17 Aug Appeal to Pity – FT#199
Show Notes
The Appeal to Pity Fallacy occurs when someone tries to convince others by making them feel sympathetic instead of using evidence.
Trump
We started out by discussing this clip of Trump claiming unfair treatment from the IRS:
Then we talked about this clip of Trump demonizing immigrants:
And finally we looked at this clip of Trump feigning empathy for the insurrectionists:
Mark’s British Politics Corner
Mark talked about Boris Johnson’s hard-done-by resignation speech:
The he looked at Liz Truss going on about how the death of the Queen was very bad for her personally:
And he finished with Nigel Farage lying about how very attacked he is:
Fallacy in the Wild (Sting: Isn’t it a Pity – George Harrison
In the Fallacy in the Wild, we looked at this clip from Chicago:
Then we discussed this deleted scene from Tangled:
We followed that up with this clip from Spongebob Squarepants
And finally, we talked about this clip from The Amazing World of Gumball:
Fake News
Here are the statements from this week’s Fake News game:
Mark got it right this week and is still on 48%!
Electability is not a logical fallacy
We talked about Abdul El Sayed’s Senate primary victory in Michigan
The stories we really didn’t have time to talk about
- Let’s make a pact – nobody tell the Trump Administration about the Streisand Effect. You’d think they would have figured it out for themselves, but it seems to be a lesson they are constitutionally incapable of learning. We saw it last episode with Kash Patel, who sued a blogger for calling him a “googly-eyed Kremlin bitch” and succeeded only in getting that phrase permanently enshrined in the federal court record for all eternity. Incidentally, you can now get your “googly-eyed Kremlin bitch” t-shirt, exclusively from our merch store at fallacioustrump.com/merch. Anyway, Trump’s just pulled off the same self-own, care of his lawsuit against Capital One. For years, you see, Trump has whined about “debanking” like it’s the great civil rights struggle of our time. Poor persecuted billionaires, cast out of polite financial society for the crime of having politics. Trump’s businesses sued Capital One, claiming the bank closed roughly 385 accounts back in 2021 for purely political reasons, tied to the “woke” backlash after January 6th, and demanding “considerable financial harm” damages for the inconvenience of having to find a new bank. Which, to be fair, was probably quite hard because all the other banks had heard of Donald Trump. Capital One finally responded in a court filing on July 31st, and it turns out that, rather than quietly settling or staying silent, the bank decided the correct response to “you closed my accounts for political reasons” was to explain, on the record, in detail, exactly why they actually closed them. Turns out the bank’s anti-money-laundering team spent months combing through Trump’s accounts and found activity with, and I’m using their exact clinical phrasing here, “characteristics of money laundering.” To be clear, Capital One isn’t accusing the Trump Organization of actual money laundering — they’re accusing it of doing so much stuff that looks exactly like money laundering that a team with “decades of law enforcement experience,” decided the smart move was to quietly show Trump the door. Capital One’s lawyers also noted, with what I can only assume was a small amount of professional glee, that they never publicized any of this at the time, and gave Trump’s businesses several months, plus extensions, to quietly find somewhere else to park their money. So now, thanks entirely to Trump’s own lawsuit, there’s a permanent court record stating that a major American bank’s anti-money-laundering unit flagged his accounts for suspicious activity. Trump made Capital One say it. Eventually, surely someone in Trump’s legal orbit will notice the pattern, but given the pattern is “sue people, discover it was a terrible idea, repeat,” I’m not holding my breath.
- There’s nothing like showing how committed you are to overseas aid at international conferences and the US state department is nothing like showing how committed it is to overseas aid in Africa at an AIDS 2026 conference in Brazil last week. On a slide showing how effective the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (Pepfar) is in 6 countries in the African continent, three of the countries; Nigeria, Mozambique and Cote D’Ivoire were in completely the wrong places. Nigeria, despite having several hundred US troops deployed there was shown not to be on the west coast but land-locked in the middle of the Sahara, let’s hope the Navy kinda knows otherwise! Mozambique which is in the south east was way up north across the water from Yemen, Cote D’ivoire? Completely the other side of the continent! The state department said it remained committed to fighting AIDS and with real results, even if the map appeared as posted on LinkedIn by delegates to have been AI generated! A Reuters analysis found the image of the map included in the presentation contained an artificial intelligence watermark that signals it was made with OpenAI tools. In a further statement the state department said “We take full responsibility for the confusion and misrepresentation it caused for attendees, including our African partners.” I’m not sure if they’re referring to the map in particular or the general shitshow of the Trump administration’s decision to pause funding worldwide!
