David Pakman

The baseline today clips of, you know, Trump mixing up the names of leaders of countries, forgetting what city he's in.

And it's like, yeah, you know, whatever.

We're kind of used to it.

And we process these obvious contradictions now in such a different way.

Even the perception of candidates changing their mind.

I mean, think back again to 2004, where John Kerry had this unfortunate line, something like, well, I voted for it before I voted against it, referring to the authorization to let George Bush go to war with Iraq.

Um, it destroyed him.

It, uh, among a couple other things, it destroyed John Kerry's candidacy.

Now he's still almost won by the way, came down to like 140,000 votes in Ohio, but it really did hurt him.

Leaders now on the same, forget about on the same day, a couple of weeks ago in a span of 10 minutes.

Trump said the Iran war is over and it's not.

We want to cease fire and we don't.

I'm considering troops on the ground and I'm not.

And it doesn't matter.

Elected officials in the past would have needed to do a month long apology tour and then write a white paper to explain how their view changed.

Trump takes three positions a day on every issue at this point in time.

And so it's that that has changed.

The tone aspect has changed.

Now, I'm not much for tone policing, but I do think there is value to speaking in a respectable way, treating other people with respect, not using dehumanizing language.

There were times when referring to your opponents as enemies from within or vermin or this kind of thing.