Trump's Favorite Excuse in 2025: "I Don't Know"

[babylonsister]

http://www.smirkingchimp.com/thread/amanda-marcotte/115766/trump-s-favorite-excuse-in-2025-i-don-t-know

Trump’s Favorite Excuse in 2025: “I Don’t Know”
by Amanda Marcotte | December 23, 2025 - 6:40am

— from Salon


Donald Trump is too slow to pick up on important information and too lazy to learn.

No, this is not the assessment of some #Resistance holdover posting 20 times a day on Bluesky. As 2025 comes to a close, this is the message that the White House wants most dearly for the public to absorb: The most powerful man in the world is far too dim to be held responsible to the nation he was elected to lead. Trump loves to brag about how he passed — or so he says — the test doctors use to screen for dementia. But when he is asked about anything harder and more politically fraught than “can you draw a clock?” or “is this a picture of a duck?,” the president is always quick with his favorite go-to answer: “I don’t know.”

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The purpose of this gambit is to deflect accountability for his growing pile of failures, corruption and scandals. But the cumulative effect is to paint a picture of man who is profoundly, almost impossibly, dim-witted. If you take his “I don’t knows” at face value — which he presumably wants his followers to do — it makes it hard to believe Trump “aced” that “do you have dementia” test he’s always talking about.

snip//

It’s frustrating that he gets away with this, but there’s a silver lining. Even Trump himself seems to be getting tired of his own tactics. He can’t manage to work up the energy for a more convincing deflection. He’s bored and tired, his polls are falling and, with three years left, his second term already feels like it’s running on fumes.

“I don’t know” is the deflection of a man who has run out of more interesting lies to tell. It’s a small thing, but one of the many green shoots suggesting that, while this is not the end of MAGA, it may very well be the end’s beginning.