Presidential Onanism -- Digby

[erronis]

https://digbysblog.net/2025/12/03/presidential-onanism/

Trump keeps saying that he can void all of Joe Biden’s pardons.



Obviously, this is not true and it has nothing to do with whether or not Biden signed the documents with an autopen which, by the way, is perfectly legitimate. It’s because Trump simply does not have the authority to void a previous president’s pardons.

It’s too bad, really, because it would be nice if a future president could void all the pardons Trump is giving and is planning to give to his criminal family, friends, cronies and accomplices. Perhaps he should give a moment’s thought to that.

I’m sure this is just schtick. He knows he can’t do it. So why does he persist in saying it? (This is not the first time he’s made this “declaration.” ) I suspect it’s just a form of mental masturbation, giving himself a thrill by issuing royal orders against the man he loves to blame for all of his own failures. The question is why so few of his followers, especially the officials in Washington, have had even the slightest objections or concerns about having a person of such low character, psychological impairment and compromised intelligence running the country. My conclusion after all this time is that they must be exactly the same way. And that means tens of millions of our fellow Americans are as well.

Getting Trump off the stage won’t solve that problem, I’m afraid.

Not sure if the included photo is of trump practicing while asleep.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Onan#Onanism

The term onanism has come to refer to "masturbation" in many modern languages – for example Hebrew (אוננות, onanút), German (Onanie), Greek (αυνανισμός, avnanismós), Japanese (オナニー, onanī , and Swedish (onani) – based on an interpretation of the Onan story.

The word onanism is not based on the biblical story of Onan itself but on an interpretation of that biblical story, nor is the word onanism found in any form in the biblical texts. Thus the etymological connection of onanism (in the sense of masturbation) with Onan's name is misleading.[62][47]

[The Roux Comes First]

1. Frankly, I Think He Is Reduced to Cut-and-Paste! I'm Open to Discussion, But Doesn't it Seem as If He Is

No longer of sufficient cognitive skill (when he is nominally awake!) to craft an actual grammatically correct assertion? OK, the bar is pretty low for him, given his 4th-grade reading and 3-rd-grade writing certification, not to mention decades of not demonstrating even those low skills.

How do we cut off his access to source materials for cut-and-paste - or flood the market with doggerel which will be instantly recognized?

[usonian]

2. No need to think. That's not a rocket in his pocket; it's a portable chatbot.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100220281483

he Hallucinating ChatGPT Presidency -- Is Trump a chatbot?
https://www.techdirt.com/2025/04/29/the-hallucinating-chatgpt-presidency/

Judge for yourself.

Tue, Apr 29th 2025 09:34am - Mike Masnick

We generally understand how LLM hallucinations work. An AI model tries to generate what seems like a plausible response to whatever you ask it, drawing on its training data to construct something that sounds right. The actual truth of the response is, at best, a secondary consideration.

snip

But over the last few months, it has occurred to me that, for all the hype about generative AI systems “hallucinating,” we pay much less attention to the fact that the current President does the same thing, nearly every day. The more you look at the way Donald Trump spews utter nonsense answers to questions, the more you begin to recognize a clear pattern — he answers questions in a manner quite similar to early versions of ChatGPT. The facts don’t matter, the language choices are a mess, but they are all designed to present a plausible-sounding answer to the question, based on no actual knowledge, nor any concern for whether or not the underlying facts are accurate.

snip

This is not the response of someone working from actual knowledge or policy understanding. Instead, it’s precisely how an LLM operates: taking a prompt (the question about job losses) and generating text based on some core parameters (the “system prompt” that requires deflecting blame and asserting greatness).

The hallmarks of AI generation are all here:
• Confident assertions without factual backing
• Meandering diversions that maintain loose semantic connection to the topic
• Pattern-matching to previous responses (“ripped off,” “billions of dollars”)
• Optimization for what sounds good rather than what’s true

Great article and hard to summarize, because the author gives so many spot-on examples.

[erronis]

3. Thanks for reposting this - fascinating thought. I think we all know people who think with their mouths.

[Efilroft Sul]

4. Onan the Magarian