johnson: And now is the time, I think. For Mark’s British politics corner.
Mark: the thing is, in British politics, probably because it’s an older, it’s like 160 years older than America. They’ve learned not to fall into this trap. And so the examples that, would have been available, there was no recording devices at the time. So I couldn’t find, you know, Henry the Eighth saying anything. So what I’m trying to say is that the Brits are
00:10:00
Mark: a little bit more canny about it, unless they are completely tonto and got massive chips on their shoulders and can’t bear the fact that they were the ones that brought their own downfall to bear. We’re talking about l Trust, of course. And so this is Liz trust and the trust qua mini budget. And here is Liz Trust being interviewed by unheard and unheard spe aboutl h e r d to say we’re not along with the herd. We’re going to interview people that are slightly outside of thing and then give them a really soft ball bloody interview. So anyway, here’s the clip of her talking about the mini budget which brought about her downfall and was an abject failure.
Liz Truss: What they really don’t like about me is that I challenge the orthodoxy. And you know, I stand by that. I think I was right to do it. I think if the measures in the. Mini budget had been in place today, such as allowing fracking, such as not. Raising corporation tax, such as allowing duty free shopping, such as abolishing the top tax rate, I think the British economy would be in a better position and. I absolutely stand by that.
Mark: and also the bank of England not having to ensure there wasn’t a run on the pound and all the pension funds buying lots of guilt if that hadn’t happened. So basically she’s saying, yeah, I didn’t trash the economy for my UN peer reviewed by the Office of Budget Responsibility, which makes you think perhaps this was a budget irresponsibility in doing that. What I was doing, actually I was right because what I was doing was challenging the orthodoxy. So it wasn’t about trashing the economy. What she was saying is the orthodoxy of the economy which is to keep everything stable.
Jim: Yeah, the one that’s been working, not lose money through trial and error over hundreds and hundreds of years.
Mark: Yeah. And not at least put forward by Thatcher, erstwhile cosplay hero. Yeah, that kind of the monetarist Keynesian market forces thing. Something about the stability of the international markets and all that kind of stuff. Yeah, that orthodoxy. I didn’t fail, I succeeded in challenging the orthodoxy. She doesn’t go on to say which was the wrong thing to do. She said I was right to do that. But not without mortgage repayments, thank you very much. Not with, without pensions, not with our you know, inflation rate. Do it in your own time, do with your own money. Okay, so example two, another person that thinks they’ve done no wrong whatsoever, never mind party gate, look how hard you are working. Boris Johnson and his number one fan, Nadine Dories. God, I had to watch a lot of Nadine Doriries. She is the number one apologist for Boris and in a similar kind of phrased question, what was it that first attracted you to theairport? Daniel? It’s in the question that she Poses is the reframing of Boris’abject failure to read the nation’s room. She reframes him as a hero.
Nadine Dorries: Do you think it was wrong of you to focus all your attention on making sure we made the vaccine, we delivered the vaccine, we were one of the first countries to live restrictions or do you think you should be prowling the corridors of 10 Downing street in that warrent of officers, checking up on 250 employees and asking them what they were doing on the Friday nights when you checkers.
Boris Johnson: What I would say is that we all thought what, what we were doing, or certainly I thought what we were doing was within the rules. And what we certainly thought was we were working blindingly hard on, some massive priorities for, for the country.
Mark: The fact he’s m so hesitant in about finding that she says she’s. What he said completely lucidly. You know, she’s got it written down obviously, but it’s kind of saying, do you think you were wrong to concentrate on sorting out there should just. I mean, it’s a very difficult question to answer because it’s a bit like, when did you stop beating’s a.
Jim: Complex question fallacy built in.
Mark: Yes, exactly. Yeah, yeah.
Jim: Do you think you were wrong to do all the right things or do you think, yah, you should straw man yesly?
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: Because nobody was saying Boris should have been going door to door through Whitehall and the Houses of Parliament to check up and make sure no one was partying. The fact is he created a system where they were partying with him in rooms where he was drinking champagne.
Mark: Yeah, exactly.
Jim: During lockdown that he well knew about.
Mark: Following on from the fact that
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Mark: despite him saying, well, we thought we were doing it between the rules. What? You know, within the rules. No, between the rules is right. Yeah, within the rules. No, you came up with the bugg rules.
Jim: He’s fucking, on screen asking questions in a champagne fueled quiz.
Mark: Yes. Yeah. And then somebody after us says, yeah, what do we say? Do we tell him it’s cheese and wine who then had to get ousted because she’d given the game away?
Jim: Yeah. Then someone else going, don’t film this.
Mark: Yeah, exactly. And there are so many apologists that all point to, you know, never mind the party gate, Never mind the 232,000 people that lost their lives because we dithered and fucked about. Let’s talk about the Astrazeneca and then let’s talk about the fact that we did Brexit, which meant we could do Astrazeneca which had. Had nothing to do with Brexit. And they keep, keep doing that and keep you punting the same lies. And the nice thing about that interview, it’s just about the time of the Sue Gray report going on. So he’s about to be voted off and he looks the scruffiest he’s ever done, apart from his artfully towled hair, which you can see him doing as he’s coming down the corridor to go on. He’s got a half a bit of beard where he’s forgot to shave him hisself and there’s a little bit sticking out just under his nose. He looks like he’s woken up in a ditch. Probably has on the way back from a party. Okay, anyway, so example three, this was the one that kind of caught my eye first of all, before I had to go off into the rabbit hole of Dean Doris. No, that doesn’t sound right. Every time there’s an election or a by election, people come on to the airwaves representing the party that has lost and they always without fail reframe that loss as some kind of a win. And this example is Angela Rayr who, who was the then deputy shadow leader, now deputy leader and there were three by elections and each of the parties won one of them. This was in July following Boris resignation and his constituency, Boris s constituency of Oxbrfordge and South Rice. It was held by the Tories following on from the confused ultra low emissions zone exclusion zone that Saiddi Khan was going to extend out to Uxbridge out to West London and he’s the Labour mayor and the labor candidate in Oxford Souths. It was for the USS and then got wind of the fact that nobody liked it and then was against the Ules. So stmer was against the Ules, so consequently they didn’t win the seat. However, this is what Angela said.
Angela Rayner: Well, it’s clear that you know, u le was an issue on the door but we, you know, this was a safe Tory seat that in 1997 with our landslide victory, we didn’t gain it then. So I think it’s a bigger pitchure than that. We ran the tourries very close, within 500 votes.
Mark: So it was a win. They got them down to 500 votes which is pretty good because the guy that did win got less or just about half as many votes as Johnson had got in 2019. So this is 2023. Johnson had got 26,000 odd and Steve Tuckwell got 13,000 odd even though the electorate only dropped from 75,000 to 69,000. So they lost a lot of seats. This was Boris constituency. He was a disgraced PM. He’d been recommended, to be suspended for 90 days, which would have forced a reelect in his seat or a recall in his seat. But he chose the resign. Labor should have just won it. They did the confused thing where they kind of thought, well we ought to agree with the uss thing. And then they been regretting it ever since. And in August after this election in July sa he car did extend you Les and in 2024, labor won the seat with 500. Anyway, so it kind of think what it was a wasted opportunity. But you know, never let a failure fail to be a win, I guess. Yeah. And finally this one is just brilliant. So this was the Tory party members at the Tory party conference in October 2023 in Manchester. So not long after you would have been there for qed Right?
Jim: Yeah.
Mark: So here is somebody interviewing a Tory party member about whether Sunak is a good leader and why.
Rishi fan: Rishi Sunak is the perfect man for the job because he himself is an entrepreneur billionaire, who has
00:20:00
Rishi fan: no need to do the job. But he has chosen to do the job. And for that we are very grateful. For him and his wife. She is such an amazing person. They are so wealthy and they live such a normal life, which is. M. Which makes them a credit to humanity.
Mark: There’s no words after that. That’s, that’s just brilliant. It’s great because millionair multi millionaires soon out not. Not out of touch at all. Yeah, he’s, he’s a credit to humanity.
Jim: Wow.
Mark: Yeah. When you try your best but you.
Jim: Don’T succeed.
Mark: When you get what you want but you’re not what we need and we feel so tired but there’s.
Jim: No release.
Mark: Stuck with you focus.
Jim: And.
Mark: The lies come streaming out your face when you lose something you get replaced could kill us all Lies will gain you votes and the fire seas are out there in the wild Live stream out your face comes you will love your m face I stream out your face Fire lies will gain you votes and the fire malous are out there in the wild Coldplay there of course with fix you.
