Might is not will

Trump in 2011:

Narcissists are big on projection.

The thing that annoys me most about that clip though is the last thing he says – Isn’t it pathetic.

What is “it”? The thing Trump predicts Obama will do. It’s a prediction, it’s about the future, so Trump can’t know it will happen. He couldn’t know that even if his reasons for thinking so (or pretending to think so) were good as opposed to contemptible. It’s now in the past so we know it didn’t happen, so his stupid prediction based on ludicrous and disgusting assumptions was a bad wrong prediction, but even if it had been a good one, you can’t exclaim “Isn’t it pathetic!” about an action you predict will happen. You need the conditional tense for that, not the future.

That’s not a merely grammatical or aesthetic point, it’s fundamental – it’s about being able to keep track of what you know and what you don’t, what you can know and what you can’t, of reality itself. What is really pathetic is Trump’s apparent conviction that his thoughts are so powerful that his mere venomous prediction about Obama can create a future fact that he then gets to call pathetic.

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