George F. Will has always been consistent. He is an author and conservative political columnist who has voiced conservative issues and values for decades. When Donald Trump came along, Will left the Republican Party, saying that Trump and the party members had abandoned the GOP’s commitment to conservatism. Though I’ve always been on a different wave length politically, I’ve always admired and respected George Will’s rationality and writing. When Will renounced the GOP, Trump did what he always does. He demeaned, belittled, and ridiculed the person, George Will—tweeting that the columnist, “one of the most overrated political pundits (who lost his way long ago), has left the Republican Party. He’s made many bad calls.” Will did not respond to Trump’s tweet. Instead, Will said on Fox News Sunday, “He (Trump) has an advantage on me. He can say everything he knows about any subject in 140 characters, and I can’t.”
George Will has consistently spoken and written of what he views as Donald Trump’s inability (disability) to think and speak clearly. He writes, “It is not merely the result of intellectual sloth but of an untrained mind bereft of information and married to stratospheric self-confidence.” He writes that Trump is “syntactically challenged” consistently having “verbal fender benders.” Trump once said, “People don’t realize, you know, the Civil War, if you think about it, why? People don’t ask that question, but why was there the Civil War? Why could that one not have been worked out.” If this isn’t evidence of a syntactically challenged person, I don’t know what is. He thinks the question has only occurred to him, when library shelves of full of books that suggest otherwise. George Will summed it all up with this, “The problem isn’t that he (Trump) does not know this or that, or that he does not know that he does not know this or that. Rather, the dangerous thing is that he does not know what it is to know something.”
Misnegation, according to Mark Liberman, a linguist at the University of Pennsylvania, happens when people say the opposite of what they mean. Did Mr. Trump mean “wouldn’t” instead of “would?” I don’t think so. The question: Did Russia interfere with the election of 2016? “My people came to me. They said they think its Russia. I have President Putin. He just said it’s not Russia. I will say this: I don’t see any reason why it would be.” Yesterday, Mr. Trump said, “The sentence should have been, ‘I don’t see any reason why it wouldn’t be Russia.’ Sort of a double negative.” Trump’s words in Helsinki, “I will say this” are a kind of pre-announcement—those words serve a function: in effect, “Listen up.” He is saying his next words are important—he prepares his listeners, announcing the importance of his next words: “I don’t see any reason why it would be.” It is possible Mr. Trump misspoke, but I don’t think so.
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| A democracy does not center on one bully....or one party... |
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| Democracy includes all of us--thinking and speaking clearly-- a government "of the people, by the people and for the people." |
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