Jim: And in the fallantacyies of the wild we like to talk about the fantacy of the week from non political perspective. And our first example this week comes from Futurama. Yes, this is an episode that plays a little bit on Covid. I think, in fact this is kind of saying that Covid is still going in the year, 3000 or whatever. Right. but they’ve got a vaccine and.
Mark: Right.
Jim: so Professor Farnsworth and his arch rival are both giving a, press conference about their differing vaccines and the benefits or potential side effects of them.
Scoop Chang: Dr. Wenstrom, what do you say to report your vaccine has the side effect of magnetism?
Dr Wernstrom: That’s a feature, not a bug. Ool,
Linda van Schoonhoven: Linda. Morbo and Linda, according to an anonymous Internet post, your anti anger vaccine causes sterility. Care to comment?
Dr Wernstrom: The sterility is essential. Studies show that kids are what make people angriesious. Everyone hates kids.
Jim: Yeah, so it’s a feature, notl a bug. Yeah, yeah. So the strand of the virus that they are offering a vaccine for, the kind of main feature of it is that it makes people angry. So it’s like a rage virus.
Mark: Right.
Jim: So his argument is that the fact that it also makes you sterile.
Mark: It’s sterile.
Jim: It’s a plus. Because, you know, kids.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: What makes you angrier than kids?
Mark: Exactly.
Jim: Yeah.
Mark: So get rid of them. No problem.
Jim: Yeah.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: So our, second example comes from Annie hall. And this is a scene in which Alvie is worried that Annie wants to move in with him and is thinking of giving up her apartment.
Alvy Singer: What do you mean? You’re not gonna give up your own apartment, are you?
Annie Hall: Of course.
Alvy Singer: Yeah, but. But, but why?
Annie Hall: Well, I’m in moving in with you, that’s why.
Alvy Singer: Yeah, but you got a nice apartment.
Annie Hall: I have a tiny apartment.
Alvy Singer: I know it’s small.
Annie Hall: That’s right. It’s got bad plumbing and bugs.
Alvy Singer: All right, granted, it has bad plumbing and bugs. But you say that like it’s a negative thing. You know, bugs are, The entommology is a rapidly growing field.
Mark: That. You say that that’s a bad thing. Yeah.
Jim: Yeah.
Mark: So, yeah.
Jim: The bug bugs are clearly not a negative. What are you talking about? No, entomology is. It’s a ra growing thing. So.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: Why would you see this as a negative thing? So. And our final example.
Mark: It’s a tiny apartment, though. Yeah. Yeah.
Jim: Our final example comes from Better Call Saul.
Mark: Ah.
Jim: And this is very early on in the series where Saul has found the Kettlemans, the rich couple who have absconded with, I think, over a million and a half dollars, and they try and get him to take a bribe, and instead he tries to get them to become his clients.
Saul Goodman: I know that HHM is shiny and it’s slick and it’s chock full of lawyers. Compared to them, I’m like, a kidy lemonade Stand trying to compete with Walmart. But here’s the thing. What are you gonna get from me that you’re not gonna get from those other guys? Passion, commitment. Ask yourself this. Who found you? I don’t see Howard Hamlin ruining his $300 Gucci loafers out here. If you’re with mate, you’re my number one client. Morning, noon or night, you call me, I’m there. I would be singularly devoted to you.
Jim: So he’s trying to sell. I mean he’s a con man as it. As it goes. And so kind of getting people. It’s prety pretty early on. You figure that out. Convincing people to do what he wants is one of his main skills. But what he’s trying to do is sell people who have already very high scale lawyers and can certainly afford to pay the very high scale lawyers.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: He’s trying to get them to leave them and come to him by saying that. That you know what you get? even though I’m just one guy.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: And I’m nothing compared to that firm. Get passion. You get like, yeah, focus o you’ll be my main client. And he. Yeah. He’s trying to turn what’s clearly a negative.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: Because he’s far less likely to have sway within the court system and kind of win cases.
Mark: But also he’s kind of trying to sell the. On their failure in the soar as he’s caught them.
Jim: Ye.
Mark: He’s caught up with themeah as a success on their part that they discovered him who are passionate, committed.
Jim: Yeah.
Mark: You know, any time of the day or night.
Jim: And they point out that he’s the kind of lawyer that guilty people hire. So even though they are absolutely guilty people.
Mark: Yeah, yeah yeah.
Jim: So they don’t want. They don’t want that to be the look they if they were to go with him as their lawyer.
Mark: So. Yeah. Yeah. Excellent. That’s why, just why it’s such a brilliant series because it’s nuanced to every turn. Y. Yeah.
Donald Trump: So we’re gonna. We’renna 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 has to figure out which one is fake news.
Mark: You see the appearance of sometimes losing in the game and yes, I admit it, it sometimes appears that way is actually a way to ensure that Jim doesn’t feel Outclassed and outgunned every time. See, I’m actually doing a good thing, a great thing, guaranteeing Jim comes back time after time thinking he’s able to win. It’s a special service I’m providing. You ought to be. Thank you.
Jim: You’re being, you’re being selfless and generous, aren’t you?
Mark: Yeah. Altruistic and I’m not losing. I’m taking one for the team. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jim: Fair enough. Yeah. So these examples this week come from a press conference that Trump gave at Mar a Lago. Pretty much as we were recording our last episode, actually. And.
Mark: Right.
Jim: As with so many Trump press conferences, it didn’t really have a point. There wasn’t like a thing. Normally when people have a press conferences because a thing has happened, they re. And they are talk about the thing.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: Or commenting on the thing.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: He just was talking there. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Mark: People are here. He’s like, they come here to see.
Jim: Me Thursday press conference. Yeah, why not?
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: So, yeah, he rambled, basically, about all kinds of shit.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: This was incidentally the press conference where he possibly on the spur at the moment, decided to rename the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.
Mark: Oh, okay. U. Right.
Jim: Which he’s now carried through and as it is, one of the executive orders that he’s signing today.
Mark: Yeah. Because that’s. That’s what everybody needed.
Jim: So we want that’we.
Mark: Want jobs, we want, you know, cheap health care, we want lower inflation.
Jim: Yeah.
Mark: But no, actually, come to think of it, what we need to do is rename the GOTLF of Mexico Gulf of America. Because that’s been bugging me ever since the day I was born.
Jim: Understandable.
Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jim: So he said, statement number one. We will settle the horrible war in Ukraine very quickly. We have to do it, and I will get it done in a very short period of time. Frankly, it should never have happened. It would never have happened if I
00:30:00
Jim: was your president. People are being shot and really killed in numbers nobody’s ever seen. Even a mediocre dealker could have stopped it. And the time to stop it was before it got started. I spoke to Vladimir Putin. I told him very strongly not to even think about doing anything. And he didn’t do it until he saw how weak America was under Sleepy Joe.
Mark: Even the mediocre deal could have. Temaker could have stopped it. Ye.
Jim: And I am that mediocre deal.
Mark: You standing there with his arms and kimbo, big M on his chest, has his tie flaps in the wind. Yeah.
Jim: Okay, so statement number two.
Jim: I don’t know what it is with electric. This guy loves electric. We’re go going toa be ending the electric car mandate. quickly, by the way. This guy loves electric and he. We don’t have enough electricity and then we have AI where we need more. And he wants to get, he wants everybody to have an electric heater instead of a gas heater. Gas heater is much less expensive. The heat is much better. It’s a much better heat. As the expression goes, you don’t itch. Does anybody have a heater where you go and you scratch and that’s what they want you to have?
Mark: What?
Jim: It’s one of those, you know, expressionsion expression.
Mark: You don’t itch, right? Because the heat is better. It’s a. Ah, non itchy heat.
Jim: Better heat.
Mark: Oh, okay. Because as we all know, electric heating is. Is it, I guess it contains some of the letters in the word it electric. The near as I can get there. Okay. The guy loves electric and we don’t have enough. And then we have AI where we need more. Yeah, okay. All right. Yeah.
Jim: Statement number three, right? This is in response to Biden protected 625 million acres of offshore drilling.
Mark: Oh, okay. Banned’like the Antarctic Arctic. So protected thing.
