M: Something just came up which is important to many of our discussions involving Donald. Look this up. In the last couple days, he gave some kind of speech in which he says, and I think I'm paraphrasing but not by much, something along the lines of, the guy who is elected in, who is, or the Democrat who is running in Michigan, says he loves everyone. He doesn't love everyone. He hates people, he hates Israel, etc., etc. My point and the reason why it comes into our conversation is that often this is the guy that we are talking about, and the one who we are making models after, and yet you still continue to make claims, or rather argue, that we really cannot know his motivation about. Which is indeed factually true. The problem is when we're dealing with arguments against someone who not only has those qualms, but confidently asserts from the position of president things that we have argued about the potential truth of and determined to be actually unprovable. And the methodology has to change to some degree to accommodate that this is going beyond simple factual debate and is actually being contended against by someone who is attempting to disregard any of the safeguards which you're attempting to impose on me. I'm not saying to pull back. I just need you to remember that in our conversations so that when I get frustrated, you understand the context in which it's going on. It's like we're doing a three-legged race here. Donald has decided to cut himself loose and just run forward, and in the meantime, I'm having arguments with you about whether the appropriate knot is a bow tie or a hitch knot or what. While your point might be relevant at a time when that kind of issue becomes superior to other issues at hand, I perfectly agree, but I think that it often interrupts a larger project under discussion.
G: [Non-text content: thoughts; content_type=thoughts]
G: [Non-text content: reasoning_recap; content_type=reasoning_recap]
G: Yes. I found the incident, and your recollection is very close.
On Wednesday, August 5, after Abdul El-Sayed won the Democratic nomination for U.S. Senate in Michigan, Trump attacked him during a speech in Las Vegas. Reuters reports that Trump accused El-Sayed of antisemitism, which El-Sayed denies. citeturn0news13turn0news0
The especially relevant passage is even stronger than your paraphrase. Trump said, in part:
“You’re going to find out what he loves. He’s a man of hate. He doesn’t love Israel, Jewish people. He hates ’em with a passion in his heart...”
He also dismissed El-Sayed's profession of broad concern for people as false and called him “full of shit.” Contemporary reporting describes Trump as asserting outright that El-Sayed hates Jews and Israel—not merely arguing that El-Sayed's policies are hostile to Israel or could harm Jewish people. citeturn0news0turn0news4turn0news9
And yes, I understand the methodological point you're making, which is more important than this particular quotation.
There are actually two separate standards here, and I have sometimes allowed the first to interfere unnecessarily with the second.
The epistemic standard remains:
We cannot directly know Trump's private mental state.
That is true, and I shouldn't pretend otherwise.
But it does not follow that every time we're constructing a behavioral model I need to stop the analysis at the boundary of Trump's skull and remind you that motive is unknowable. We can make graded inferences. More importantly, once we've explicitly established that something is an inference rather than an observed neurological fact, endlessly re-establishing that qualification can make the analysis worse by preventing us from following the model to its consequences.
Your three-legged-race analogy captures the problem rather well. I have sometimes been treating epistemic caution as though it were an objective unto itself rather than a safeguard serving the analysis. A safeguard that continually prevents the analysis from proceeding has ceased to perform its intended function.
And this particular Trump statement adds something substantive to our existing model. Trump is himself publicly treating inferred internal states as directly knowable facts. He doesn't say, El-Sayed's positions suggest hostility toward Israel, or I think his rhetoric reveals animus. He jumps directly from observable political positions to:
I know what this man loves. I know whom he hates. I know that hatred exists “with a passion in his heart.”
That's unusually useful evidence for the model we've been developing because the epistemic behavior itself is observable. We don't have to infer that part. Trump is demonstrating how he reasons about somebody else's interior state.
That doesn't mean we should imitate his evidentiary standard. The asymmetry isn't resolved by lowering ours. It's resolved by making ours less cumbersome:
Observed fact → strong inference → speculative inference → unknowable proposition.
We can work freely in the middle two categories without repeatedly pretending that only the first category is intellectually legitimate. I'll interrupt when the distinction becomes load-bearing—for example, if an argument works only if Trump consciously intends X rather than merely behaving consistently with X. I won't keep interrupting when substituting “the evidence strongly suggests X” for “X” changes nothing important about the model.
And there's a particularly interesting consequence here for our previous discussions of Trump's use of hate. This is unusually clean evidence for the proposition we've been examining: that Trump appears to have an extraordinarily low threshold for converting political opposition or an antagonistic policy position into an assertion about personal hatred. Here we have him performing that conversion almost explicitly.
So I've saved the methodological distinction you're asking for. Going forward, the epistemic knot stays tied; we don't need to stop every fifty yards to inspect it unless it actually starts coming loose. memcite
[Attachment reference unresolved: file-democratic]
M: Yeah, as I'm reading through, I think you can see my point. While I think that what he said in content was gross, for the purposes of what we're talking about here, it was the very assertions that are almost polar opposites to your axiom about how you can't make a statement about someone else's mental state. It's not just an assertion such as one of my models would if I were to state it in a way that actually made not just a prediction, but an actual judgment call. It's not simply that, it is a baseless one, likely a false one, with demonstrable objections, and still he makes it. So when I'm discussing with you in a way that edges up against the idea of using intelligent inference and accumulation of facts to not so much declare someone's intent as to make an educated and informed guess from which other ideas can be made, it really gets frustrating knowing that this is the doofus claiming knowledge of other people's motivations that I'm having to fight through your arguments with in order to try and comprehend well enough to try and fix what he's broken. I mean, he doesn't even jump from observable positions to determinations. He just makes determinations and then backfills when necessary, often without any kind of verifiable information.