- Trump only hires lawyers who are prepared to lie in public about everything he’s already lying about, but he seems to have run out of lawyers who are prepared to lie in court. First Jeanine Pirro admitted that a botched installation, not vandalism, was the cause of the Reflecting Pool peeling like a sunburned Scotsman, and now, in a July 15 court filing which is part of a lawsuit over $7.5 billion in canceled clean-energy grants, the Energy Department’s own lawyer admitted, in writing, that “with one exception,” all 284 terminated grants went to states that voted for Kamala Harris and have two Democratic-caucusing senators. Not “underperforming,” not “wasteful,” not any of the bangers from the greatest-hits album of bureaucratic justifications. Just “you didn’t vote for our guy.” The Energy Department had originally sent the Office of Management and Budget a hit list of more than 600 grants for the chop, all sharing this one utterly nonpartisan, totally-not-political characteristic of existing in blue states, while leaving untouched a pile of similarly recommended grants in red ones. And in case we might think it’s just some amazing coincidence, or perhaps that clean energy grant writers in blue states are universally bad at their jobs, the helpful Trump lawyers added “the inclusion of grants in the October notice was based solely on the political identity of the grant recipient state, i.e., whether the recipients location was in a blue state or a non blue state.” If that’s true, Energy Secretary Chris Wright committed a felony in April by lying to the House Appropriations Committee when he told them “our project review process did not take into account any politics in the evaluation of these projects.” Luckily for Chris nothing matters any more. Naturally, Trump’s commitment to screw over the states he lost slightly more than he’s screwing over the rest of the country extends well beyond clean energy. Back in February, a genuinely historic blizzard buried the Northeast, and New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island, all of which comfortably cleared FEMA and NOAA’s own damage thresholds, verified by the actual scientists whose job is to verify these things submitted a combined $227 million in disaster aid requests. Trump personally overruled his own agencies and denied all four, two days after approving disaster declarations for six Republican-led states. When asked to explain the distinction, a FEMA spokesperson immediately invoked a snow-covered slippery slope, saying, “If the federal government is paying for regular operations like snow removal, what next? Garbage removal?” And I feel like if more than three feet of garbage fell out of the sky onto Rhode Island in less than 24 hours, government intervention might be warranted. Obviously that varies by state, as parts of New Jersey wouldn’t really notice the difference. FEMA, meanwhile, rejects the volume argument, saying in their statement “Simply having record or near-record snowfall does not automatically qualify a state or community for federal aid if the overall impact and damages do not meet the necessary criteria,” because, you see, FEMA sets a cost threshold for each state and only suggests approving disaster aid when that level is met or surpassed. The damage assessment for Rhode Island following the February storm was $19.3 million, which is over 9 times FEMA’s $2.1 million cost threshold for the state. The message from this petty, fragile administration isn’t subtle: pay your taxes, shut up, and pray a blue-state address doesn’t disqualify you from basic civilization the next time the sky falls.
- Sleazy David Brent-alike from UK version of The Office – North Carolina GOP Congressman Chuck Edwards has disagreed with the The House Ethics Committee’s findings, and denied any wrongdoing despite admitting to giving his staffers gifts. He told the committee “he was aware” that other staffers were interpreting his relationships with the young women as inappropriate. Okay you may be a big fan but I think you’ve taken David Brent a bit too far Chick – I hear you saying “it’s almost an insult if you don’t make some comment about [one another’s clothing]” but the committee’s report noted numerous examples of two unnamed staffers expressing discomfort and concern about your “increasingly unusual attention” that created “an environment where both they and their coworkers felt uncomfortable” as early as May 2025. The Ethics Committee report offers extensive detail about Edwards’ conduct, including providing the two staffers with “lavish” gifts worth thousands of dollars, despite this Edwards’ 14-page response to the 25-page report argued that the House Ethics Committee’s findings exonerated Edwards and “failed to demonstrate that either of the two staffers expressed discomfort” with the congressman’s behavior. This is the same findings that found Edwards gave “both women lavish gifts including jewelry totaling over $1,000, designer purses, guns, shoes, flowers, a laptop and cell phone, KitchenAid mixer, robotic vacuum, vacations, tickets to performances, and one-on-one dinners.” He also brought a staffer on a work trip to N.Y.C., but extended the trip for his birthday and “sought to ‘surprise’ her” with a helicopter ride, dinner and a Broadway show. He was documented as having recited tearful poetry, gone on a trip to the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas with the ex-staffer during the fall 2025 government shutdown and hired a singer in spring 2025 for a surprise performance of a staffer’s favorite Ed Sheeran songs at a D.C. restaurant. He also visited a staffer’s home to do yard work and skipped votes in the House to decorate her Christmas tree. In one deleted text to a staffer decades his junior he wrote “You’re so fun to be with, so easy to talk to, and I love listening to you. By all means — let’s explore more of DC together, “We seem to have a fondness for many of the same things. Even where we do not, I’ll enjoy the adventure alongside you!” Edwards is 65 the staffers were 19 and in their 20s. “While he can navigate rumors like those are circulating now without concern, because he is, I guess, a male in politics, he had no regard for how something like this could impact my career,” one of the staffers told the committee. Yep there you have it!