Jim: Trump says the 625 million acres, people can’t realize that’s like the whole ocean. Take an acre, you know, an acre, you have a house on a half an acre or a quarter of an acre or an acre. If you have an acre, you have a big deal. Now you multiply that by 625 million acres, it’s like, feels like the whole ocean. And that’s our strength. You know, people can say we manufacture, we don’t manufacture. Thing is we have, we have oil and gas more than anybody in the world and we’re gonna have more of it too.
Mark: Okay, Right.
Jim: The hell.
Mark: So, so you’ve have a house and half an acre, or a quarter or anre. And then you multiply that by 60. Imagine that M vot by 60 million. And that feels like the whole ocean. What? So he’s helped us out there by saying, okay, imagine your house on half an ang. That’s quite big. Yeah. And and now imagine that house. That’s an ocean.
Jim: Just multiply that by 625 million.
Mark: Yeah. It feels like that’s how you’s, how.
Jim: You imagine big things, isn’t imagine a small thing, but millions of them. Hundreds. Millions.
Mark: Million. Just ramp it out like that. When, when you say when he says people can’t realize he’s actually saying I’ve got no idea how big that is. Part of his appeal is that he’s, he’s like a doofus everyman. He’s the stupid one that is asking stupid questions. And people think, oh yeah, they, they are kind o, look at him, the doofus. Or they go, yeah, that guy’s just like me. Yeah, he’s gone. No, I’ve got no idea either. So, yeah, so I’I’m with him. Okay, right. Yeah, I for forgot from minute what I’m supposed to be doing.
Jim: Yeah, One of them, right? One of them is. The other one of them is fake.
Mark: Oh my God, I can’t believe that two of them are real. That’s the truth of the matter, that two of them are real. Never mind which one’s fake. Two of them. Horrifyingly he actually said, okay, well I want the 65 million one to be true, but okay, so we’ve got one, it’s got two of them with numbers insofar as people are being shot and reallyre killed in numbers. See I’m beginning to suspect the mediocre deal maker, because that popped out for me might be a gym sized joke because it’a very good joke. And then strongly and weak, what do you do that. Okay, all right. Meanwhile, back at the heat’much. Better. So it’s a much better heat as the expression goes. Well that might be a bit of a giveaway as well because as we know you could. He just says as the old saying goes and ah then puts in a saying he’s just made up. So that might be a tell. Does anyone who have a heater where you go and scratch and that’s what they want you to have. Nobody has a heater where you go and scratch.
00:35:00
Mark: There’s something nagging me about the Ukraine thing. I can remember the invasion happening and I was driving down a motorway, but it was, it was the same motorway that I heard about the news of Boris. So I suspect that is under B. No, I think that’s before Biden. Okay, so right on that, on that dodgy self history thing, I’m going to say with decisive boldness that number one is the one you made up.
Jim: Okay, so have the other two, which you more convinced by.
Mark: Convinced is a very strong, strong word. I think I’m more amused by the number three is 6,625 million acres. Whether, whether I, whether he said it, I suspect he did it might be my cognitive bias. I just wanted to have said it.
Jim: Okay. And so I think, yeah, number three is real.
Donald Trump: The 625 million acres. People can’t realize it’s like the whole ocean. Take an acre, you know, an acre, you have a house on a half an acre or a quarter of an acre or an acre. If you have an acre, you have a big deal. Now you multiply that by 625 million acres. It’s like, feels like the whole ocean. And that’s our strength. You know, people can say we manufacture. We don’t manufacture the thing we have. We have oil and gas more than anybody in the world and we’re gonna have more of it, too.
Mark: It sounds like Pinocchio realizing he’s a real boy. It’he’s just absolutely in awe of the size of the ocean.
Jim: Yeah. He does not know how big things are.
Mark: No, no.
Jim: The whole ocean, just for the record.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: More than that is 89 billion acres.
Mark: There you go.
Jim: So he’s only off by a factor of about 140M m. It’s. It’s much less than 1% of the whole ocean.
Mark: Yeah, yeah. Probably the Gulf of America is about that big. It’s not the whole ocean.
Jim: How can it be of ocean?
Mark: It’s a lot famously, if you’re just protecting the waters. It’s quite big. It’s, you know, proportionally, there’s more of that than there is the dry stuff.
Jim: So you also think number two is real?
Mark: I do, yes. But I kind of don’t want him to. Don’t want it to be. Because that’ll be awful.
Jim: Well, I’m afraid no. Number two is real.
Donald Trump: I don’t know what it is with electric. This guy loves electric. We’re going to be ending the electric car mandate quickly, by the way. This guy loves electric and he. We don’t have enough electricity. And then we have AI where we need more. And he wants to get. He wants everybody to have an electric heater instead of a gas heater. Gas heater is much less expensive. The heat is much better. It’s a much better heat. as the expression goes, you don’t itch. Does anybody have a heater where you go and you’re scratching and that’s what they want you to have.
Jim: You know the expression, you know, famous. That famous advertising slogan, for G.
Mark: For G. Don it. Yeah, yeah. Donut. Yeah. I guas o they got there.
Jim: Everyone saying it everywhere, sweeping the nations.
Mark: Yeah. Everyone saying that failed advertising firm Trump adverts Oh, no. What’s musk go going to think about? Him ending the electric car mandate.
Jim: Yeah. That’s why this relationship can’t last.
Mark: No. Because he’s just gonna goah we’re gonna do away with that. Either that. Always not going to fulfill that.
Jim: Well, I mean think. I think he’ll be saved slightly by the fact that there is no electric car mandate.
Mark: Oh.
Jim: that’s not a real thing. That’s a thing he’s made up. So.
Mark: Right.
Jim: So it’s. Yeah, it’s one of those. Those things where you make up a problem and then you can. You say you’re gonna solve the problem. Made up.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: And then when there isn’t, when it doesn’t happen, you can say, see, I solved it.
Mark: Yeah. Yeah. It’s like Sunak and is I’ve saved you from seven recycling thing or tax on meat.
Jim: Yeah.
Mark: None of which existed.
Jim: Problems you make up are way easier to solve than real world waye.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: It turns out.
Mark: And you can do it really quickly. Yeah. They cost almost nothing. Yeah.
Jim: Yeah.
Mark: And you know, as a, as a millionaire, he’s. Sunak would know that. He’s a. And Trump being a. He must be a. You know, he’s a gift to humanity.
Jim: Absolutely. So we, we have a few social contestants. Right on Discord. Andrew says in
00:40:00
Jim: honor of his second term, I’m saying number two is fake.
Mark: Right, Right.
Jim: And Steve Bick says, I’m pretty sure I’ve heard number one. I’m going with number three being fake. Just a coin flip.
Mark: Wow. Okay.
Jim: Yeah. On Facebook.
Mark: Cool.
Jim: Christine says number one is uncharacteristically coherent. So I think Jim has slipped that one into trick us. Number two who itches in front of the heater. That’s got to be true. Even Jim wouldn’t think that one.
Mark: Yeah, there is.
Jim: So that leaves number three is fake. So she was saying number one is so coherent. I’ve. I’ve included it as an uncharacteristic in.
Mark: Order to true one. Okay. Yeah, yeah. So therefore number three. Right.
Jim: Yeah.
Mark: Wow.
Jim: On patron. And as says I have no idea. So I’ll do the same thing I always do when some electronic device asks for a passcode. I guess we’ll try three then. And that. And that, my friends, is how you rise to legend. For about one in a thousand people you encounter three is the one you made up. So, Kaz says, so as of yesterday, four more years of the ranting of dementia Don. So I’m strapping myself in and considering day Drinking Fairly sure I’ve heard something like number two. Electro heaters and the like. And number one has some familiar phrasing, but could be a gym trick. Number three, what the ever loving fuck is that? I want to hear him say that, so I’m going with number one is fake news.
Mark: Yeah, there you go. Yes. There’s much of the same reasoning when you see what the loving F is that. Yes. Yes. Yeah, Please let you that be true.
Jim: William says number one has to be fake, as I think I’ve heard him say the other two or some variant of them. Christ, he’s an idiot. I’m dumbfounded as how truly insane the GQP has become and how much more crazy we have in store for us. Yeah, yeah. Scottes. Oh, wow. That greedy fetid turd always manages to sound so ill informed. Number one has a few too many complet is sentences. Two has the mandatory misuse of adjectives, in this case electric. Electric wat. And I think I heard him say something about his fascination with Acres. So I’ll choose number one as fake.
Mark: Ah. Ah. Okay.
