Trump thought he’d be clever calling Omarosa a ‘dog’ without some obvious (double) code violations.
There is a logic to his idiocy, testing the boundary between the pathetic and the pathological, as though even RW Blacks would legitimate his comments.
And he confirms yet again that it’s not about having “tapes”, because his contradictions seem not to matter, especially to his cult-following.
Kettle logic (la logique du chaudron in the original French) is a rhetorical device wherein one uses multiple arguments to defend a point, but the arguments are inconsistent with each other.
Ironically this appears on its Wikipedia page: “Not to be confused with Pot calling the kettle black.”
Jeet Heer in the New Republic makes a cogent analysis of why 45* is so brazen, desperate for any interpretive solution for the obviousness of his racism. His guilt causes dissimulation, and expresses it in the gas-lit kettle of Twitter.
In the same way, Trump’s response to this controversy can be broken down into several parts:
1. He never used the n-word.
2. Mark Burnett told Trump there is no tape of Trump using the n-word.
3. Manigault Newman can’t be trusted because she is “Wacky” and “Deranged.”
4. The media didn’t listen to Manigault Newman when she praised Trump.
Point number 4 seems wholly irrelevant. It’s natural, for obvious reasons, for a former White House aide who is critical of a president she worked for to get a lot more media attention than a normal White House aide. The point is also in contradiction with 3 since if she is “Wacky” and “Deranged” the press should avoid her at all times.
Point number 1, if true, makes point 2 irrelevant and strange. After all, if Trump never used the n-word at all, he doesn’t need Mark Burnett to tell him no tape exits. Trump himself would know that no tape exists.
In sum, Trump is in the dream world of kettle logic, making whatever arguments he think will stick, no matter their internal coherence.
newrepublic.com/...
Without lapsing into the usual psychological projections about 45*, it is fairly obvious he’s casting about for diversions and distractions, as the rigged witches make another return appearance.
Or put into more visceral, economics terms, his tweeting is symptomatic of an entire presidency, a kesselwitz or kettle-joke, where in 45*’s delusions, there can be no contradictions.
That does not mean that his actions are without intention, even as we can see intension at work with his childish language play.
Technically, 45* operates as capitalism’s clown prince of cognitive repression, much like boycotting Harley-Davidson because of his tariffs, or his claim that his soybean tariffs had nothing to do with its price decline. The pee-tape is a cipher for the fallacy of trickle-down economics, made worse by kleptocrats and crony oligarchs.
Communicative media interventions are needed to smash his fallacious message frames. One method might be to launch a comic strip featuring rigged witches and their double-bubble kettles.