[Revised with short tutoring on America's enthralled obsession with the correct usage of ... commas.]
Last week the progressive left (as opposed to my indefinable, nonidealogical tribe of the FDR center-left) became all aquiver with boundless joy because finally a recording of Donald Trump bleating "I lost the election" has been unshrouded. The denuding issues forth somewhere in the pages of the newly released Apprentice in Wonderland, by journalist Ramin Setoodeh.
Trump did indeed say "I lost the election." If one's slightest peripheral vision then failed to catch his following six-word independent clause, "but when they said we lost,” one would have all-uppercase cause for rejoicing, just as the bleater's scribbled bile is emphatically capped.
The misfortunate truth of progressives' roiling whoop-de-do of We got him! We finally got him! is that there's not even a slim reed of confession in "I lost the election, but when they said we lost."
Brace for brief English lesson. In the quoted sentence there dwells an example of grammar's proper use of a comma, an infinitely and understandably dull subject to most readers. A comma's correct usage may be a boring topic, but it carries an important distinction, as just re-demonstrated by the preceding comma. The other, the same: "I lost the election, but when they said we lost" — comma, correct.
"I lost the election but when they said we lost." Incorrect. For here are two independent clauses, meaning stand-alone sentences. A dependent clause means just what it sounds like: It's dependent on the first, hence dismissible. Trump's blather was no such creature; he unmistakably conditioned his first words on progressives' mistaken confession.
It could be that Trump genuinely slipped and let loose with the titanic truth that has ping-ponged in his head since 6 November 2020. But that he promptly reversed in the same sentence, and so its beginning was nullified.
What puzzled me are the already existing documented instances of Trump confessing to associates that, yep, he lost. (Like this one.) These aren't recorded moments, however the credibility of friends and White House familiars — people who harbored no political reason to spill the beans — renders the documented as valid as the recorded. This additional confession, if one wishes to so call it, is superfluous at best.
Yet none of my "I object, your Honor" observations — either his salient negation or preexisting utterances of election reality — appeared in progressives' online celebrations. Not that I saw, anyway. Of course I scarcely surveyed them all, so apologies to those who perhaps prudently refrained.
What then puzzled me far beyond my initial state was this tweet sent by Harvard Law's Professor Emeritus Laurence Tribe.
No way I'd debate such a distinguished law professor on what's admissible evidence. What I would dispute is its usefulness. Or rather, in this case I'd prosecute its naked uselessness — Q.E.D., above. A 1L student from the law school widely dubbed the "worst in America" could discredit with ease, I should think, the allegation of a blundering Trump confession.
Prof. Tribe might have wanted only to protect his adversarial attack bona fides in the heaven-sent anti-Trump crusade. Of that I've been a proud equestrian knight (or one's accompanying pauper) lo these many years. But I shall never partake of the seamy out-of-context kind of anti-Obama horseshit like Romney's "You didn't build that."
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