Jim: Finally, Richard says I like 1 and 2. For the sheer hypocrisy of what Trump says about people behind their backs versus to their face, Putin is a war criminal. All verses O. Hello, Vladim Me looks so handsome and SW strong or electric cars are a joke versus you’re a genius, Elon, and I love you.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: Yeah. I have to go for three as fake news because even those simple maths seem like a stretch for the new lox of the United States. America.
Mark: Oh, yeah. Immediately the image flashed into my mind. Brilliant. Yeah, yeah.
Jim: Wow.
Mark: Well, that. See somebody’who said yeah. Number one. I’m sure I’ve heard him say it. You say yeah, that’s when you hear that you kind of know that you’ve nailed it. Yeah, well, that. But yes, I think it was the. It wasn’t so much the coherence because it was studdiedly incoherent, but the. For me it was the mediocre deal maker. even a mediocre deal maker could have stopped it.
Jim: Uh-huh.
Mark: And I’m get in. Yeah.
Jim: Yeah, yeah.
Mark: Well, which is yeahither. It’s a bit too self aware for him. I think that was probably what it is.
Jim: Unfortunately that means you did catch me out that time, so.
Mark: Yay. You say. I’m just don’t look upon it as a failure. It’s a success in soar as you know, it keeps you coming back for moreh.
Jim: Uh-huh. And it’s time for the part of the show that this week at least is called Day one is not a Logical Fallacy. Because, I mean, the counter starts again today. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We’re recording this mere hours after Trump was was inaugurated for the second time.
Mark: Yeah. And the news coverage of it was saying, oh, it’s terribly quiet and it’s all very civilized and nobody’s saying he’s a dangerous f. Narcissist.
Jim: Yeah.
Mark: You know, pawns in his stupid game. Thankfully, it is a stupid game because he is a narcissist. And all of the things he said he was going to do day one, I suspect many of them have been watered down.
Jim: Well, here’s the thing somewhat.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: I mean, as we’re recording this only u. 6ish hours after he was after his inaugurration. Yeah. So it would be a little unfair to judge him based on how he has done on day one compared to how he claimed he would do.
Mark: Right.
Jim: But never let it be said that we’re not above that.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: So.
Mark: Bothered us.
Jim: So we thought we’d have a look, at some of the things that he said he would do on day one, some of the things he promised. And, and to be fair, he has taken steps towards doing
00:45:00
Jim: some of those things even in the last few hours, albeit most of them are meaningless and pointless and, unconstitutional. And yeah. If potentially, challeng in court, probably make it up to the Supreme Court where they will say, yeah, that’s fine. so, yeah, the first thing on the list is that he said he would begin on day one, a mass deportation program to get rid of all of the criminal illegal aliens in the U.S. yeah. And I mean, this was walked back just a couple of days ago by Tom Homeman. The, the incoming borders are because.
Mark: Right.
Jim: It was announced a couple of days before that or it leaked that they were gonna start in Chicago. That was where they were gonna kind of focus on day one. Their beginnings’like as soon as Trump signed the executive order m making this a thing, they were gonna start doing ICE raids in Chicago.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: And, but apparently the fact that people knew it was coming already was fine. But the fact that they knew, knew it wasnna be Chicago focused means according to Tom home. And they were like, well then like, fuck you, we’re not doing it then in that case.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: Because now everyone knows there’s no point.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: It was only gon to be fun if it was a surprise. So.
Mark: Yeah. So, now, now that you all Know what we were going toa do? We’re not gonna do it now because, you know. And that’s. Yeah. Spo. Yeah.
Jim: So maybe that’s a double bluff. And they’re still gonna do it, but they’re like, no, don’t worry, all Chicago people continue to go and do your jobs in restaurants things. We not planning on raiding any places on the Magnificent Mile or anything like that at all. No, no.
Mark: I don’t know that they’re intelligent enough to do that. That’s, you know, I don’t know why. I’ve just got the feeling. See, I think with most. I was having a conversation today, I think with somebody about, how Trump got in, and my thought was that he didn’t. You didn’t unite the vote, the, the non Democrat vote. He didn’tite it in that they were all kind of, anti Democrats, but they were all pro Trump, but they weren’t all pro each other. Yeah. Because he promised everything to everyone, to every. Every splinter group. He will say, yes, exclusives do that for you.
Jim: Absolutely.
Mark: Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. So now they’re going to. And he does. He doesn’t give a shit about that stuff. He was. He’s all about getting into power because he doesn’t want to go to jail.
Jim: Yeah.
Mark: So it. So he would say anything to anybody to make. To make it possible for them to vote for him and deal with their cognitive dissonance. So he’d say, oh, yeah, you want me to do that? Yeah, course I’ll do that. You want me to do that? Because I’ll do that. He’s done that his entire life. So it’s. He doesn’t. It’s like Boris, he doesn’t know how not to lie to. He’s not lying. He’s just appeasing everybody. He will just do what the. He likes in order to be liked by people.
Jim: Yeah.
Mark: You know, if the applause stops, he dies. So that’s the, He will promise everything to everybody. So all of these things that he said he’d do on day one, many of them, as you say, are mutually exclusive or impossible to do. But. But the fact that he can promise to do the impossible makes him a superhero, and a superman and somebody you ought to vote for because he’s going to bring about this stuff. And of course, if it isn’t brought about, he can blame the system. Yeah.
Jim: And I did my best and they stopped me. They. They.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: Deep State, probably.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: Stop. Yeah, yeah. I mean, and also one of the other reasons he’s not going to be able to do a lot of the things that he claims is, is because the problems are invented problems like he, he wants to get rid of millions of criminal aliens from the US but there’s actually only about half a million, yeah, undocumented people who have a criminal record. So that’s gonna be tricky to get rid of four times as many as exist. So yeah, yeah. The next thing is ending birthright citizenship. This is another thing he said he would do on day one. And he has, I believe, either already signed an executive order, to do that or is, or has it in his pile of 200 plus executive orders ready to sign. He is, I think currently at the Capital 1 Arena in D.C. signing a pile of, of
00:50:00
Jim: executive orders in front of the crowd.
Mark: Of course he is. Course.
Jim: Because, I should say with the. Part of the reason people are in the Capital One arena is to watch the inauguration on big screens because.
Mark: Right.
Jim: They couldn’t show up to the capit to watch it because he wor out like a little pussy and decided the whole thing inside because it was a bit chilly. Yeah, yeah, it was, it was kind of a similar temperature to Kennedy’s inauguration. which he did not. He didn’t even wear an overcoat when he, when he took the oath of office. It was not that much colder than Obama’s first inauguration where 2 million people showed up and waited outside on the mall. certainly a fuck of a lot warmer than some of Trump’s rallies where he has had people standing for hours. There was one where it was -17 Fahrenh where, where people waited in the cold for like four hours to get in to see him. He wasn’t bothered about that all, but he claims that he did. You know, you didn’t want to get people ill or anything, so he had to.
Mark: That’s right, yeah.
Jim: There’s a possibility that the reason for moving it inside was more crowd size anxiety based.
Mark: Yeah, well, that was my thought. Yeah. Yeah.
Jim: Because he already had a significantly smaller crowd than Obama in his first inauguration, despite what Sean Spicer yelled on on TV the next day. but yeah, Obama’s first inauguration, 2009, the hotel vacancy rate in D.C. was 2.8% and a couple of days before the Trump inauguration, hotel vacancy rate in D.C. was 25% for Inauguration Day. So it seems like not that many people were travelling to DC to attend. And those that did, many of whom, repeatedly tweeted that they couldn’t afford eggs in November. but, somehow Managed to find thousands of dollars to make it across country to get to D.C. to stay there for several days and spent all that money made it the DC and then he was like n, fuck you, I’m going to do it inside.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: So they didn’t actuallys but they did already have plans to have the Capital One arena as an alternative venue for people to see the inauguration on a big screen. And so some people a less than half of the number of people who could have attended if it was outside, did get to, to do that and he has visited that venue to do a little bit of a kind of victory rally speech and signed some executive orders are like on stage at the dais in front of his adoring.
Mark: On this little Fisher Price. My first y. Yeah, desk. Yeah, yeah.
Jim: So it is possible that one of those that he’s signiding at the moment is the, the ending birthright citizenship.
Mark: Yeah, yeah.
Jim: Thing the thing about that ironic really.
Mark: Because his parents were.
Jim: Yeah.
Mark: Immigrants.
