Wednesday, December 06, 2017

WHAT DOES IT EVEN MEAN WHEN SOMEONE WHO DOESN'T BELIEVE IN TRUTH THINKS ALLEGATIONS ARE UNTRUE?

The Daily Beast is reporting this:
President Donald Trump has privately told confidants over the past week that he firmly believes Roy Moore’s innocence and feels no hesitation at all about endorsing the embattled Alabama Senate candidate, three sources close to the president tell The Daily Beast....

“This is not something he’s struggling with,” one senior White House official told The Daily Beast of Trump.

The president has even begun adopting some of Moore’s more outlandish lines of defense to push back against accusations that the candidate’s guilt is beyond question.

Two of the sources, one working in the Trump administration and the other a friend of the president, noted that in recent conversations Trump has begun to stress that the “Roy Moore, D.A.” signature in the yearbook of a woman who publicly accused the candidate of sexual assault, is a likely forgery. The president has found the signature suspicious, according to these sources. Moore has stressed this, too. Experts, for their part, disagree.
Does Trump believe that the Moore allegations are false the way you and I believe that untrue things are false? Or does he believe the allegations are Trump-false, meaning that they run counter to Trump's self-interest, therefore they're untrue?

As I've said before, Trump doesn't seem to believe in objective truth -- he believes that the truth is whatever he wants to be true. He believes polls that show him up and doesn't believe polls that show him down. He uses the term "fake news" to refer to any story that offends him or makes his life difficult. He doesn't even believe the Access Hollywood tape is genuine, even though he lived it.

So if he tells people that Roy Moore didn't engage in pedophilia, does that really mean he thinks Moore is innocent? Or is this just Trump believing he bends reality to his will?

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