Tom Hicks | October 8, 2026
Editorial Note
Off Script is independent journalism. I’m a lifelong Independent, not a spokesman for either party. If a Democrat deserves the hit, they get it. If a Republican deserves it, they get it. And if the facts ruin the argument I wanted to make, the facts win.
I almost called this article “Fuck You, MAGA.”
It had a certain directness, and after the last week or so I had plenty of material to work with. Every time I wrote something about Donald Trump, a whole lot of somebodys seemed to show up to explain what Trump really meant, what I had obviously failed to understand, which part of the context I had supposedly ignored and, occasionally, what must be wrong with me for not understanding something that was apparently crystal clear to everybody else.
One particularly charming response informed me that Trump speaks in ways that “baffle the really stupid.”
I’ll admit, that one stayed with me. Not because somebody on the internet called me stupid. I spent years in radio, worked as a paralegal, did stand-up comedy, and now publish political opinions under my own name. Hell, I even did a brief stint as a substitute teacher in middle and high school. If being called stupid by a stranger were enough to send me looking for a safe space, I have made a spectacular series of bad career choices.
What stuck with me was the argument underneath the insult.
The problem, apparently, wasn’t what Donald Trump had said. The problem was that I expected the President of the United States to communicate in a way that didn’t require an unpaid team of amateur translators in the comments section, and somewhere in there I realized that the replies weren’t really what was bothering me.
It was the curve.
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We have developed a different standard for Donald Trump than the one we use for almost anybody else in public life. He says something confusing, inflammatory, seemingly outrageous, or mind-numbingly stupid, and before the rest of us have finished asking, What the hell did he just say?, the translation department is already open for business.
You have to understand how Trump talks. You have to listen to the whole thing. You have to know what he meant ten minutes earlier. Everybody knows what he meant.
Here’s the irritating part. Sometimes they’re right.
Which is precisely why I keep checking.
I’m not interested in pretending Trump said something he didn’t just because the fake version would make a better column. His comments this week about Iran, Los Angeles and San Diego are a pretty good example because when I first saw the quote I thought, Oh, for Christ’s sake, what did he say now?
At his October 5 rally in Nebraska, while talking about the Iran war and higher gas prices, Trump said:
“They can take out a city. Let them take, let it, let them take out Los Angeles. Let them take out San Diego.”
Read that by itself, and it sounds horrifying. Plenty of people did exactly that, including California Gov. Gavin Newsom, who accused Trump of saying America’s enemies should attack Los Angeles and San Diego. Reuters reported similar condemnation from the mayors of both cities and some California Republicans.
So I went looking at the rest of it.
FactCheck.org did too. After examining the full passage, Trump’s earlier comments during the speech, previous remarks on the same subject, and the White House’s explanation, it concluded that the more plausible interpretation was almost the opposite. Trump appeared to be arguing that the war was preventing Iran from someday threatening American cities and that higher gas prices were a relatively small price to pay for that protection.
So I’m not going to tell you Donald Trump asked Iran to bomb Los Angeles and San Diego. I don’t think he did.
That would have been a hell of a story, and the context ruined it.
Good.
That’s what context is supposed to be allowed to do.
But once we’ve given Trump the context he deserves, there’s another question sitting there that nobody seems particularly interested in asking. Why did it take fact-checkers, the White House, reporters, politicians, and several thousand people on social media to figure out what the President of the United States was trying to say?
That’s where the grading curve comes in.
Trump didn’t simply substitute the wrong word and correct himself. He wandered through a thought badly enough that reasonable people heard something almost exactly opposite to what he apparently intended, and then everybody else had to go back through the tape and reconstruct the sentence afterward. We have become so accustomed to doing this with him that the need for translation is now treated as evidence that the listener screwed up.
Try applying that standard to Joe Biden.
