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Have You Read the Constitution of the United States?
It’s a rhetorical question. I presume you all have, and many times over. And I presume you’ve all carefully read the Bill of Rights, and probably know the Second Amendment by heart. And so I assume that if you saw the following sentence, you’d know how it should be corrected: “The right of the people to keep and bear Arms shall not be infringed upon.”
You’d just whip out that red pen and get rid of the “upon,” wouldn’t you? Because you know what it actually says by heart, and that sounds wrong. It sounds wrong the way, “O say can you see, by the dawn’s early lightning” sounds wrong. It’s just not the way the lyrics go, and every Americans knows those lyrics by heart.
Well, I congratulate Donald Trump for his robust endorsement of something that sounds like the Second Amendment.
And I believe, based on that mistake, that he has rarely or never before read or thought deeply about the Second Amendment, because no one who has would make that mistake. I furthermore believe that no one in his employ proofread that position paper, or that the person who did was wholly incompetent.
That impresses me less than his endorsement of the Second Amendment.
What about you — impressed?
Published in Elections, General, Guns, Politics
I have no problem with Trump’s paraphrasing. And I support his proposal for reciprocity of concealed handgun licenses.
Headline: Trump makes entirely uncontroversial statement, ricochet has freak out.
more at 11.
It wouldn’t sit right with me if he got that wrong, either.
Trump should probably respond to this criticism with the same language that my principal used. She’d called me into her office to repeat some parental complaints that my requirement that students memorize large portions of the Bill of Rights was just too hard. She blithely gave me her recommendation:
“If anybody needs to know the exact words, they can simply look them up.”
Claire,
Please note: there is no quotation mark. As such, I’m not sure I understand this criticism.
Didn’t you get the memo from Picard? It’s “to boldly go where on one has gone before.”
Which makes the intro false, unfortunately, because plenty of other species appear to have gone pretty much everywhere before any Enterprise showed up on the scene. But who cares about truth or falsehood. We’re trying to speak Truth to Power!
I’ve heard that the real problem was that contract negotiations with Eric Idle broke down. It was supposed to go:
About the OP:
It’s The Donald. What do you expect? As his campaign tanks, I’m looking forward to him telling us:
Is that from Star Trek? I thought it was something Rosie O’Donnell’s girlfriend said.
If we’re going to talk about Donald Trump’s language, let’s talk about the way he speaks with repetition and an extremely limited vocabulary. He generally uses only words that are understandable by grade-schoolers – the fewer the syllables, the better.
Consider, for example, his controversial reply to the apparently unhinged person who asked him, at a “town hall” event, about terrorist training camps:
I was struck less by the substance of his remarks, and more by the words themselves: “We’re going to be looking at” (twice), “a lot” (thrice, including twice with “of people” added), “things” (thrice).
“Different things.” “Bad things.” “Other things.”
“Bad things are happening out there.”
No one who is as smart as Trump claims to be speaks this way. He sounds like Forrest Gump, except that character had the self-knowledge to say, “I’m not a smart man.”
Still a cheap shot, Claire. Take it like a (oops!)
Trump is being clever here. He convinced people who would otherwise not have been interested in either his Second Amendment position paper or his campaign for president, and others who oppose his campaign explicitly, to link to his campaign website.
There are Republican primary voters who never considered Trump a serious conservative, and who disregard his stances on the issues as affectations, who are now carefully parsing his positions on the issues that animate their votes.
Trump, in a statement this evening: “I am dedicated to the preposition…”
I would have to agree with Claire.
There is not a publisher in the United States that would let that error stand. It is too close in wording to be a paraphrase, and omitting the quotation marks does not get the author off the hook. Either reword it so it is a paraphrase, or get it right and use the quotation marks.
What is ironic is that it is the Constitution that was the basis of Trump’s support for the birther kerfuffle.
I would never admit this outside my little home office lest people think I’m idiot conspiracy believer, but I was a bit upset that Obama did not produce a proper birth certificate. There were good reasons (see Oliver Cromwell and Charles I) that the framers of the Constitution wanted someone who fit this description exactly:
Trump earned some points from me on that.
It’s interesting, and disturbing, that Wharton graduate Trump didn’t quote the Second Amendment perfectly. That said, I do agree with what he is doing in promoting a universal gun carrying license that will be legal in all fifty states.
Adding to comment 43:
However, one of our members (I think it was Leigh) surveyed all of the candidates’ websites after the first debate, and she found only Jindal’s to be ready for a serious campaign. I’m sure that with so many candidates running, most of them have been holding back in some ways as a budget and time matter. They seem to be in a rush now to catch up.
It’s sort of like the job hunt these days. Prospective employers expect the candidates to have exhaustive knowledge of the prospective employer, but for the candidate, it must be frustrating to guess how much time and money to risk on a job that might not materialize.
