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Thanks, Sam, for doing this. I also recommend reading Trump's book [0] to understand his appeal. It's more coherent and nuanced than his speeches and tweets. S

by tlb 10y ago

Thanks, Sam, for doing this. I also recommend reading Trump's book [0] to understand his appeal. It's more coherent and nuanced than his speeches and tweets. Some of the logic is fallacious, of course, but in subtle ways that I think are worth understanding. For example, the idea of "have some other country pay for X" comes up in multiple contexts (not just the border wall). It sounds great if you don't really understand macroeconomics. [0] https://www.amazon.com/Great-Again-How-Crippled-America/dp/1501138006/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1487701724&sr=8-1&keywords=trump+crippled+america https://www.amazon.com/Great-Again-How-Crippled-America/dp/1...

jacobolus 10y ago
Considering Trump didn’t write any of his own books, and hasn’t read a whole book in decades (including the ones he puts his name on), why would reading “his” book give an accurate impression of his ideas, vs. just listening directly to the source (his tweets and campaign rallies)? Anything “coherent”/“nuanced”/“subtle” is the invention of the ghostwriter, a kind of best-guess translation from word salad to something comprehensible by literate adults. inre this book specifically, see http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/gossip/donald-trump-uncredited-ghostwriter-new-book-article-1.2424852 http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/gossip/donald-trump... “[Donald] got this done on the road with a series of phone calls and snippets from campaign speeches. He had a ghostwriter from start to finish, and he was annoying, tough and threw fits throughout.”
- droopybuns 10y ago
  When all politicians rely on speech writers, what is the point you are making? The result is the same: someone was commissioned to draft statements that the speaker endorses.
  - madamelic 10y ago
    The point is that his brain is scrambled. He is seemingly incapable of putting together a straight-forward thought. There is a difference between shaping and deciphering.
  - djaychela 10y ago
    While that's true, I think the two don't compare in terms of degree. Trump's off-the-cuff speech (or answers to questions I saw the other day in a press conference) is drastically different to something a speech writer would create. I don't think that's the case with Obama, or a raft of world leaders. As a parallel, I know very little about programming. But I could have a ghost writer create a book that I would endorse by agreeing with the general premise (let's say it was a "learn Python from the start the right way" book), and a book of the same quality could have been ghost written for one of the many incredibly talented people on here. The quality of the books would be similar, but if you asked them or me anything about programming, you'd get a good answer from them, and a complete pile of old tosh from me!
  - randcraw 10y ago
    When a ghostwriter is present, I've found that a book's subtle exposition often arises from them more than the OP. With someone as raw, blustery, and self-promotional as Trump, any suggestion of nuance will inevitably invite circumspection.
    - robaato 10y ago
      So what do you think? http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-ghostwriter-tells-all http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-g... It had never been his ambition to be a ghostwriter, and he had been glad to move on. But, as he watched a replay of the new candidate holding forth for forty-five minutes, he noticed something strange: over the decades, Trump appeared to have convinced himself that he had written the book. Schwartz recalls thinking, “If he could lie about that on Day One—when it was so easily refuted—he is likely to lie about anything.”
- tlb 10y ago
