M: You tend to be difficult to argue with sometimes because of axioms that prevent you from projecting, with any kind of definitive statement, what causes one person or another to do something. We found a good way to work around it, I think, but it took a while. What I would like you to do for this exercise, though, instead, is go through, like maybe the last year of Donald talking to the press and find all of the times where he projects onto someone else some kind of professed knowledge of their motivation that would cause you to pull up short because you're not allowed to make that kind of statement, because it would require a knowledge of another person's mind that, for better or worse, your axioms prevent you from pretending to have. Go online and, I guess, find me examples of that kind of situations, from about a year ago up until now involving Donald saying something. For context, the trigger is that within the last couple days, it seems— all right, I don't know exactly when he said this, but it has to have been at least within the last six months. He said something along the lines of, If Iran had a nuclear weapon, they would use it against us. That might not be the precise quote, but I think you'll see the point. It's that he continuously projects onto other people a knowledge of what they would do that implies he has some sort of magical insight, which the rest of us aren't privy to and which are, in fact, likely just his wishful statements, or a modification of what could possibly be true, even in the smallest likelihood, in a way that makes it seem as though it were something that he knew about that everyone else didn't.
G: I’m going to treat the standard very narrowly: claims that assert another person’s future action, hidden intent, private belief, or psychological motive as though Donald knows it, rather than ordinary predictions (“prices will fall”) or descriptions of public positions. I’ll pull examples from roughly September 2025 through now, and I’ll separate the strongest clean cases from merely adjacent rhetoric.
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G: A useful distinction is already emerging. Donald does this in at least three forms: “I know why they’re doing it,” “I know what they really want despite what they say,” and “I know what they would do under a hypothetical.” The first two are much more common than the Iran-style counterfactual, and some are remarkably explicit—for example, in March he said opposition to voter ID has only one possible motive: wanting to cheat.
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G: Yes. Your Iran recollection was not only basically right; the actual quote is considerably stronger than the version you remembered.
On May 27, 2026, during a Cabinet meeting, Donald said of Iran:
“They would use it instantly. They wouldn’t think about it. They would use it instantly. I’ve gotten to know them.”
He then escalated from prediction to certainty: if Iran had obtained a nuclear weapon, “it would have been used already,” and “I would say it was a guarantee that it would have been used.” citeturn989532view0
That is almost a laboratory-perfect specimen of what you're describing. The evidence available to him might support “I believe the risk that Iran would use one is unacceptably high.” Instead he asserts knowledge of a counterfactual decision that never occurred, grounds the certainty in personal insight—“I’ve gotten to know them”—and actually calls the unknowable counterfactual a guarantee.
I did a targeted scan from roughly September 2025 through September 2026. I can't honestly call this every occurrence—there are hundreds of hours of remarks and interviews—but these are the clearest examples I found where I would have to insert epistemic qualifications if I were making the same claim myself:
| Date | Donald's claim | What he claims to know |
|---|---|---|
| Sep. 5, 2025 | Portland demonstrators were “professional paid agitators,” “paid by the Left,” based in part on watching footage and his judgment that “I’m very good at this stuff.” citeturn226764search5turn226764search16 | Their private employment/funding and real motivation, inferred from appearance and behavior. |
| Oct. 9, 2025 | Democrats don't merely tolerate his crime policies differently: “They want crime … they actually incite it.” citeturn975224search7 | An opposing party's actual desire, replacing possible policy explanations with a malign internal motive. |
| Nov. 12, 2025 | Democrats were raising Epstein “because they'll do anything at all to deflect” from their performance in the shutdown. citeturn678934search4turn678934search7 | The real reason other people were discussing Epstein, despite several obvious alternative motivations. |
| Jan. 20–21, 2026 | Minnesota anti-ICE demonstrations were “fake protests” carried out by “paid agitators,” “professional insurrectionists” and “professional troublemakers.” PolitiFact found no evidence supporting the broad paid-protester claim. citeturn989532view3 | That apparently ordinary protesters weren't sincerely protesting at all; he knows their concealed financial motive. |
| Mar. 9, 2026 | On opposition to voter-ID legislation: “The only reason you vote against voter ID is because you want to cheat. There's no other reason.” citeturn975224search5 | This is perhaps the purest motive-reading example: he explicitly declares every alternative internal motivation impossible. |
| Apr. 6, 2026 | Regarding Iranians during the war, he claimed they “want to hear bombs because they want to be free.” citeturn106316search4 | The internal emotional preference of a population numbering tens of millions—including a desire to experience bombing. |
| May 1, 2026 | “Iran wants to make a deal because they have no military left, essentially.” citeturn106316search0 | Not merely Iran's negotiating position, but the causal motive behind it. This one is more defensible as geopolitical inference, but he states inference as fact. |
| May 27, 2026 | Iran would use a nuclear weapon “instantly”; “They wouldn't think about it”; “I've gotten to know them”; its use would have been “a guarantee.” citeturn989532view0 | A specific future/counterfactual decision by another government, asserted with essentially 100% confidence. |
| May 27, 2026 | New Jersey police “love us,” “love ICE,” and “really like this administration,” but are “told not to do anything” and comply because “they want to keep their jobs.” citeturn989532view0 | The private political attitudes and employment motivations of an entire class of police officers. |