Jim: Yeah, absolutely. There is that. There’s also the fact that that’s the 14th Amendments to the Constitution and you can’t just executive order away a constitutional amendment. That’s not a thing.
Mark: Believe me. He wants to abolish the 14th Amendment. Yeah, yeah.
Jim: You need not even just a kind of simple majority in Congress to do that. So it’s not like the Republicans can agree to do his bidding. Yeah, you have to have like a super majority. I think it’s, I think I’m right in saying it’s 2/3 of one house and 3/4 of the other have to vote in favor of amending the Constitution.
Mark: Changing. Yeah, yeah.
Jim: so that means nothing if he signs that executive order, it doesn’t change anything.
Mark: No.
Jim: Also what, how the f would you figure out citizenship if not by birth? Like.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: What how are they gonna do it then there’s Noah apparent plan for that.
Mark: You could buy a Trump citizenship.
Jim: Oh yeah, yeah. To be anyone who, who owns the Trump NFT gets to bely.
Mark: Well it’s a bit like the the company that owns the war in catch 22 ye it’s that you, you can buy the company citizenship. Yeah, no.
Jim: Yeah. So he has various plans for ending the border Biden era border policies. So he wants to basically close down the border completely reinstate his remainaining Mexico policy, get rid of Catch and release. And the thing he has already I think signed the executive order to do is to close down an app called CBP1 which is an app that is used for asylum seekers and refugees to make appointments within the asylum system.
Mark: Right.
Jim: It’s a system that puts people into a queue to talk with the people who decide whether they get
00:55:00
Jim: into the country as, as potentials, you know, as legal migrants.
Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jim: And so he has stopped that, which, yeah, some people say will result in, ah, a massive increase in illegal border crossings because now there isn’t a way to do it.
Mark: Well, it’s a bit like they u. Yeah. The kind of thing that justified the Rwanda policy was that there are all of these illegal immigrants and you know, they should be coming in via legal routes. Okay, what are the legal routes? And they shut them all down. So, you know, pretty. Patel shut them down. Brabhamman shut them down. Jricick shut them down. And yes, there are no. So by definition, if you do away with all the legal routes, then people who come in aren’t doing it legally.
Jim: Yeah. So they’ve shut.
Mark: Or they can all be deported.
Jim: They’ve shut down the app. They’ve cancelled appointments that people already had, which again sometimes might have been months in advance. It allows at the moment, or allowed until now, 1450 migrants a day to seek asylum.
Mark: Wow.
Jim: Or at least to start that process, to make appointments to apply. So that’s now not able to happen. And it’s already been challenged in court by the aclu, so I guess we’ll see what’happen with that.
Mark: It does occur to me that actually if they do away with the citizenship thing as a reason for deporting immigrants or yes, deporting mass deportations, how many people are going to be left in America? Maybe the Native Americans.
Jim: I mean that’s.
Mark: Isn’t that there is a definition. There are, there are non Native Americans. All of the people who are’t the First Nation Native Americans. The people who were there when all the Americans arrived. Pilgrim Fathers, Founding Fathers. When they arrived, there were people already there.
Jim: Yeah.
Mark: Who were, the First Nation Native.
Jim: Yeah. I mean if they.
Mark: Everybody else is non native, so they should just get rid of all of them.
Jim: Yeah. So if they, where does, where they say they’re focusing on, undocumented people with criminal records. if they were to expand that, as they have said that they will, to, all undocumented people. Because their argument is that they, by coming in across the border illegally, they have committed a crime, therefore they are criminal aliens.
Mark: Yep.
Jim: yeah, that doesn’t necessarily count people who’ve overstayed visas and things like that, but they, they’ll. Which is Not a criminal offense. It’s a civil offense, I believe. But anyway, that’s beside the point. If they were to do that, then generally farmers in the Midwest say, yeah, literally America will run out of food in like three days. If you get rid of undocumented people, that’s you. The country will not have food.
Mark: Exactly.
Donald Trump: Because.
Mark: Because just like in England, you know, white Americans, white British people don’t want to work in the fields, picking fruit, working on farms. They don’t want to do that. They, they just, they think it’s beneath them. Somebody else should be doing that.
Jim: But even if, even if they were prepared to, which in many cases they’re not, that’s not how the system works. So you can’t change the system within a couple of days. It’s not a thing that happens. It, it needs to be done in a gradual way where those kinds of jobs are valued more and paid more and in a way that meanse they’re then advertised to different people and the system has to be changed. You can’t just remove a section of society that does, an important role in society.
Mark: Yes.
Jim: And then go, yeah, that’s. Would you just get by without them? That doesn’t. It’s not possible. So if they were able to achieve their goal, it would fuck everything up immeasurably and probably irrevocably. And.
Mark: Yes.
Jim: It just, it’s not a thing you can do.
Mark: Yeah, we tried it. It take it from us, it didn’t work. Breit was all about trying to do that. And m. It means that this is short food. We had a summer where we had no salad. Yeah, yeah. Just. It’s just, it’s just institutional racism. It’s just racism writ large in order to get votes by lying. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I’ve just really. I’ve realized it now. Yeah. It’s just dawned on me. Okay, what else is he. Oh yeah, yeah.
Jim: The next thing is January 6th. defenders.
Mark: Yeah, yeah.
Jim: all of those things.
Mark: All of those things. All of those people that didn’t turn up at this point. You know that. So in January 6th, this
01:00:00
Mark: year passed with very little.
Jim: Well, yeah, of course it did. Yeah.
Mark: Anything. People just read stuff out and that was it. There was no mass hordes of. No, there was self confessed Trump supporters.
Jim: Yeah. Two or three days ago there was a march in D.C. like an anti Trump march, a completely, utterly peaceful march through D.C. saying down with this sort of thing. Y.
Mark: And yeah, thately peaceful because. Yeah, it’s only peaceful because Biden’s in power. If Trump was in power there would have been tear gas and he would have waded through and held some sort of book upside down out of some sort of building.
Jim: Yeah, yeah, so yeah, so January 6th. Yeah, this year was, was uneventful.
Mark: but yeah, passed without incident.
Jim: But the other one, that was a bit of an issue and yeah, he is, they have been more than 1580 defendants charged after January 6, more than 1270 convicted of whom more than 700 either didn’t get a custodial sentence at all or got a short one and have done done with it. So if he does pardon them, that won’t really make any difference.
Mark: Any difference, yeah, yeah.
Jim: But there are some who are still in prison, most of whom the ones who are still in prison who got longer sentences or took longer to track down, tend to be the ones who did commit violence and he has at least suggested that it would be the non viollenent ones that he would pardon.
Mark: Oh, okay. Okay.
Jim: So yeah, so chances are it’t a.
Mark: Great deal of time.
Jim: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Mark: So yes, it, it’s just a thing. It’s just.
Jim: Yeah, yeah, that, that is going to be an executive order. and it, it isn’t one that has, has at the moment as we record being signed, so we don’t know the details of it. It may be it’s in that list that he’s going through at the moment and we’ll find out soon what is, what will be the outcome. And if he does actually differentiate, you know, it may be that, that he’s had someone go through and make a list of him list for him. Yeah, that, that will dos rather than. I don’t think he’ll sign a neo that just says, you know, Januaryendants who weren’t violent or something like that. I think it’ll delineate them by name probably. Like I mean Biden just pardoned. Well, he’s done several. Yeah, he pardoned. He gave preemptive pardons to some people who the Trump new Trump administration has promised to target. People like Fauci, the January committee members, yeah, his family members, Biden’s family members, to stop them from being attacked in kind of partisan lawsuits and things like that. But also the other day he pardoned I think 2,500 non viollenent drug offenders who had either excessive sentences or in many cases are in states where it is now legal to possess the drugs they possessed. But they were convicted before that was that law was made. And so those would have been cases that had been gone through by staff members and were, named m. People that were like, yeah, this case and this case. In this case, not just a general blanket pardon for a group of people. So I suspect that’s how the 1-6- defendant thing would have been done and they would have gone through the individual details of each case. Probably.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: I hope that’s how it would have been done.
Mark: But. But he will dress it up to say that, yes, I’ve pardoned those because it was injustice and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Jim: But, but what I’m saying, I think that actually there’s. It’s quite likely if they have gone through that process and they aren’t determined to just pardon everyone.
Mark: Ye.
Jim: That there probably won’t be very many people who will have any impact on.
Mark: Because they’ve done their time.
Jim: Yeah.
Mark: They’re either already out or they didn’t go in. They.
