Don't Take Trump Seriously or Literally

Donald Trump says a lot of crazy shit on the regs, which was actually a good thing, more or less, when his job was yelling at Gary Busey on TV. But now he's the literal president, and his words matter—if you don't believe me, ask North Korea. How, then, do we approach Trump's latest lunacy, when he casually suggested the Democrats, who did not clap for him at the State of Union, were "treasonous"?

In a speech on Monday that was supposed to be about tax reform but was not, the president said of the Democrats, "They would rather see Trump do badly, OK, than our country do well. It got to the point that I didn’t really want to look too much on that side. It was bad energy." Though the opposition party traditionally avoids applauding during the State of the Union, Trump was fixated on the Democrats' silence. “They were like death. And un-American. Un-American. Somebody said treasonous. I mean, yeah, I guess, why not?” Trump said with a shrug. “Can we call that treason? Why not? I mean, they certainly didn’t seem to love our country very much.”

The straightforward response to this is to point out that not clapping for Trump is actually not treason, whether it be VICE News quoting the Constitution or CNN's Chris Cillizza providing a dictionary definition of the word. But if anything is certain in these chaotic times, it's that Trump is not careful with his words, and tends to say what feels right to him, not what's actually correct. We're in the post-truth era! Facts don't matter!

https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/xw5z3q/dont-take-trump-seriously-or-literally