After repeatedly insisting Barack Obama was literally the founder of ISIS, Donald Trump is now saying it was all…sarcasm.
True, despite his insistence that he was shooting straight, the only sane explanation for Trump’s allegation was that he was engaging in hyperbole. But my sarcasm detector never went off.
Wouldn’t sarcasm require saying the opposite of what he was getting at?
If, for example, Trump had said, “Obama REALLY gets ISIS. Boy, I mean, you know, Obama immediately knew this was just the ‘Jayvee team,'” now that would be sarcasm.
Saying Obama invented ISIS is a wild exaggeration, yes, but is it sarcasm?
I’m not a scientist, man (or a linguistics expert, for that matter), but this feels like a rather loose interpretation of the term—kind of like Alanis Morissette’s not-so-perfect definition of “ironic.”
(I suppose it might be ironic for Trump to use imprecise language to clean up his past use of imprecise language.)
Who knows what led Trump to say this in the first place, but the best argument is probably that he wanted to change the subject from his gaffe about “Second Amendment people” assassinating Hillary Clinton.
This escalation strategy might sound shrewd, but at some point, you have to assume the frequency of its implementation leads to diminishing returns. I suspect we have long since reached that point.
Can an entire campaign be premised on saying something outrageous today, in order to overshadow the outrageous thing you said yesterday?
Now that would be a BRILLIANT strategy.
(This is sarcasm.)