Jim: Or they are in there because they did a bad thing and they’re not getting part.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: So I don’t know. We’ll see there’this. Is one of the many fun things we get to learn this year.
Mark: Wa. I was gonna say we wait with basd breaths. No, we’re kind of wa. With, Oh, for, fuck kind of. Kind of stuff. Yeah, many fun things. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jim: So one thing he vowed to do on day one is end the war.
Mark: In Ukraine, if not before. Yeah, yeah, yes, yes.
Jim: That was always a little ambitious.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: And indeed has walked back significantly by both him and incoming people, I think.
Mark: Who knows?
Jim: Yeah. I think one of his incoming generals said something like, yeah, let’s. I think it was Keith Kellogg said, let’s. Let’s aim for a hundred days. And I think even Trump said, I’m hoping for the first. For within the first six months. U. like a few days ago. So they’ve walked that back quite significantly from.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: Day one, when we get around to.
Mark: It, to way off
01:05:00
Mark: down there.
Jim: Yeah.
Mark: Given that Putin’s involved.
Jim: Absolutely.
Mark: Yeah. You kind of can’t go. Yeah, we’renn. We’re gonna get. We’re goingna end the war in Ukraine and I want to. And Putin, I love you. Yeah, It’s.
Jim: I’m going toa be a bit busy on Inauguration Day for all the boot lking that’s going to be required. So.
Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Some My tongue won’t work probably to actually say those things. Yeah, yeah. So. And then tariffs. He’s got to do tariffs. Yeah.
Jim: I mean, obviously he’s going so much about that. Pretty much his main campaign thing was he’s definitely, he’s putting tariffs on Mexico M Canada and China and other things like that. So yeah, that’s, that’s one he was absolutely gonna do on day one. that’s not, that’s not even among his list of executive orders that he has. He did a memo about it or his people put out a memo about it which was basically requiring his incoming departments to look into trade practices from those countries. Doesn’t even make tariffs on the tariff.
Mark: All just trade practices.
Jim: Yeah, well we should check these. We should make sure that we’re not being screwed by these countries basically.
Mark: Yeah, yeah, I did watch a, like a really short, I mean it was 30 seconds long video of somebody talking to somebody on the streets in New York about tariffs and they were going oh yeah, it s great, Trump should slap the tariff on. Somebody walked up and said what business you in? Yeah, I mean I’m in T shirts. And he okay, so if your T shirts go up by from $10 to $15, what happens? What are you going to do? This is not even the interviewer. It’s just a guy walking by. What are you goingna do? He said well I would put, I would up my price for the consumer. So okay, so is China paying for this? No, no, no, the consumer pays for it and then the look on his face just realizes what he’s saying.
Jim: Drops, scales fall from the eyes.
Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jim: Amazing.
Mark: It’s just brilliant. And never said the guy just carries Go U. Huh? And just carries on walking to the interviewer is just amazed as well. Who’s brilliant. oh, man. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, so they’re going to looking into looking looking practices.
Jim: They’re not doing tarence straight away, but who knows, you know, basically if he decides to tweet it at some point, then it’ll happen probably.
Mark: Yeah. yeah because so the next why.
Jim: Not is cancelling the electric vehicle mandate.
Mark: Okay. As which has featured in yeah.
Jim: He might have an executive order for but it’s meaningless because there’s no such thing. Right. Yeah. He said in his inauguration speech, in fact after taking the oath of office that he was on day one he was like today he would be signing his executiveive orders to to repeal the Green New Deal and get rid of the electric vehicle mandate which you know, neither of those things exist.
Mark: Yeah. So yeah, so that’s, that’s easy say yeah, I did away with those.
Jim: Yeah. The closest thing to an electric vehicle mandate is a goal to reduce tailpipe emissions and the amount by which they would like to reduce tailpipe emissions would inevitably increase the number of EVs on the road. That’s basically right. It’s a nationwide goal aiming for 50% of new cars and trucks sold by AH, 2030 to be zero emission which is still you know, five years off and it’s, it’s a name rather than a mandate. So he’s presumably go goingna walk that back. Which. Yeah, yeah. Which probably doesn’t make that much difference because it, the increase in electric vehicles is popular among both vehicle makers and consumers.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: People want them, people want to sell them.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: They’ve already put an enormous amount of money into developing the technologies.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: They’re not going to just f. Stop.
Mark: Making them because given, given that, you know, the guy has s been camping out on the lawn in Mar a Lago and it’s now in the, the suitet next door to the White House is known for owning a company that makes the Damn things. Yeah, yeah. And that’s the only reason he wants to be in charge of government efficiency. So that you can do away with all the kind of those pesky kind of requirements to report failures and deaths when it comes to self driving electric cars. Yeah, yeah. So that way. So again that’s the that’s one of those. Okay, we’re going to do away with electric cars. I promised that to whoever is listening. Who, who, who’s listening? I’t know, the petrochemical donors
01:10:00
Mark: who’s listening to that.
Jim: Yeah. It’s another thing where even if he does nothing at all, which essentially the EO’that he’s signing probably do nothing at all. he will both have achieved nothing and achieved the goal that he is claiming he wants to achieve because he, what he says is we’re getting rid of the electric vehicle mandate. You, you will be able to buy whatever car you want. You know, it’s.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: And that will already be true.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: Yeah. Because only 50% by 2030 have to be zero emission. They’ll still absolutely make all the gas guzzlers. You’ll still be able to buy them if you want. They might be a bit more expensive. Yeah. But you can buy them.
Mark: Well, particularly if the steel is coming from outside the US and there’s a tariff on it. Yeah, yeah. So but that’s, that’s the thing, it entirely isn’t it that he’s, he’s also going to claim all of Things about that he’s been saying about the economy which have all been untrue, that ah, the, you know, inflation is through the roof, the economy is tanking, it’s the worst performing, you know, employment is way up. None of which are true.
Jim: Yes, absolutely.
Mark: He’s. Now of course, as soon as he gets into office, he will say, you see, the Dow Jones has gone up.
Jim: Unemployment, inflation sudden be down to 2.9%, which is exactly where it is right now. Yeah, but it near 40%.
Mark: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And if we look at the figures, it’actually be 60. Yeah, yeah. So. And it’s just. That’s the. He will just claim that like he did with all the things that Obama put in place. He will claim all of those. It’s a bit like when Boris claimed the London Olympics which had, which had been put in place by the previous mayor.
Jim: Yeah.
Mark: And people fall for this stuff and fell for it. Y. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jim: so drill baby drill is his next one, right? He is, he’s going, oh, this is.
Mark: The other promise to the petrochemical donors. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Jim: Which is completely meaningless again. M. Because the US already is at peak oil production ever. Like they.
Mark: Right.
Jim: Made more’ve. They’ve produced more barrels of oil in the last year than they ever have in the US History. And also there’s thousands of unused drilling contracts and, and areas that people are allowed to drill in that they haven’t done because it’s expensive to start a new drilling thing. And even though there’s plenty of areas that they’ve that are open to drilling and available and have probable oil reserves, they’re busy already getting out the ground in other places.
Mark: Yeah, well, this is exactly, exactly how he’s set it up. So he, Well, I’m not going to credit him with the nuse to have thought of it. His advisors have said, right, here’s the wor where they fed him the words to say, yeah, go riff on this. You know, and they’ve. They kind of. They play into his, It. Well, it isn’t nostalgia, it’s. It’s Archie Bunker sitting there moaning about how things are better in his day. So they’ve got him to moan about all this stuff saying, you know, we used to have such great oil reserves. We haven’t. And Biden has made it so that we can’t. And the whole thing about. We used to. We used to have manufacturing. We don’t have manufacturing. And I think the manufacturing of cars or something was way up the highest it’s ever been.
Jim: It’s the highest since pre Covid in the U.S. right, there you go.
Mark: Yeah. So it’s. So it’s gone way up. So actually there is, there is manufacturing. There wasn’t under Covid, which coincided with his presidency. And so actually it’s. If, if we’re going to apply the rubric that he applies is all of these things that, happened during my presidency are my fault. No, I will take credit for if it’s a good thing. So using that rubric, we should then say, okay, so manufacturing has gone up under Biden. the production of oil has peaked under Biden. But of course none of that will occur. What he will, what he has set up is to depress our expectations. And then he will come in and say, you see what I’ve done? Look how much more oil is being produced when there’s absolutely nothing has happened that he has anything to do with. Because he was already doing that. All he’s done is depress the perception. That is great.
