The Meaning of I Couldn’t Care Less

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Context is everything. Watch and listen to this video and think about what the phrase “I couldn’t care less” is referring to.

The transcript of the important part is:

EARHARDT: We have radicals on the right as well. How do we fix this country?

TRUMP: I’ll tell you something that’s gonna get me in trouble but I couldn’t care less. The radicals on the right oftentimes are radical because they don’t want to see crime. The radicals on the left are the problem.

Those on the political left interpret this as President Trump does not want to fix the country. Or, one person I know think he was answering the question, “Who could fix this country?”

I interpret him as saying he couldn’t care less about getting in trouble for saying the following words.

I will grant that I can see it being misinterpreted you only hear the first sentence as the complete response to the question. But in the full context it seems very close to unambiguous. Is this just my bias?

Yet, I see instance after instance of emphasis on the first sentence:

Do they honestly believe that is a truthful interpretation of what he said? Are they all deliberately lying? I find both conclusions inconceivable.

More than ever, I just want to be left alone in my underground bunker in Idaho. People have gone nuts.

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14 thoughts on “The Meaning of I Couldn’t Care Less”

  1. Lost in all the chaos is the Left wanting to make it about gun control means they want to ban antique bolt action rifles. Fudds beware

  2. I am baffled at this right wing violence. Who, what, where, when? I see that expression as more gaslighting. In my opinion this mythical right wing violence doesn’t exist.

  3. Of course people appear to be going insane.

    We keep telling you it’s a spiritual battle, and if you don’t have any belief in the supernatural world, and only the the simple physical/material realm, then yes, it would be inexplicable.

    On the other hand….

  4. “People have gone nuts”

    They’ve always been nuts, it’s just that now the signal is strong enough to overpower the noise so it’s no longer hidden.

  5. Trump has figured it out. He knows that no matter what he says or does…or doesn’t say and doesn’t do…roughly one third of the country will be unhappy. So he simply doesn’t care what they think, feel or want. They are insane, irrational and if we can remove their power to vote they’d be irrelevant. The rest of us need to start feeling a bit that way. You simply do not allow your life to revolve around insane idiots.

  6. If right wingers were as violent as the Left pretends, they’d be too terrified to speak in public.

  7. Trump said he would get in trouble because he simply said that many like Proud Boys simply stood up to criminal activities by Antifa

  8. I have, not infrequently, had the experience of saying a ting, only for the message received to be completely different from the message sent.

    Sometimes I think it’s because they aren’t paying g attention, sometimes I think it’s because they are letting their biases inform their input, and sometimes I have no idea WTF is wrong with their parsing circuitry.

    I’ve done the same thing occasionally myself, probably to some degree it’s a matter of superficial “on-the-fly” parsing vs. deeper, more thoughtful parsing that requires more energy & attention.

    Then there’s the “take things out of context & twist words” straw man game. I think there is great benefit to learning how to play this one, it can be great fun and people (some, anyway) use it a lot during arguments, especially when they start losing. It’s a great way to get bogged down in the specifics of definitions & attempting to gaslight details of what was or was not said while taking time & attention away from the main points of the argument, with a side helping of tarring each other as the bad guy. Ah, memories.

  9. EARHARDT:
    “We have radicals on the right as well. How do we fix this country?”
    I’m with the commenters above, where is it?
    Like saying the most armed society the world has ever seen had a planned insurrection on J6.
    Ask Matt Bracken how easy it would be to cause real problems in this country for the right?
    With well north of 400 million guns, ammo to back?
    Vox Day; “SJW’s always lie”. Never except the premise of their arguments.
    The clown started off with a fearful deflection.
    Trump should have hammer him for it. We need to hammer them for it.
    Their scared little girls. (Or they want to be.)
    Use it whenever you meet one.

  10. The side that always yammers about context is deliberately looking at just one sentence here and is completely blind to context (as usual) unless it benefits them in some way.

  11. Read Second Thessalonians chapter two, KJV or NKJV. It addresses this phenomenon directly.

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