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I guess it was gradual, but when did it become the job of journalists to try and guess what politicians mean when they make statements? Shouldn't the meaning be made clear by the speaker? Right now it seems like its:
This is what "sanewashing" refers to, if anyone was unclear on that.
This should be the word of the year, by the way. Someone really, really nailed it with that portmanteau. It perfectly describes what the "liberal media" does all the time with RWNJs like dimbulb donnie.
Oh I like that term. Will be applying it in my life. Thank you.
The media is rightly concern that MAGA will have a fit if they tell the truth so they go full Onion. We have reached the point of, "Idiocracy", but here we are.
Goes double for whether or not he's serious. The number of times I've heard something and have had a legitimately hard time telling if he's joking, or exaggerating, or just a complete fucking moron is absolutely crazy. Pretty much every sentence he utters becomes this endless game of trying to figure it out. It seems like his base just kind of randomly picks the option that makes the most sense to them and rolls with it.
He's joking if someone calls him on it, but serious if they don't.
The Krusty the Clown approach to threatening people.
If you haven't seen it : https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=zIu2dGTJlHM
The difference is he could be the next president and try to turn whatever he's thinking into national policy, so it's worthwhile to try and dissect what he's saying.
But those experts are also (somehow, still) not really accustomed to Trump's bombastic language. He was like this long before he got into national politics, hyping real estate and business for the market (where it kind of worked). That's a totally different world, where half lies and crazy sales talk are the norm.
I get what you're saying but they really should just be pointing out that he's not making any sense. Trump's speeches are being treated like Nostradamus' prophesies now. He spews a bunch of nonsense and people make up what they think it means. The guy should be in a home, not on the campaign trail and the media should make that clear to voters.
The worst part is they nitpick any piberal or progressive candidate on their exact phrasing while translating conservative hate speech into something less horrible.
It's not totally incoherent though, its vague and almost poetic.
This is kind of Trump's talent. He makes these grand statements that aren't quite lies. The crowd gets exactly what he's trying to say: all this water pouring out of snowy mountains into the ocean is a "waste" when it could just be diverted to LA, so let's fix that. It's worded almost like a dream. It's an attractive fantasy. But it's also vague, not quite enough to be a lie even if the implied facts are straight up wrong.
What can the news do? If they dig into it, he didn't really make any hard claims to roast. They can veer into opinion talk and say that sounds unpresedential and that his speech should be more clear, but making fun of his speech style at a rally is not supposed to be their job. So they do what they can, guess what he's saying and refute that.
Again, this was his talent before he got into politics. The Motley Fool did this great podcast on Trump (before Trump was big and political) where he sold massively overvalued real-estate from his private company to his public one, effectively "duping" the market, and it worked because he sold it as a vague fantasy just like this. He got plenty of criticism and it didn't matter, because he threaded the needle and what he's claiming is not hard enough to stick. This is what he does.
They can quote him as saying there's "a large faucet as big as perhaps this building and it takes a day to turn" and say there is no such faucet and move on with their day. That would be a much better thing than what they've been doing since 2015 which is this bullshit: trying to find a real life thing to attach his utterances to and then asking him if that was what he was referring to when he clearly wasn't.
His talent is getting other people to fill in the blanks with his absolutely moronic speeches. For a time, people were arguing that "injecting disinfectant" was a great idea, actually, and trying to find science to back that up. Then he walked it back as a joke because he realized everyone except the brain washed lunatics in the country thought he was an absolute idiot for saying that shit.
(Detailed with a large amount of humor here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wkO4QAP5wPo)
It's not the news media's job to make a blathering imbecile make sense, and they are doing great harm to the country by treating him this way.
The problem is, he has no idea about policy and really no interest in it, except when the decision obviously benefits himself, or benefits those who pretty directly benefit him. So whatever he's saying at this point is just stuff he thinks sounds good. It bears no relation to what he'll do, except where there's obviously something in it for him and his associates. That's why "I'll take vengeance on my opponents" or "I'll increase fossil fuel use and suppress green technologies" are the kinds of statements to take seriously from him, but "I'll sort out your water problems" is not, unless we can find a benefit for him in it. The question to ask is, "Is he saying this because he thinks it benefits him to say it, or because he thinks it benefits him to do it?" (And for him, making people he dislikes suffer counts as a benefit.)
This does benefit him if it gets him votes. He wants voters to like him, and he'd absolutely build this crazy pipe and slap his name on it if he could.
But like you said, he'd drop it like a rock if it's inconvenient.
Unlike other politicians, Trump accepted there's no real consequence for making fantasies up and almost lying, just like he did in business.
And anyone who's on the fence about Trump is not thinking critically like this, they are looking at a few things he's saying and pondering if its a good thing and benefits them.
And again, fact-based news journalism does not have the luxury of assuming "Here's what we think he's saying, and we think he's making that up because it benefits him, so it's probably nonsense."
News Readers in USA have been paraphrasing a long time. Now "paraphrasing" works really hard.