- Six months into Trump’s undeclared war with Iran, we’ve finally hit the phase where the world’s most expensive military in human history has apparently run out of ideas, and is now essentially posting in the group chat asking if anyone’s got anything. CNN reports that a senior officer in US Central Command’s intelligence branch sent an email last week to a broad group of military analysts asking for “new creative and unconventional ways to pressure and punish Iran,” which could only be worse if it was an in-person corporate brainstorming session with a whiteboard and everyone introducing themselves with a fun fact to break the ice. Military officials told CNN that crowdsourcing a war plan via email is, in fact, unusual. Which is, honestly, good to know, since I was worried for a second that “hey does anyone have any ideas, we’re a bit stuck” was standard operating procedure for the country with eleven nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. Both the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency have reportedly already assessed that the current strategy of chucking missiles at Iran until you run out, is unlikely to actually shift Iran’s position, which apparently wasn’t quite persuasive enough to stop them from doing six more months of it anyway. Asked at a Cabinet meeting on Friday how exactly he plans to end the war he started, Trump showed the level of foreign policy and military strategy we’ve all come to expect, saying: “I think we just want to win… We’ll be hitting them very hard, and you know, at some point, they’re going to say, ‘We just can’t take it anymore.'” It is possible he got distracted and started watching a boxing match half way through answering the question, which would explain why the next thing he said was “get up you son of a bitch, cos Mickey loves ya!” Meanwhile, Iran’s still got the Strait of Hormuz effectively closed, global oil markets are white-knuckling it, the Saudis are personally begging Trump to knock it off because they’d quite like their shipping lanes back, and the sixth month of a war that was supposed to end with Iran “saying they can’t take it anymore” has instead ended with the US Central Command desperately saying “Come on, anyone? There are no bad ideas. Not you Trump, OK, there are some bad ideas.” At this rate, someone in the Pentagon inbox is going to reply-all with “have you tried turning Iran off and on again,” and honestly, given everything else on offer, it’ll probably get forwarded up the chain.
- Speaking of sleaze-balls Trump’s been sending round his creepy, clingy fundraisy emails which are somewhere between a billet-doux and a stalker’s ransom note in tone; “I’m sitting in the most beautiful garden in the world maybe the most beautiful garden anywhere [huh! Is he talking about off-world gardens like the ones in Silent Running?] and all I keep thinking about is whether you’re still with me” I mean that’s bad enough but the email is accompanied by a picture of Trump in the garden, Maga hat in place, White House in the background, sat at a wrought-iron table under a parasol scrolling on his phone sipping from a can. At which point things start looking even more fishy that the stinky salacious tone of the text, for one thing the White House isn’t a building site and there appear to be roses in bloom where there are no roses in reality and then it hits you, he is not drinking his famous Diet Coke he’s chugging from a can of Trump Diet Soda, re-read the text of the sleaze-mail and there it is “I am sitting in the Rose Garden right now sipping a Trump Diet Soda”. Well no you aren’t cos there’s no such thing as Trump Diet Soda – we’ve listed all the things he’s stuck his name on over the years but there isn’t a diet soda amongst them and then it dawns the whole damn image is AI’d or at least the can is AI’d in, and it appears to have like a handle or a space where a handle ought to be cos his hand is doing what hands do when they hold a teacup. Of course nothing in the fake-friendly grabbing pseudo-personal email indicates that the image is AI or that the soda is fictitious. I guess what we’re actually witnessing is what goes on in Trump’s head, the complete projection of his own imagined reality like a pair of Meta-Glasses presenting an augmented world that finally complies in a way that the real world disappointingly doesn’t, you know; Iran surrendering, Trump Gaza, Pope Trump, Jesus Trump, Nobel Peace Prize, Mount Rushmore, everyone loves him, journalists find his words funny, and no-one points out that he’s a completely shit human being!
