Yesterday Pres. Trump made the following statement “The leaks are real, the news is fake.”  This has some people very puzzled, and well it should.  Not for bad logic, but for the very poor speaking style of of our President.  What I submit he was trying to say was:

Yes, the leaks actually occurred but the content in them is false, therefor the news stories are fake.

Unfortunatly this is not the common usage of the phrase ‘Real Leaks’.  When someone says a leak is real you are saying both that the leak actually occurred and its content is true/factual.  This is because in politics, ever since we’ve had politics, it has been rife with rumors, fabrications, stories, and out right lies.  A leak is only a leak if what is being told is indeed true.  Everything else is commonly know as ‘disinformation’.

We should not expect President Trump to be familiar with this set of definitions, after all he come from a business where the truth is what you say it is.  All marketing is true for certain shades of truth.  Donald Trump is a promoter, marketer, a snake oil salesman and like all such his relegation ship to the truth is very loose.  This why no one should take anything he says at face value.  We can not go by his words, only by his actions because his words have no fixed truth level.  The run the gauntlet of 1 to 99, where 0 is a full falsehood, to 100 is an absolute truth.

So lets give the guy a little slack here, let him say what he wants and just not pay it any attention.

NOT!