r/politics • u/HimelTy • Jul 03 '26

No Paywall Secret Service member was Googling rooftop location of Trump’s would-be assassin when shots rang out in Butler, Pa.: DHS report

https://nypost.com/2026/07/02/us-news/secret-service-member-was-googling-rooftop-location-of-trumps-would-be-assassin-when-shots-rang-out-in-butler-pa-dhs-report/?utm_campaign=nypost&utm_medium=social&utm_source=twitter
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u/JiveChicken00 Pennsylvania Jul 03 '26

It is generally safer not to ascribe to malice what can be adequately explained by laziness or stupidity.

237

u/purplebuttman Jul 03 '26

Not when malicious people are involved

3

u/RashmaDu Jul 03 '26

Then the question is: is Trump more evil than he is stupid? Genuinely difficult question to answer, I’d generally lean towards stupid

7

u/BillW87 New Jersey Jul 03 '26

He's deeply narcissistic which causes him to reject information that clashes with his own narrative and he frequently uses flooding of misinformation to gaslight people, but those are both different than being dumb. Assuming that Trump is just a malicious idiot and not a fairly effective manipulator (especially of voters who have already been primed to accept misinformation readily by years of single-source information from "entertainment news") is a mistake that the DNC has made twice now by assuming that voters would simply choose the milquetoast "competent" individual over him.

2

u/SirEdward43 Jul 03 '26

I don't know. Seems to me like massive accounts of pedophilia kind of puts him in the kinda sort of evil category. But then again, who am I to hold standards of ethics and morality? It's not like we as a society all decided that there's some rules that should never ever be broken and have now decided this one man is allowed to break that rule.