Jim: So, yeah, the last couple of things that he has said that he would do. attacking trans rights.
Mark: Yes. Which is m definitelynna do. Because
01:15:00
Mark: that’s easy to do.
Jim: Yeah. Yeah. And first of all, ensuring that he keeps, and I’m quoting him here, keep men out of women’s sports. M. And and also ending gender affirming care in. It’s not clear. He hasn’t been clear, unsurprisingly, on what he means by that because a lot of that is based on states and there’s already a fuck ton of states that have made gender affirming care illegal in many cases. And so there wouldn’t be a federal protection for that, which there already isn’t. So I don’t know what, I don’t know what the fuck he’s talking about with that.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: probably he’s talking about ending the possibility of you sending your little boy to school and the school never contacting you about it, but sending, back your boy, who is now a little girl. Because he has repeatedly claimed that that’s a thing that happens despite schools not even being able to give you, an aspirin without contacting your parents first.
Mark: Yeahah.
Jim: But maybe he’s planning on ending that practice.
Mark: Yeah.
Jim: Which I would say at least wouldn’t mean he would stop talking about it. But he will claim credit for having ended it despite the fact it never ever happened.
Mark: Never. Yes, of course.
Jim: but he is in the process, if he hasn’t already of signing an executive order to keep sports to one gender basically. Right. And he said in hisal inaugural address that it is now essentially the stand of the US Government that there are two genders, male and female, and that’s it. So he’s already, ah, like within minutes of being inaugurated was already a massive fucking bigot. Which is, you know, unsurprising. We, we all knew. M. Yeah, but he, but there is.
Mark: Written down for history.
Jim: He.
Mark: Yeah. Was he also going to do similar stuff in the military and kind of walk back those.
Jim: yeah, this’s, Yeah, I mean it. And he’s made various claims about things like yeah, gender affirmin care in the military and, and in prisons and things like that. yeah, and walking those back. I don’t know if those are included in his plans but yeah, wouldn’t surprise me. He’s just apparently in the Capital One arena signed a, an executive action to withdraw the United States from the Paris agreement again.
Mark: All right, okay.
Jim: So yeah, yeah, that’s that’s great because you know, it’s not like there’s currently a a massive ecological disaster happening in the U.S. is it?
Mark: Well, I know that’s all about bad forest management that should be raking the.
Jim: Leaves and divers knows.
Mark: Yeah, that’s what, that’s what caused it. Blacks and women. Yeah, yeah. And, and poor raking.
Jim: Yeah, yeah. Welcome to yeah. Season two of Trump in the White House.
Mark: yeah. And finally some things we really don’t have time to talk about.
Jim: Well, Trump got sentenced for his 34 felony convictions and continued his 78 year run of facing absolutely no consequences for anything he’s ever done because his bought and paid for Supreme Court helped him run out the clock. I’m actually upset that Judge Merchand’s options didn’t extend to the ability to order a literal slap on the wrist for Trump because that would have been far more punishment than the unconditional discharge he imposed. To be clear, the reason Trump got away with it is that non magro Americans continue to think that integrity matters and the right thing to do is to allow Trump to begin his second term without a sentence hanging over him to theoretically be imposed when and if he leaves office in four years, which of course he would find some way to dodge anyway, despite getting away scot free. Trump insist we’re going to appeal anyway, just psychologically because frankly it’s a disgrace. I’m not sure how you appeal psychologically, but I’m sure the colibur of lawyers Trump employees will be able to figure it out. Those lawyers weren’t able to prevent special counsel Jack Smith from releasing his report on the January 6th case. However, I’ve no idea why Trump tried so hard to stop it, since none of his followers are going to read it, and those of us who have been paying attention already know almost all of the contents. We did learn that Smith considered charging Trump with incitement to insurrection, but that they hadn’t developed direct evidence, such as an explicit admission or communication with co conspirators of Mr. Trump’s subjective intent to cause the full scope of the violence that occurred on January 6th. Ultimately, they decided that they already had plenty of other powerful charges that they could prove more easily. We also learned that the various unnamed, unindicted co conspirators mentioned in Trump’s indictment were still in danger of being indicted all the way until Trump won the election. Those six, including Giuliani, John Eastman and Sidney Powell, could theoretically still face prosecution. But they won’t because
01:20:00
Jim: gestures broadly at everything. On the plus side, the last three years have been great practice for Jack Smith for when he’s appointed a special Counsel again in 2029 to look into all the new crimes Trump will have committed by then.
Mark: Yeah, there is that. Yeah, yeah. Before we got the turncoat horror, JD Trump is America’s Hitlerler advance as vp we nearly got Fox Business anchor Maria Bartiromo because she was great with the big donor Wall street types and she knew how to do tv, Trump told his team, as Politico’alex Eisenstad reports in his forthcoming book Revenge the Inside Story of Trump’s Return to Power. You remember Bartiromo? She was one of the most prominent defenders of Trump’s falsce assertions that the 2020 election was stolen from him due to rigged voting machines. Her, amplification of these basis sel election conspiracy theories eventually resulted in Fox News paying out $787.5 million to settle the defamation lawsuit brought by Dominion Voting Systems. Well, I guess if your favorite reporter on your favorite channel can cost your favorite channel three quarters of a billion dollars. And Tucker Carl’s job, she can’t be all bad. I mean, what could possibly have gone wrong? Trump is such an astute judge of business character, right? Despite her obsequiousness and mailing the softball questions, the Trump team ahead of any and all the interviews she held with him. Eventually the President elects s campaign team convinced him to move on as there was no time to vet Bartirroo and they had spent months Looking at other candidates and as incoming White House communications director Stephen Chung stated, Vice President elect Vance was the perfect choice to be President Trump’s running mate and I really don’t know what to make of that.
Jim: Trump has handed out some pretty weird ambassadorshipips this time around, putting clinically insane former Senate candidate Herschel Walker in charge of America’s relations with the Bahamas and leaving France to Jared Kushner’s tax evading witness tampering prostitute, hiring to seduce his brother in law, filming them having sex and then sending the tape to his sister dad Charles. He also made Kimberly Guilfoyle ambassador to Greece immediately after her relationship with Don Jr. Ended, which is probably the nicest thing he’s ever done for one of his children. However, the weirdest ambassador announcement so far came out last week when Trump appointed Mel Gibson, John Voight and Sylvester Stallone special ambassadors to Hollywood. He claimed in a truth social post that the purpose of this is bringing Hollywood, which has lost much business over the last four years, to foreign countries back bigger, better and stronger than ever before. These three very talented people will be my eyes and ears and I will get done what they suggest. Quite what the fuck this will result in is anybody’s guess. I assume there’ll be tariffs imposed on Warner Bros if they don’t greenlight a remake of Three Men and a Baby starring Mess as Voigt Gibson and Stallone as grandpas tasked with looking after a baby who was abandoned by her woke leftist mother who was forced to carry the baby to term after her attempt to use abortion as birth control was foiled by Trump himself, who will appear in a cameo enforcing the laws of New California which Republicans recently took back after the first ever fair election which resulted in 98% of voting age Democrats being prosecuted for voter fraud. I mean, I’m not saying I wouldn’t watch it.
Mark: There is that. Yes. I think we should pitch it. Yeah. We would spend eight hours. Yeah. Donald Trump Jr. Was sent to Greenland. Nop. Don’t cheer and whoop and jump for joy just yet. It’s not permanent. He came back. It was all part of the thing to convince oh God, I don’t know. The people to whom Don Senr promised he’d bring down the price of eggs and bacon perhaps. I really don’t know. To convince someone or other that the Greenlanders themselves were all for having America buy invade or an ex Greenland because they were all pissed off and underserved and keen to make Greenland greener again or something. And sure enough, several Genuine looking Greenlandic people duly said as much to people pointing cameras at them whilst Don Jr was making yeah, you see, gestures. Of course Charlie Kirk was there and of course he was absolutely stoked to be in the presence of another useless Trump offspring are more than happy to be in photos with MAGA hat wearing Greenlanders inviting America’s Hitler to invade. Only trouble is the MAGA cohort reportedly rounded up homeless people from the area, including one person from under a bridge promising them a meal at the hotel Hanz Ajid in exchange for their participation in the pro Trump photo circuit. Despite describing the greenlanding participants as the local community in
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Mark: Nook, several local sources that spoke with Denmark M s Dr. News described the photographed individuals as homeless and socially disadvantaged people who are often outside the supermarket directly across from the hotel where the Trump event was held. I watched Hyperormalization again this week and the point put forward by Adam Curtis is that the powers that be are supposedly in total control of the way we see things. Part of the problem for Trump is that Denmark and Europe is a bit older and more savvy than Trump and his target audience and over the millennia have set a lot of store by actual facts rather than stupid wishes. Oh, do you think Don Jr. Thought he was going to wear Wicked was shot and that everyone was going to be green and that magic wands work?
