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  • The Atlantic

    Donald Trump and the Art of the ‘Con’

    The president keeps inveighing against all the con jobs he imagines surrounding him. You could say that it takes one to know one.
    by Ben Zimmer Sep 27, 2018 4 minutes
    Source: Carlos Barria / Reuters

    In Donald Trump’s bizarre, meandering 81-minute press conference on Wednesday, he often returned to his favorite words, lexical touchstones that he looped back to again and again, providing a patina of coherence and structure to his stubbornly unstructured discourse.

    Twenty-two times he said , though frequently to state disbelief. (“Nobody in this room believes it.” “Honestly, nobody knows who to believe.”) came up 13 times, as he managed to profess his affection for Canada, China, farmers, and even . He relied on his usual fleet of positive and negative adjectives, with everything arrayed in a Manichaean dichotomy: on one side, , , and ; and on the other, , , and (for news, of course) . Tellingly, he said his own name 15 times, whether it was to quote an unnamed expert who said that “China has total respect for Donald Trump and for Donald Trump’s very, very large brain,” or to implore a reporter to say “Thank you, Mr. Trump.”

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