I voted for Biden, so I’m not going to rewrite history now just because it would be convenient. There were already widespread concerns about his age and ability to serve another term before the June 2024 debate. His halting performance that night intensified them dramatically and eventually helped set off the crisis that ended with him leaving the race. When Biden lost his train of thought, mangled a sentence, or seemed unable to communicate clearly, those moments became part of the argument about whether he remained capable of doing the job.
Sometimes fairly. Sometimes gleefully. Sometimes with clips that deserved more context than they got.
But I don’t remember an entire political movement insisting that the burden was on the American public to learn how to speak Biden.
Nobody handed us a decoder ring and said, Come on, you know how Joe talks. You know what he meant.
If clarity from the President mattered then, it matters now.
I’m not diagnosing Donald Trump. I’m not a doctor, and watching somebody on television does not confer a medical degree, no matter how many people on social media appear to believe otherwise. I’m talking about something we can actually observe: the words coming out of the President’s mouth and the extraordinary amount of reconstruction sometimes required afterward to turn those words into the argument his defenders say he intended to make.
Biden had trouble communicating, and it counted against him.
Why shouldn’t it count against Trump?
That doesn’t mean deliberately misunderstanding him. It doesn’t mean clipping six seconds out of a speech, throwing away the surrounding context and pretending the worst possible interpretation must be the correct one. In fact, the Los Angeles example is exactly why we shouldn’t do that.
It means the same standard applies in both directions.
Which brings me, somewhat reluctantly, to some of you.
If you’re going to tell me I’m wrong, have at it. Tell me my evidence is weak. Tell me I missed something. Find the hole in my reasoning and drive a truck through it. If I get a fact wrong, show me, because I would much rather correct something publicly than spend three days defending something I privately know is bullshit.
But first, read the damn article.
A title isn’t the article. Neither is the subtitle. And the picture sure as hell isn’t the article. Their job is to make you curious enough to read what comes underneath them, not to save you the inconvenience of doing so.
Over the past week or so, I’ve had people argue with positions I never took, assign motives I never expressed, and explain to me what I supposedly believe. Then I go back and look at what I actually wrote and discover that somewhere between the headline and the comment box, an entirely different Tom Hicks apparently wrote an entirely different article.
I would very much like to meet him. Apparently he has more free time than I do.
There’s something almost perfect about the contradiction. Donald Trump says something that sounds appalling, and some of the people defending him will search backward through twenty minutes of a rally, examine previous statements and parse every bit of surrounding context to arrive at the fairest possible interpretation of what he intended.
I write something they don’t like, and suddenly six words in a headline and a photograph are sufficient to establish my argument, my motives and possibly my plans for the weekend.
Pick a standard.
I’m fine with the one that says context matters. In fact, I prefer it. Context matters when Trump speaks, it mattered when Biden spoke, it matters when Gavin Newsom reacts to Trump, and it matters when I write something that pisses you off.
The catch is that you have to let context work even when it helps the guy you don’t like.
That’s the price of intellectual honesty, and I just paid it in this very article. The easy version of the Los Angeles story was sitting right there waiting for me. Trump’s actual words would have made one hell of a headline. I could have stopped at the clip, called him deranged, and probably collected a few approving nods from people who already agree with me.
Instead I kept reading, and the facts got in the way.
I wish that happened more often.
It’s also why I keep coming back to receipts. I don’t care whether the information comes from a source you consider liberal, conservative, or somewhere in between. I care whether the claim survives examination.
Fox News is perfectly entitled to cover the world from a conservative perspective. Having a point of view doesn’t automatically make journalism false. But a logo isn’t evidence, and neither is reputation by itself.
In 2023, Fox agreed to pay Dominion Voting Systems $787.5 million to settle Dominion’s defamation lawsuit. In Fox’s own statement announcing the settlement, the network acknowledged the court’s rulings finding certain claims about Dominion false.
That doesn’t mean everything Fox reports is false, any more than catching another outlet in an error means everything it reports is false. It means “Fox said it” isn’t the end of an argument.
Neither is “CNN said it.” Neither is “Trump said it.” And for that matter, neither is “Tom Hicks wrote it.”
