What's Wrong With What Trump Said About Unite The Right / Charlottesville?
So the overwhelming consensus is that Trump screwed up, screwed up so badly that he cannot be forgiven. Needless to say, it would be absurd for any single person to presume to question something so universally acknowledged. So at this point, I'm just trying to understand the nature of Trump's screw up. Here are what seem to me to be the most salient possibilities:
[1] What Trump said was false.
[2] What Trump said was true, but insufficient.
[3] What Trump said was true, but he shouldn't have said it.
[4] What Trump said was true, but had nefarious intent.
What other relevant options are there?
I'm trying to avoid making this all so precise as to be unwieldy. I understand, for example, that [3] and [4] can both be true, and that what he said might have been partially true and partially false.
[1] What Trump said was false.
[2] What Trump said was true, but insufficient.
[3] What Trump said was true, but he shouldn't have said it.
[4] What Trump said was true, but had nefarious intent.
What other relevant options are there?
I'm trying to avoid making this all so precise as to be unwieldy. I understand, for example, that [3] and [4] can both be true, and that what he said might have been partially true and partially false.
posted by Winston Smith at
3:25 PM
2 Comments:
You were never wrong about this (but, well, there is a reason I comment anonymously now, so I have no illusions this is the prevailing opinion). There was another quote from the piece that really makes the fact that he wasn't making a moral equivalence really stand out:
"And you have – you had a group on one side that was bad, and you had a group on the other side that was also very violent, and nobody wants to say that, but I'll say it right now. You had a group – you had a group on the other side that came charging in without a permit, and they were very, very violent."
So he's saying one side was bad and one side was simply violent (no explicit moral condemnation, leaving it open as to whether the violence was justified). He identifies the violent side as those without the permit, so he isn't even condemning the antifa explicitly here. Based on this you can't even say that he is making a moral comparison at all, because he simply isn't even making any moral judgement about the counter-protesters.
And if you look at the other statements about counterprotester violence, they are all made declaratively, with repeated claims that this is just what happened.
Sorry, but if someone reads that as moral equivalence, it is hard to view them as operating in good faith here, or are simply cognitively unable to accept that the left might have vices when the words white supremacy are uttered.
I noticed that, Too, Anon, but haven't gotten that far down in the transcript--I couldn't agree more. One side is bad...and also, the other side is "very violent"--i.e., you've got a (morally) bad side, but the other side's violent (too--that is: both are violent, but one's also morally bad).
There's another possible reading, but it's not what he meant.
When uncharitable interpreters are given free reign and granted moral authority, you are fucked and no doubt.
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