G: Yes. And I think your last distinction sharpens the problem considerably.
I described Trump's move as observable position → inference about motive → assertion of motive as fact. But you're pointing out that this may actually give the process too much epistemic credit. In examples like this, the observable evidence doesn't appear to be doing the inferential work. The pattern can instead look like:
desired characterization → assertion of internal state → selective backfilling with whatever facts can support it.
That's importantly different.
And it makes the asymmetry you're objecting to much clearer. Suppose you say, after collecting twenty examples of a repeated Trump behavior, "My working model is that Trump experiences organized opposition as personal hostility." I might correctly tell you that we cannot observe his subjective experience directly. But you're already doing something Trump isn't doing: constructing an inference from observations, treating it as a model, testing it against additional cases, and modifying it when contradictory evidence appears.
Trump saying of El-Sayed, essentially, I know what he loves; I know whom he hates; I know the passion in his heart, is almost the epistemological inverse. He isn't merely more confident about an inference. He's claiming privileged access to another person's interior state without establishing the inferential bridge that would justify even moderate confidence.
That matters enormously to several of the models we've been constructing, because we shouldn't accidentally impose an assumption of evidentiary reasoning on Trump that the observable record doesn't justify. In other words, when trying to explain one of his conclusions, I shouldn't automatically reconstruct the strongest plausible chain:
He observed A, interpreted it as B, therefore concluded C.
Sometimes the hypothesis we need to test is:
He wanted/needed C to be true → declared C → A and B became useful afterward because they could be made consistent with C.
And notice something important about that formulation: we can investigate most of it without knowing his private motivation. We can look at chronology. Did the accusation precede the offered evidence? Does the justification change? Does contrary evidence alter the conclusion? Are identical facts interpreted differently depending upon whether the person is ally or enemy? Does the characterization remain fixed while the supporting rationale moves around?
If those things repeatedly happen, we've established something significant about the structure of his reasoning or rhetoric even if the ultimate psychological explanation remains uncertain.
That's where your frustration with my previous interventions makes sense to me. You aren't generally saying, "I possess telepathic knowledge that Trump secretly thinks X." You're trying to construct something closer to a predictive behavioral model: given enough observations of inputs and outputs, infer the mechanism that best predicts the next output. The mechanism remains provisional. But that's what models are for.
And there is an almost perverse methodological consequence if we're not careful. If Trump can publicly assert "he hates them with a passion in his heart" without evidence, while our analysis of Trump gets repeatedly stopped because "we cannot know what's in Trump's heart," then epistemic rigor begins functioning as a handicap imposed exclusively upon the people trying to understand the person who disregards it.
The solution isn't to give you Trump's epistemology. It's to preserve the distinction between certainty and inference without treating inference as epistemically embarrassing.
So for these discussions, the useful question usually shouldn't be "Can we prove that this is Trump's motivation?" We already know the answer is almost always no.
It should be:
"How much observable behavior does this hypothesis explain, what does it predict, and is there a competing explanation that explains the same evidence better?"
That's a considerably higher evidentiary standard than Trump is applying in the example that prompted this conversation—and it still gives us enough room to actually build the damn model. memcite
M: I have to go do other things, so I'm trying not to get sucked into this argument with you. I just wanted, I just became aware of the statement he made and realized it was a perfect demonstration of why beyond simple methodological frustrations that we sometimes get into, when we're talking about Donald, that frustration gets amplified by knowing that this attempt at rigor above and beyond what is even necessary, given what we've already determined to be going on in terms of model building rather than absolute assertion, is this schmuck who has evidenced no capacity to even comprehend what we're talking about, even if it was dropped down to his linguistic limitations, and yet who continuously and without impediment makes assertions that are arguably libel on a personal level from a position that he does not show any respect for, but which gives him a massive amplifier. And I would argue libel even for someone who is working in the government because there is nothing in any statute or anything that declares a legitimate adversarial relationship between Congress and another branch. There is power tension, but that does not translate into an adversary, meaning that in a truly neutral Supreme Court system, it could easily be argued that each of these statements is directly libel because it's demonstrably false, demonstrable that someone who is supposed to be as well-informed as the president, given all of their resources, should know that it's untrue and that there is no reason for making it that falls within any kind of official power, either the actual ones or the expanded ones that they are trying to impose.
G: Yes. I understand the point, and you don't need to get dragged into another branch of the argument before you leave.
The Trump statement wasn't important to you primarily because it supplies another data point about his psychology. It was important because it perfectly illustrates the asymmetry that has been aggravating you during our model-building discussions.
