> It’s true, because we have to get the vote out. Christians are not known as a big voting group, they don’t vote. And I’m explaining that to them. You never vote. This time, vote. I’ll straighten out the country, you won’t have to vote any more, I won’t need your vote any more, you can go back to not voting.
Basically "the country is screwed up right now because ${reasons}, if you get out and vote I'll fix it for you for good and you can go back to not voting again". It's more or less the same line that politicians say every election to try to motivate the less-likely-voters in their base, just said in Trump's classic meandering way and with explicit permission to vote only this once if you want.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/article/2024/jul/30/dona...
But you kinda skipped past what I was asking. How and what do those voters think he was going to fix for good? And do they perceive themselves as being politically inactive except for just this once?
It sounds like you're just giving him a pass because hey, all politicians lie to get people to vote. At that point, why do we even care what a politician says, whether we agree with them or not?
It does not even matter than there was no rigging, no illegals voting, no shenanigans. The truth has never been an effective counter to rhetoric, I get that. But it's an entirely plausible explanation for what a supporter would think.
But after yesterday, maybe we will all agree together than the elections are rigged? ;-). You guys can't put that genie back in the bottle. Everyone thinks it's totally cool until the other side uses it right back.
That's not how language works. There's a whole field of linguistics called pragmatics that is about how context contributes to meaning [0].
You're taking a few seconds of his words, joining them to all of your priors, and interpreting them in that context.
His original listeners were taking his words in the context of the whole speech, joining them to their priors, and interpreting them in that context.
It's entirely expected that your interpretation would be different than theirs given that disconnect, and the most reliable way to interpret meaning is to look at who the audience was and how they would have interpreted it, because the speaker chose their words for that context, not for yours.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pragmatics