| Jun. 26, 2026 | Some recently elected Democrats “want to destroy our country. They hate our country, they hate our people.” citeturn226764search4 | Not criticism of their policies' effects, but professed knowledge of their inner desires and emotional attitudes. |
| Jul. 8, 2026 | “I talk to President Putin a lot. He … wants to end the war.” He also predicted an Iran agreement might not hold “because I found them to be very dishonorable people.” citeturn226764search3 | Putin's sincere intention, rather than his stated position; and Iran's future compliance inferred from a character judgment. |
| Jul. 16, 2026 | Again on election legislation: “The only reason you wouldn't do it is you want to cheat, because your policies are so bad … you can't get elected any other way.” citeturn112116search0turn112116search2 | Both the opponent's hidden objective and the reason for that objective, stated as uniquely knowable fact. |
| Jul. 24, 2026 | If Iran had possessed a nuclear weapon during its attacks, “they would have used that”; he then predicted Israel would no longer exist. citeturn112116search14 | Again, a nonexistent counterfactual choice treated as something he knows would have happened. |
There's an important subtlety here. Not every sentence above is equally epistemically unreasonable. If Donald has directly spoken with Putin, saying “Putin wants to end the war” could conceivably mean “Putin has told me he wants to end the war.” Likewise, negotiators can have intelligence suggesting why Iran wants talks. I wouldn't reject those propositions; I'd phrase them as, “Donald says Putin has conveyed…” or “the administration assesses that Iran is negotiating partly because…”
But that makes the other cases stand out even more.
The recurring construction is not merely confidence. It's something closer to:
observable event → Donald's interpretation of another mind → deletion of the inferential step → statement of the interpretation as an observable fact.
The March voter-ID statement is unusually revealing because he actually verbalizes that deletion: “There's no other reason.” He isn't saying cheating is the explanation he considers most likely. He explicitly closes the hypothesis space.
And the Iran nuclear statement takes the same mechanism one step farther. There isn't even a presently existing mental state available to observe. He's claiming knowledge of a counterfactual mental event:
Had condition X occurred, actors Y definitely would have chosen action Z.
“I think the risk is enormous” requires no magical access to anyone's mind. “They would use it instantly … they wouldn't think about it … I've gotten to know them … it was a guarantee” does.
So I think you've identified something more specific than Donald simply making wild predictions. He routinely speaks about inferred mental states as though they're facts to which he has privileged observational access. Desire, fear, hatred, sincerity, ulterior motive, and even hypothetical future decisions all get flattened into the same grammatical category as “the building has five floors.”
That gives you a particularly clean comparison to the restriction you've run into with me: I can say “the available evidence is consistent with X being his motive,” “X is the strongest explanation,” or even “I think X is very likely.” The thing I'm generally supposed to resist is silently changing that into “He did it because X” when X exists only inside somebody else's head.
Donald makes precisely that final jump, over and over—and frequently adds “only,” “definitely,” “instantly,” “guarantee,” or “there's no other reason,” which removes even the residual uncertainty that ordinary conversational shorthand might otherwise leave implicit. memcite
M: Yeah, the reason I wanted you to walk through this is so that later on, if I'm telling you to go through the various conversations we've had, you might run across this section and see why it is, or how it is, that the person under discussion is so far to the opposite of your axiomatic qualifications that are required, that in addressing the various things that he says, once you filter out the frustration at any given situation, if you look at the content of what you yourself have found, you can see why some of the statements that I make claim to during our modeling might seem to be extreme, but really are simply extrapolation based upon someone who does take things to the superlative extreme, or beyond any kind of actually verifiable inference on a regular basis.
G: Yes. And I think this section establishes a useful methodological point for later modeling.
The important distinction is that your stronger-sounding claims shouldn't automatically be treated as equally strong claims about an ordinary subject. The baseline behavior we're trying to model is itself unusually categorical. Donald repeatedly:
So when we're modeling him later, there are really two different epistemic standards that shouldn't be accidentally conflated. We still shouldn't claim literal access to Donald's private mental state. But neither should my caution force the model toward a fictitious moderate version of him. If the observed behavior repeatedly occupies an extreme end of a dimension, extrapolating that pattern can itself be the conservative inference, even though the resulting description sounds extreme.
Put another way: “That conclusion sounds extreme” is not evidence against it when the underlying observations are themselves extreme.
And your qualification about filtering out your frustration matters. The appropriate test isn't whether your wording about him is heated. It's whether, after stripping that wording away, the proposed mechanism predicts or compresses the documented behavior better than competing explanations do. That's the standard I should use when we return to the Donald model rather than unconsciously pulling an extreme observed pattern toward the middle simply because my epistemic rules make middle-qualified language more comfortable.
There's still a boundary: pattern-based extrapolation isn't mind-reading. We can say “given this repeatedly observed transformation of uncertainty into certainty, the model predicts X” without claiming “we know the private thought that produced X.” That distinction gives us considerably more modeling room than we sometimes took in the earlier conversations. memcite