For Trump And Lochte, The Delicate Politics Of Contrition

Trump, the serial insulter of the 2016 presidential campaign, said he'd sometimes said "the wrong thing" and acknowledged that his words had "caused personal pain." Lochte, the gold medal-winning swimmer, said he should have been "more careful and candid" in describing an incident during the Rio Olympics in which he claimed to have been the victim of an armed robbery that police said wasn't really an armed robbery at all. "What both are trying to do is take a topic out of the news and turn the page," said Kathleen Hall Jamieson, director of the Annenberg Public Policy Center at the University of Pennsylvania and an expert in the politics of rhetoric. Trump's remarks, read from a teleprompter during a speech Thursday night, were part of an effort to reset a campaign that's slipped in the polls and lacking direction as the candidate picks one distracting fight after another. [...] his contrition was prefaced by a litany of self-congratulatory statements designed to puff himself up and lessen the humbling aspects of his regrets. [...] his declaration that he'll continue to tell the truth suggested maybe he didn't really regret what he'd said at all. Robin Lakoff, a retired linguistics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, says Trump's underlying message was: If you have to have this politically correct expression of regret, I'll give it to you, but really, you're the one in the wrong.' There has already been too much said and too many valuable resources dedicated to what happened last weekend, so I hope we spend our time celebrating the great stories and performances of these Games and look ahead to celebrating future successes. Lochte's statement, posted on his Instagram account Friday, was designed to quell the global firestorm that erupted after his claims about being the victim of an armed robbery outraged his Brazilian hosts and were sharply disputed by that nation's police. The Olympic gol

 

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