Jim: Speaker of the House Mike Johnson is very, very bad at his job. I know we’re supposed to be doing news in this part of the show, and that sure as fuck isn’t news to anyone, but even someone as bad at the job as Johnson must understand that with a majority as slim as his, you don’t want to piss off any of your own members. So he must have had a pretty good reason for summarily firing Ohio, Congressman Mike Turner as head of the House Intelligence Committee. If Johnson does have a good reason for it, he’s not saying. When asked his rationale, he it’s a new Congress. We just need fresh horses in some of these places. But I’m a Mike Turner fan. He’s done a great job. Depending on who you ask, there might be other reasons. Turner says that when Johnson explained his decision, he cited concerns from Mar? A Lago. But Politico claims that Johnson didn’t obsequiously obey Trump. He obsequiously obeyed the hard right factions of the party who disagree with Turner’s support for Ukraine aid and for surveillance powers for intelligence agencies. Either way, while Turner isn’t exactly popular within his party, he does have some close allies and Mike Johnson will need every single Republican vote in order to get any legislation through in the next few months. So it not a great time to make an enemy. Not that it matters really. Once the confirmation hearings are done, Johnson will accidentally use a pronoun and get ejected in favour of several months of new speaker election shenanigansay.
Mark: In the manner of acting on behalf of some kind of dictator for a day. Or a fragile, needy, narcissistic despot, perhaps. Incoming senior Trump administration officials have begun questioning career civil servants who work on the White House National Council about who they voted for in the 2024 election and their political contributions, and whether they’ve made social media posts that could be considered incriminating by President Elect Donald Trump’s Team McCarthy. UN American activities, anyone? Trump’s pick for National Security advisor, Florida Representative Mike Waltz, in recent days publicly signals his intention to get rid of all non political appointees and career intelligence officials serving on the NSC by Inauguration Day to ensure the council is staffed with those who support Trump’s agenda at a stroke. This of course will denude the administration of considerable expertise and institutional knowledge, but hey, what the hell. Nobody knows more about the Middle east than Ukraine and Sudan and Yemen and Iran and Trump anyway. And with all those never Trumpers out the way, there’ll be a lot more posts for yes people who a won’t have a clue and most importantly B won’t disagree just how Uncle Joe Stalin. Sorry, Donald J. Trump likes it. White House security adviser Jake Sullivan noted when Biden took office in 2021, he inherited most of the NSC staff from the outgoing Trump administration. Those folks were awesome, Sullivan said. They were really good. Which just makes me go hu? Are these the people Trump now wants to get rid of? I guess we all see where Trump’s coming from though, because during his first term, two careoreer military officers detailed to the NSC raised their concerns about Trump’s 2019 call to Ukrainian President V. Flodyimir Zelensky, in which the president sought an investigation of Biden and his son Huunter, which as we know, led to Trump’s first impeachment. Remind me again, is it three impeaches and you’re out?
Jim: One of the fun things about being right wing, I imagine, is finding new things to be outraged about. Tiny faced idiot Charlie Kirk used to just wait for more important outrage manufacturers like Tucker Carlson to tell him what to be upset about and would then wring his hands over the lack of clear genitalia on a m Mr. Potato Head or the toned down sexual appeal of the M Emine M mascots until the well ran dry. With Tucker now downgraded from a primeime Fox News host to a cut rate Dr. Jacobi on Twitter, massive headed community college dropout Kirk needs to make up his own reasons to cry, and he’s not very good at it. His latest, nestled among various conspiracy theories about the California wildfires, is that ASL interpreters make it hard for him to concentrate on his eponymously titled show. He can we please just go away with half the screen during these
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Jim: emergency briefings to the sign language interpreters, I have nothing against, obviously, people that cannot hear, but there’s closed captioning. I mean, this is just over the top. We can’t do this. We’got to get back to how it used to be. It’s just. Oh, it’s just too much of a distraction is what it is. The reason is they do these emergency briefings for fires or terrorist attacks and you’re looking at this and you’re not listening. I don’t like it. Yeah, fuck deaf people. I find it slightly harder to pay attention to what people are saying, so you should be made to rely on the error prone live caption and keeping up with everything that’s being said. And miss out on the emphasis, tone and emotion that can’t be conveyed in text but is integral to asl. Yeah, let’s make America great again by getting rid of this woke attempt to pander to a tiny proportion of Americans just because it’s required by the Americans with disabilities act of 1990, which was signed by radical leftist George H.W. bush. And no, Charlie, closed captioning isn’t enough because aside from all the stuff I’ve already mentioned, some people don’t speak English. An ASL is not just a flappy arm version of English, but its own unique language which is understood by half a million Americans. You can’t see me right now, but I’m signing something extremely rude about Charlie Kirk that even the explicit tag on Apple podcasts wouldn’t cover.
Mark: Yeah, yeah. And it’s understood by at least half a million Americans. Yah. Meanwhile, this side of the pond, in amongst the usual batch shittery that is British politics outside of the Labour Party. Inside the Labour Party, Treasury Minister Tulip Sadiki resigned because the possible links to her aunt, who was ousted last year as Bangladeshi’s prime minister, whilst standards adviseor Sir Lourry Magnus, to whom Tulip preferred herself, said he had not identified evidence of improprieties but said it was regrettable that Sadiq had not been more alert to the potential reputational risks of the ties of her art. Which to my ears resignation thus sounds quite a noble thing to have done considering the size of the distance from actual wrongdoing. Meanwhile, of course, those very much closer to actual wrongdoing, Boris and Truss are flogging volumes of bound to toilet paper in the form of biographies. I genuinely got a roll of Boris toilet paper for Christmas and it’s been such a joy to use. And the Tory Party and the Reform Party are contining to have a go at Rachel Reeves s fiscal feasibility as Chancellor. She’s at fault as the pound apparently slumps a bit more against the dollar, which is probably more to do with market anticipation of trammels being undone by Trump than anything Reeves is doing. And the cost of borrowing by the government remaining high, probably more to do with Liz Truss than what anything Reeves is doing to fill the hole left by Said Letuce. Even the Independent newspaper reported that more millionaires than ever are leaving Britain under this government than before, which is not really a problem seeing as they’re the ones that did all they could to not pay tax in the UK anyway by registering their businesses offshore. The actual problem is that millionaires like Sunak and Fara remain in the uk, especially since the latter promised that he would leave if Brexit failed, and yet somehow is the only one still touting that’been a success and we should all move on. Well yeah, after you nigj. After you.
Jim: So that’s all the bad arguments and faulty reasoning we have time for this week. You’ll find the show notes@felaciousrump.com and if you hear Trump say something stupid and want to ask if it’ fallacy our contact details or on the contact page.
Mark: If you think we’ve used the fallacy ourselves, let us know. And if you’ve had a good time, give us a review on Apple Podcasts orever you get your podcast or simply tell one other person in person about how much they like our podcast and you can support the show@patreon.com f TRUMP Just like our newest patron, Lisa O Lisa P All up our ah, strawman level patrons Mike Smith, LT Colleen Laila, Richard Thunder Hop, Will M. Scott Oie on Bank, Laura Toomink, Mark Reichy and Alber Ib Buchanan told us when we met her at qed. We can just call a Rambo. Last year at QED I met the listener recognized at QED the year four because we keep using our full name all the time. And our true Scotsman level patron Schmootz. Sharon Robinson, Renee Z. Melissa syitetech, Stepen Pickle, Janet Gataa, Andrew Halk and our top patron, caaz2e. Thank you so much. I and welcome Lisa O Lisa and thank you for your contind support. Very much appreciated.
Jim: You can connect with those awesome people as well as I send other listeners in the Facebook group@facebook.com groups falllaciousrump or in theisord@fallaciousrump.com Discord all music is by.
Mark: The outbursts and was used with permission. So until the next time on Feacious Trump, we’ll leave the last word to the new Donald. That’s right.
Donald Trump: Go home to mommy.
Mark: Bye.
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