  I didn't say it gave an accurate impression of his personal ideas, I said that reading it would help people understand his appeal, since it convinced many of his supporters. It's usually a mistake to focus too much on the personal limitations of the front man. Like assuming that because Robert Plant wasn't a good guitar player, Led Zeppelin must not be a good band. It's better to understand the ideas in the book (and campaign generally) as belonging to his team, which includes intellectuals who do read books and have very clear ideas. Some of them are now policymakers in the administration, so those ideas will affect our future whether or not Trump came up with them.
  - jacobolus 10y ago
    Can you give an example of who you consider to be the “intellectual” with “very clear ideas” behind Trump’s team’s ideology/agenda? Are we talking about Bannon and Miller here? Kushner? Priebus and Ryan? Roger Stone and Rudy Giuliani? Vladimir Putin? The Koch brothers? Anyhow, nobody in Trump’s new administration had anything to do with writing his book. In practice most of Trump’s policy agenda is going along with the standard GOP playbook of deregulating environmental pollution, cutting funding to reproductive healthcare, eliminating taxes on the wealthiest, restricting labor rights, slashing funding for scientific research, privatizing infrastructure and public institutions, boosting weapons spending, and so on. There has been a lot of thought put into these (it’s worth billions of dollars to donors) but I wouldn’t really call it intellectual per se: intellectually dishonest obfuscation of the intended outcomes is half the purpose of these plans. Trump’s “signature ideas” like deporting all Muslims, imposing a 20% tariff on imports, “bringing back” all the coal jobs, growing the economy by 4% per year, and building a wall and making Mexico pay for it are pretty much all Trump, and are doomed to fail.
    - jacobolus 10y ago
      Or maybe Alex Jones? https://news.vice.com/story/infowars-alex-jones-says-he-and-trump-talk-on-the-phone https://news.vice.com/story/infowars-alex-jones-says-he-and-...
- oh_sigh 10y ago
  > and hasn’t read a whole book in decades source please.
  - jacobolus 10y ago
    http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-ghostwriter-tells-all http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-g... https://newrepublic.com/minutes/133566/- https://newrepublic.com/minutes/133566/- https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/-/2016/07/17/d2ddf2bc-4932-11e6-90a8-fb84201e0645_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/-/2016/07/17/d2ddf2b... http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/features/-898465 http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/features/-898465 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bd79UsXSLWg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bd79UsXSLWg
    - oh_sigh 10y ago
      Honest question: Do you think that any of your sources legitimately support your claim?
      - jacobolus 10y ago
        I have seen absolutely no evidence that Donald Trump has been seen reading a book any time in the past 30 years, and there are multiple people who spent hours a day with Trump for months at a time who claim they never once saw him reading a book during that time. When asked to name recent books he has been reading, he mumbles excuses and then grasps at straws. He has asked for all his white house briefs to be no more than a page, and multiple sources have suggested that he likes bullet points, big fonts, and lots of pictures and maps instead of prose. In a legal deposition, he went way out of his way to avoid reading a few sentences of a contract, claiming that it was because he needed glasses to read and the text was too small (but was not willing to get his glasses or have the lawyer provide a version with larger type). When he went on the comedy sketch show SNL, he wanted to ad-lib his lines instead of reading a few sentences. It’s of course possible that Trump has managed to read one book sometime this millennium, but is embarrassed enough about his general lack of reading that he doesn’t want to discuss it in detail. That wouldn’t really change the key point, which is that he doesn’t in general like to / have the patience to read more than a few pages at a time, and certainly isn’t authoring his own books.