Show me the receipts.
That’s the deal I’m offering, and it’s the one I expect in return. I’m going to get things wrong. Anyone who publishes as often as I do and tells you otherwise is either lying or hasn’t been doing it long enough. When I screw something up, correct me. When my reasoning is bad, challenge it. When I’ve left out context that changes the meaning, bring it.
Just correct what I actually wrote instead of the article you constructed from the cover on your way to the comment box.
And give Donald Trump the same treatment.
When he says something indefensible, hold him responsible for what he actually said. When the surrounding context materially changes the meaning, include that too. When he communicates so badly that half the country reasonably hears something entirely different from what he intended, stop pretending that the confusion itself is everybody else’s failure.
That last part matters.
The President of the United States should not receive extra credit because somebody else can eventually explain what he was trying to say.
We’ve become so accustomed to defending our own side and prosecuting the other one that applying the same evidentiary standard to everybody now looks suspiciously like betrayal. I don’t owe Biden a better standard because I voted for him, and I don’t owe Trump a worse one because I didn’t. I also don’t owe Trump a lower passing grade because “that’s just Trump.”
He wanted the job again.
He got it.
This is the job.
The presidency is not an open-book exam where the rest of the country gets to finish the President’s sentences after he turns in the paper.
I don’t want Donald Trump judged unfairly. The Los Angeles and San Diego mess is a pretty good demonstration of that because when the context helped him, I gave it to him.
I just want him judged normally.
Apparently, that’s asking a lot.
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THE BULLSHIT DETECTOR
CLAIM 1
Claim: Donald Trump posted that, thanks to Elon Musk, “every Republican vote counts as 3 votes.”
BULLSHIT: 💩💩💩💩💩
Why: He didn’t. The supposed Truth Social post is a fabricated screenshot. Lead Stories compared it with Trump’s actual post and found that somebody had added the line claiming Musk had made every Republican vote count three times. Lead Stories also searched Trump’s account and an archive of his posts and found no such statement. There’s plenty of genuine political insanity available without manufacturing extra.
CLAIM 2
Claim: A viral photo shows Trump aide Natalie Harp sitting in the presidential motorcade wearing blue surgical gloves.
BULLSHIT: 💩💩💩💩💩
[IMAGE: SIDE-BY-SIDE COMPARISON — VIRAL ALTERED PHOTO / ORIGINAL PHOTO]
Why: Those hands didn’t change gloves. They didn’t exist. Lead Stories located the original photograph in the Reuters database, taken when Trump’s motorcade arrived for an October 1 rally in Durant, Oklahoma. The original contains no blue gloves because the two gloved hands were digitally added later. The person who originally posted the altered version even identified it as parody, but by then the internet had done what the internet does. And yes, bullshit aimed at Trump is still bullshit.
CLAIM 3
Claim: The Democratic Party orchestrated the attempted terrorist attack aboard FlyDubai Flight FZ1073 and then tried to blame Israel.
BULLSHIT: 💩💩💩💩💩
Why: The accusation came packaged as a NewsGuard report, which would be impressive evidence if NewsGuard had actually produced it. It didn’t. NewsGuard told Lead Stories that the video was fake and appeared connected to a Russian influence operation that impersonates legitimate news organizations. There is no evidence Democrats orchestrated the attack. Meanwhile, actual investigations into the incident are underway in several countries. Dressing bullshit up like journalism doesn’t make it journalism.
Bullshit Detector is available for $4.95 at the Tom Hicks Media Store, or for free for all subscribers because everybody could use a little less bullshit in their life.
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One Question Before You Go
Should presidents be judged by what they actually say, or by what their supporters insist they meant?
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I have always thought the word "parse" needs to be more frequently used. I appreciate your keen intelligence, Tom.
I have been judging what TrumPUS has said and done for the last ten years. I am not the least bit interested in anyone's interpretation or explanation of was he has said. I rarely listen to the sound bytes. He is a dedicated fearmonger. I look forward to his demise.