EAllusion wrote:What actually occurred is that you inferred that Trump had no role in encouraging anti-Semitism or a specific anti-Semetic attack because Trump issued a boilerplate statement condemning the attack. No anti-Semite would do that, the logic goes. First, that already starts with a strawman as there's a difference between accusing someone of being an anti-Semite and accusing someone of irresponsibly using anti-Semitic rhetoric for political gain, but perhaps that's a distinction without a difference. What I did in response to your argument is remind that he has promoted anti-Semitic messaging and that his rote denunciations don't mean a lot when he has a habit of contradicting them both before and after he makes them.
Yup. Sometimes Trump reads out a paragraph of logically structured and grammatically regular prose saying the kind of calming ethics-based stuff that a President of the United States might be expected to say.
It is however screamingly obvious that the paragraph in question has been put in his hands by a staffer, saying 'Mr President, if you don't say something like this it may alienate key voters in the mid-terms'.
But although Trump reads the paragraph out, what he says shortly afterwards often reveals that he wasn't really listening to himself at all ...