by tlb 10y ago

jacobolus 10y ago

Considering Trump didn’t write any of his own books, and hasn’t read a whole book in decades (including the ones he puts his name on), why would reading “his” book give an accurate impression of his ideas, vs. just listening directly to the source (his tweets and campaign rallies)? Anything “coherent”/“nuanced”/“subtle” is the invention of the ghostwriter, a kind of best-guess translation from word salad to something comprehensible by literate adults. inre this book specifically, see http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/gossip/donald-trump-uncredited-ghostwriter-new-book-article-1.2424852 http://www.nydailynews.com/entertainment/gossip/donald-trump... “[Donald] got this done on the road with a series of phone calls and snippets from campaign speeches. He had a ghostwriter from start to finish, and he was annoying, tough and threw fits throughout.”

droopybuns 10y ago
When all politicians rely on speech writers, what is the point you are making? The result is the same: someone was commissioned to draft statements that the speaker endorses.
- madamelic 10y ago
  The point is that his brain is scrambled. He is seemingly incapable of putting together a straight-forward thought. There is a difference between shaping and deciphering.
- djaychela 10y ago
  While that's true, I think the two don't compare in terms of degree. Trump's off-the-cuff speech (or answers to questions I saw the other day in a press conference) is drastically different to something a speech writer would create. I don't think that's the case with Obama, or a raft of world leaders. As a parallel, I know very little about programming. But I could have a ghost writer create a book that I would endorse by agreeing with the general premise (let's say it was a "learn Python from the start the right way" book), and a book of the same quality could have been ghost written for one of the many incredibly talented people on here. The quality of the books would be similar, but if you asked them or me anything about programming, you'd get a good answer from them, and a complete pile of old tosh from me!
- randcraw 10y ago
  When a ghostwriter is present, I've found that a book's subtle exposition often arises from them more than the OP. With someone as raw, blustery, and self-promotional as Trump, any suggestion of nuance will inevitably invite circumspection.
  - robaato 10y ago
    So what do you think? http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-ghostwriter-tells-all http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-g... It had never been his ambition to be a ghostwriter, and he had been glad to move on. But, as he watched a replay of the new candidate holding forth for forty-five minutes, he noticed something strange: over the decades, Trump appeared to have convinced himself that he had written the book. Schwartz recalls thinking, “If he could lie about that on Day One—when it was so easily refuted—he is likely to lie about anything.”
tlb 10y ago
I didn't say it gave an accurate impression of his personal ideas, I said that reading it would help people understand his appeal, since it convinced many of his supporters. It's usually a mistake to focus too much on the personal limitations of the front man. Like assuming that because Robert Plant wasn't a good guitar player, Led Zeppelin must not be a good band. It's better to understand the ideas in the book (and campaign generally) as belonging to his team, which includes intellectuals who do read books and have very clear ideas. Some of them are now policymakers in the administration, so those ideas will affect our future whether or not Trump came up with them.
- jacobolus 10y ago
  Can you give an example of who you consider to be the “intellectual” with “very clear ideas” behind Trump’s team’s ideology/agenda? Are we talking about Bannon and Miller here? Kushner? Priebus and Ryan? Roger Stone and Rudy Giuliani? Vladimir Putin? The Koch brothers? Anyhow, nobody in Trump’s new administration had anything to do with writing his book. In practice most of Trump’s policy agenda is going along with the standard GOP playbook of deregulating environmental pollution, cutting funding to reproductive healthcare, eliminating taxes on the wealthiest, restricting labor rights, slashing funding for scientific research, privatizing infrastructure and public institutions, boosting weapons spending, and so on. There has been a lot of thought put into these (it’s worth billions of dollars to donors) but I wouldn’t really call it intellectual per se: intellectually dishonest obfuscation of the intended outcomes is half the purpose of these plans. Trump’s “signature ideas” like deporting all Muslims, imposing a 20% tariff on imports, “bringing back” all the coal jobs, growing the economy by 4% per year, and building a wall and making Mexico pay for it are pretty much all Trump, and are doomed to fail.
  - jacobolus 10y ago
    Or maybe Alex Jones? https://news.vice.com/story/infowars-alex-jones-says-he-and-trump-talk-on-the-phone https://news.vice.com/story/infowars-alex-jones-says-he-and-...
oh_sigh 10y ago
> and hasn’t read a whole book in decades source please.
- jacobolus 10y ago
  http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-ghostwriter-tells-all http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/07/25/donald-trumps-g... https://newrepublic.com/minutes/133566/- https://newrepublic.com/minutes/133566/- https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/-/2016/07/17/d2ddf2bc-4932-11e6-90a8-fb84201e0645_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/-/2016/07/17/d2ddf2b... http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/features/-898465 http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/features/-898465 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bd79UsXSLWg https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bd79UsXSLWg
  - oh_sigh 10y ago
    Honest question: Do you think that any of your sources legitimately support your claim?
    - jacobolus 10y ago
      I have seen absolutely no evidence that Donald Trump has been seen reading a book any time in the past 30 years, and there are multiple people who spent hours a day with Trump for months at a time who claim they never once saw him reading a book during that time. When asked to name recent books he has been reading, he mumbles excuses and then grasps at straws. He has asked for all his white house briefs to be no more than a page, and multiple sources have suggested that he likes bullet points, big fonts, and lots of pictures and maps instead of prose. In a legal deposition, he went way out of his way to avoid reading a few sentences of a contract, claiming that it was because he needed glasses to read and the text was too small (but was not willing to get his glasses or have the lawyer provide a version with larger type). When he went on the comedy sketch show SNL, he wanted to ad-lib his lines instead of reading a few sentences. It’s of course possible that Trump has managed to read one book sometime this millennium, but is embarrassed enough about his general lack of reading that he doesn’t want to discuss it in detail. That wouldn’t really change the key point, which is that he doesn’t in general like to / have the patience to read more than a few pages at a time, and certainly isn’t authoring his own books.