- Texas Attorney General and puffy human indictment magnet Ken Paxton has spent years positioning himself as the last line of defense against the shadowy hordes of illegal voters he insists are lurking behind every ballot box in the state. Back in February, he launched a shiny new tip line for Texans to report suspected voter fraud, warning in the accompanying press release that “we will stop at nothing to uncover and stop any illegal voting activity,” which included, among other guidance, a stern reminder that “it is illegal to misrepresent your residence on election records.” In related news, Ken’s registered address according to election records is in Collin County, Texas, but he didn’t actually live there when he voted in the last six local elections, including the May primary runoff that made him the Republican Senate nominee. That little detail comes courtesy of his estranged wife, State Senator Angela Paxton, whose 2025 divorce filing states he moved out of the house a full year before any of this voting took place. A source close to the family confirms he never moved back in. Reporters have instead traced him to a property one county over in Denton, which he apparently forgot to mention on any of his voter registration paperwork, despite having an entire office dedicated to reminding other people not to do exactly that. Three election lawyers told the reporters this looks like a genuine violation of the law Paxton himself has spent much of his career weaponizing against everyone else, and University of Michigan law professor Ekow Yankah added “You would think that somebody who’s going through this would learn a little bit of humility that lots of things which look on their face, like technical violations of the law, are usually explained by totally ordinary things. It’s only if you’re utterly cynical and ignore all the evidence that you make a claim that, in fact, these cases are attributable to nefarious criminal intent.” But, of course, this is Ken Paxton we’re talking about, and along with corruption and running from reporters and process servers, cynically ignoring evidence is kind of his thing. Campaign spokesperson Madison Cercy, when asked to explain, did the responsible thing and completely ignored the question, instead issuing a statement praising Paxton as “a national leader on election integrity,” which is one way to describe a guy who apparently can’t correctly fill out the one form his political brand is built on. Texas Democrats have since formally requested an investigation, which I’m sure the Texas Attorney General’s office will take super seriously.
- Andy Burham is taking things seriously as Prime Minister, Westminster Council is trying to restrict customers in pubs from drinking while standing up or ordering from the bar, and standing about outside on the pavement in the warm summer evening having a fag after 10 o’clock at night in popular spots around Soho. A Downing Street spokesperson said: “Busy pubs full of people talking to each other is not a public nuisance, it is British life, and it is thousands of jobs. Soho did not become world famous by taking last orders early, switching the lights off at 10 o’clock. The prime minister encourages local leaders to work with the industry so that pubs can continue to thrive.” The government is due to grant new powers to the London mayor, Sadiq Khan, allowing him to “call in” local council decisions he opposes. Khan said of the proposals on X: “You can’t run a world-famous nightlife district with a village-hall mindset.” This possibly parks Labour’s tanks on Farage’s beer- swilling fag-smoking chummy pubgoing personality politics lawn and also distracts from the unpopularity of the early-release prisoner scheme. Whilst the scheme will ensure that rapists and sexual offenders are not granted early release, it will allow the early release of two young offenders that killed policeman Andrew Harper while investigating a quadbike theft. Justice Secretary Alex Norris said he and Mr Burnham were both “angry” they were being forced to carry out the measures to have a “functioning prison system”. “Were we not to make these changes, then we would run out of prison places in this October or November. I know that’s difficult. I know that’s created harm, and it’s not Lissie Harper’s fault, and I’m sorry that she’s been put into this situation as a result, I genuinely am. But this is a decision we’ve had to take to make sure we have a functioning prison system.” At least they didn’t use the phrase ‘tough decision’ otherwise I’d begin to suspect that Andy Burnham might just be a Starmer in Smart Casual. But at least he’s not Rupert Lowe the Reform splitter who set up Restore Britain in opposition to Farage. Lowe appeared on the Today programme and could not confirm whether King Charles was a White Briton under Lowe’s proposed Restore agenda for who don’t get deported! Makes ya proud dunnit!
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