I imagine Trump has delayed for the same reason. He hasn’t had his position statements ready for the public’s consideration until very recently. Clearly this has been a rush job. Over time, I hope, his campaign staff will take the time edit his materials carefully.
I think Trump blew it. First, if he was trying to reassure Second Amendment supporters, gun-rights folks, of his bona fides, the better way would’ve been to get the language exactly right. By getting it wrong he leaves questions as to his seriousness or sincerity on the issue. See: this thread.
Second, the “Period.” is far more dramatic and effective withOUT the “upon” preceding it.
Seriously? (I can no longer tell reality from parody at this point.)
If I’d never heard the phrase before, I might correct it. But that particular split infinitive has entered literary immortality in our culture, and anyone who corrected it would sound like a fool or someone who didn’t understand America.
Which is sort of my point.
I knew when I posted this that I’d catch flak from a few people who’d say I’m just being pedantic because I don’t like Trump. It’s true that I don’t like Trump, and true that I might be inclined to give another candidate a pass on something like this.
But the reason I don’t like Trump is because it’s all like this. It’s all hat, no cowboy, and underneath it, not even the kind of shrewd, street-smart competence about which he’s endlessly boasting. If you release a policy paper about the Second Amendment — a subject very dear to the hearts of many Americans — it’s just basic common sense and competence to have someone who cares about the Second Amendment proofread it, first. Period. And that person will tell you, “That sounds weird.”
If you can’t be bothered to do that, don’t tell me you’re a great manager who knows how to hire the best people. Period.
If Trump was running for Historian General or Novelist Laureate, I would concede the point. But he isn’t.
If you can’t tell reality from parody at this point,chances are you have been paying close attention to the democratic party’s candidates:)
He ain’t running for dogcatcher, Mike.
What’s the president’s job? Let us review! Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States (that would be the world’s most expensive and powerful military with the largest nuclear arsenal, so that’s a big responsibility) and of the militia of the several states (many of which are more expensive and powerful than most of the UN member states), power to grant reprieves and pardons for offenses against the United States, power by and with the advice and consent of the Senate to make treaties (if he remembers, of course — seems optional these days) …. nominates other public ministers and consuls, judges of the Supreme Court, and all other officers of the United States … let’s see, what else. Oh, yeah: takes care that the laws are faithfully executed, fills up all vacancies that may happen during the recess of the Senate …
It’s a big job. Too big, in my view — I think we need less president and more Congress. But it’s still a big job. And I’m just not persuaded that he read the job description closely before he applied for it.
Asking a presidential candidate to know what the job’s all about — and in a pretty deep way, as in “knowing the natural sound of the Second Amendment at least as well as we all know the introduction to Star Trek” — really isn’t holding him a ridiculously high or unfair standard. Is it?
Most people know that if you send a job application with a typo in your CV, it’ll get tossed.
What typo? And what misquote, for that matter? Trump’s understanding of the Second Amendment is accurate. It protects an individual right, not a collective right as so many on the left disingenuously claim. That is what matters. You are making the perfect the enemy of the good, Claire.
(As usual, I can’t quote because I’m on my iPad. Will that problem ever be fixed?)
And not even a very good hat.
Well-regulated, but, yeah, I hear you. I wish they added a parenthetical “And if in the future nuclear weapons are invented, then, of course, they are exempt, so don’t even bring it up.”
;)
The original saying is “All hat, no cattle“. But I take your point.
But can you see that this reaction is exactly why people say they vote for Trump? Every time you offer a reason, he gets another vote. Not a real vote but a poll vote.
Trump is not really a candidate. There are really only 2 candidates in this race. Rubio and Fiorina. And Fiorina only recently.
This is all a big, fake show. That political people think it’s real is a little annoying. That Trump can tweak political people by exposing the overblown buffoonery of their little hobby is a great deal of fun for normal people. I love it.
I pray that you’re right.
I am right. I’m always right. But nobody believes me because I’m unserious. Which, paradoxically, is the source or my rightness.
What is going on here?
There are a lot of people—not quite so many on Ricochet—who support Trump, and have become invested in that support. It is not unexpected that they would be deaf to criticism of him, and have to admit they were being silly to have given him support all this time. There are already so many obvious negatives about Trump that have not yet persuaded his supporters to abandon him that additional minor ones won’t have any effect.
It will take serious additional negatives for Trump’s supporters to abandon him. I suspect that these negatives will take the form of Trump embarrassing himself by not being able to master the details of either foreign or domestic policy and being way out of his depth when the debates get down to just a few candidates
This particular criticism (…infringed upon), even if valid in itself, is so minor as to have zero value in persuading people who support Trump that their support is misguided.
You’re probably right.
They’re my Dream Ticket. But in the opposite order from above.