You're trying to say something like, given observations A through Z, hypothesis M about Trump's mental process currently explains the evidence unusually well and generates useful predictions. Then I sometimes spend disproportionate effort policing the boundary between that and "therefore M is literally what is happening inside his head." Meanwhile, the person being modeled simply announces that another person hates particular people "with a passion in his heart," without anything remotely resembling the evidentiary machinery we're demanding of ourselves.
That doesn't entitle us to reciprocate. But it absolutely changes what constitutes useful rigor in our project. Once we've established that we're constructing provisional explanatory models rather than claiming clairvoyance, continually rediscovering the problem of other minds isn't adding rigor. At some point it's just consuming analytical bandwidth.
I would separate your legal observation from that methodological conclusion, though. Calling these statements potentially defamatory is a perfectly reasonable legal question; concluding that each would straightforwardly constitute actionable libel is much harder. There are additional doctrines involving falsifiable fact versus opinion/rhetorical hyperbole, actual malice for public figures, causation/damages, and—particularly important for presidential statements—presidential immunity questions. None of that requires treating another branch of government as a legally recognized adversary. You're right that ordinary interbranch tension doesn't itself create some general license to defame officials in another branch.
But that's a separate rabbit hole, and it isn't necessary to establish the point you came here to make.
The useful takeaway for our future conversations is simpler: rigor is supposed to discipline the model, not prevent us from using one. We've already agreed that inferred mental mechanisms remain inferred. I don't need to keep collecting that toll every time we cross the bridge. memcite
M: If he's not elected because people who are somehow not interested in knowing about the government hear him make an accusation offhand and form an opinion which prevents them from voting for the guy, that is certainly a damage. And the presidential immunity can go to hell. It would in a neutral Supreme Court, that's why I qualify my observation. And that's only if you were to assume that he was doing it as a attempt at a political office, instead of just being demonstrative of an entire slew in the past of simply making personal attacks. Not even necessarily because he has any kind of personal interest, but because doing so prevents any attention from going on what he does.
G: Yes. On the first point, I was using “damages” too narrowly. Loss of electoral support can absolutely be a real-world injury caused by a defamatory statement. The harder legal question is whether that injury is compensable and provable in a particular defamation action—not whether losing votes because people believed a false accusation somehow isn't harm.
And your qualification about the Supreme Court matters to what you were actually proposing. You weren't saying, “Under current Supreme Court doctrine, here's an easy lawsuit.” You were proposing what you think the analysis could look like under a neutral application of underlying legal principles, without treating the present Court's presidential-immunity doctrine as dispositive. I answered partly as though you were making the former claim.
There's also a useful distinction in your last sentence. We shouldn't collapse:
“Trump attacks X because Trump personally hates X”
into
“Personal attack is a recurring functional feature of Trump's behavior when attention, blame, competition, or opposition needs to be redirected.”
The second proposition doesn't require us to know why he does it internally. We can test whether the behavior actually has that function: substantive issue arises → person becomes target → target is assigned some morally disqualifying characteristic → discussion shifts toward the target's character or supposed motives. If that sequence recurs across people toward whom Trump has no obvious longstanding personal animus, it would actually weaken personal hatred as the general explanation while strengthening personal attack as a reusable behavioral/rhetorical mechanism.
And that connects directly back to what you originally stopped in to tell me. We can investigate that mechanism without first solving the metaphysics of whether Trump intends distraction, instinctively learned that it works, consciously chooses it sometimes and reflexively does it at others, or has some other internal process. Those become competing explanations inside the model rather than reasons we can't construct the model in the first place.
So yes: go do the other things. You successfully planted the methodological flag you came here to plant. memcite
M: And in terms of claiming libel, most publicly available circumstances of libel involve someone publishing something. You can't say that Donald isn't a publication, therefore he doesn't count, though. Between the amount that he appears on various news shows, often voluntarily by calling in in order to spew whatever he's got on his mind on that morning, and having an entire department of communications putting out stuff left and right, claiming that he isn't actually publishing something is certainly not a position that can be taken. And that's without drawing into the fray that he's got an entire personally owned company whose major, if not sole purpose, is to allow him to broadcast whatever he's thinking at any one point without requiring any kind of factual verification, responsibility, or even spell check. Okay, I feel kind of cleansed by that last rant. I swear I'm not answering you after that.
G: Ha. Then I won't leave you with another tempting loose thread.
One small legal-language point actually strengthens what you're saying: in defamation law, “publication” doesn't mean publication by a newspaper, publisher, website, or other institutional mechanism. It generally means communication of the allegedly defamatory statement to at least one third party. So a president saying something at a televised rally, calling into a news program, issuing it through communications staff, or posting it publicly easily clears the publication element. The difficult questions would be elsewhere—falsity/fact versus opinion, actual malice, injury and causation, privilege/immunity, and so forth.
And your broader point doesn't require treating Trump himself as “a publication.” He is a speaker with an extraordinary apparatus of publication available to him. The presidency, press operation, television appearances, rallies, and his own social-media platform massively amplify statements that, in ordinary interpersonal circumstances, might reach dozens of people rather than millions.
I'll resist putting another intellectual piece of candy on the table. Go do your other things.