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Comment by adamrezich | Hacker News Reader

Sorry, I wasn't clear; I was asking what the basis was for the assumption both you and your parent comment were making here:

>I don't think [Trump] ever thought he would win [the 2016 US Presidential election].

>That's almost certainly true,

Things like this get tossed around a lot, presumptions about the thought processes of others, specifically public figures. The parent comment to yours at least couched the assertion in an "I think," but you went on to reply, "That's almost certainly true," as though you have some sort of intimate understanding of the President's thought process that the rest of us aren't privy to. I feel that these sort of careless assertions bring down the quality of discourse in general, but here on HN specifically.

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Fire and Fury asserts in the first chapter that Trump and just about everyone else involved thought he wouldn’t win, and that Trump himself didn’t want to win. I’m not saying that book is reliable, but you can find a lot of detail there if you want to understand the claim.

Fire and Fury is also almost entirely fiction. The author had no access whatsoever, is known for just making shit up, and has admitted that he made shit up _in this particular book_. Yet some people continue to treat it as a documentary account of some sort.

The word “access” may be some kind of jargon, but many people have confirmed that Michael Wolff was often physically present in the White House. He spoke to Trump and many members of the campaign before and after the election.

Hope Hicks approved his access, and Steve Bannon confirmed much of what he wrote.

Yet the fact remains: he had 12 interactions with campaign staff, just one of which was was with Trump. It lasted 7 minutes. Hardly enough for a substantial book, so the rest of it he basically sucked out of his thumb, including such lurid fantasies as Trump having an affair with Nikki Haley.

https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.theatlantic.com/amp/article...

12 interactions? Or 12 lengthy interviews?

Steve Bannon has more incentive than anyone to contest the books accuracy and he’s basically confirmed it.

This is even better.

http://www.nydailynews.com/news/politics/steve-bannon-no-reg...

“Bannon said Thursday that his interviews with Wolff were “authorized” by both the White House and outgoing communications director Hope Hicks.

Bannon called a meeting between President Trump's eldest son Donald Jr. and a Russian lawyer "treasonous" in Wolff's book. “I haven’t seen anybody refute anything that was said in the book,” Bannon said.”

It's not really a controversial idea that no one thought Trump was going to win, including himself. Look at the state of his campaign, he didn't even have a cabinet worked out or any kind of transition plan. The first 100 days were a complete mess with people cobbled together from random areas of his life. The Michael Wolff book lays it out pretty clearly about what the thought process was at the time. If you look at the situation, they were not expecting a win at all.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2018/01/michael-wolff-f...

Not really sure what you're looking for, this is politics not computer science. You'll never get a sigma six answer for any of this. That's about as close as you're going to get in politics for any "fact".

You have an agenda and therefore make statements that pretend to be factual 'well we all know that, don't we?'. Plenty of other places to conduct that game.

I think for anyone who hasn't been hiding under a rock this is pretty well known. There's no real game here, just those who have been paying attention and those who have not.

If any of this comes off as a surprise, I would do more digging into most of this.

Despite you saying "it's an uncontroversial idea" and a book some guy wrote with obvious political intent, I still feel that projecting thoughts and feelings onto someone is dangerous, because it means that my perception of the world is no longer necessarily founded in reality. The more assumptions like this one makes, the further one's own internal reality has the potential of drifting away from those who don't share it.

I've been making an effort to do less and less of this, myself, in the past few years, and I feel that it's helped my perception of reality considerably. For example, I predicted the outcome of the 2016 US Presidential election early in the year, while very nearly everyone I knew—even those who supported and voted for Trump!—were sure he would lose. I refused to buy into memes that ascribe intentions or motivations to public figures based on hearsay, and I believe this helped me understand all the crazy shit that went on that year quite a bit better.

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