It wasn’t quite as impactful as Lyndon Johnson’s quip that “Jerry Ford is so dumb he can’t fart and chew gum at the same time,” but within the cloistered world of early 20th century European philosophy it was a significant burn when Rudolf Carnap pointed out that the influential metaphysics of his contemporaries strung together a load of sentences that were “entirely meaningless”, not even really sentences. [“die vorgeblichen Sätzen dieses Gebietes [sind] gänzlich sinnlos”] He particularly focussed on the celebrated work of philosophical Wunderkind (and soon-to-be Nazi shill) Martin Heidegger, and his utterance of seeming profundities like “the nothing itself nothings” [das Nichts selbst nichtet] and “the nothing is more fundamental than the ‘not’ and the ‘denial’” [das Nichts ist ursprünglicher als das Nicht und die Verneinung]. Carnap argued in his essay “Overcoming Metaphysics through logical analysis of language” that these were games with language, confusing rules of syntactic construction with language’s expressive content. “Nothing” is not any kind of thing, even if you give it a capital letter and put an article in front.
A recent article in the Washington Post quoted many sources who said, in different ways, that the Trump campaign was flailing about, unable to settle on a unified theme to attack Kamala Harris, and undermined by its candidate’s inability to focus and emotional need to use every speaking opportunity to whine about how unfair the world is toward him specifically. But toward the end they quoted this pushback from Steven Cheung, official spokesman for the Trump campaign:
Cheung… dismissed concerns expressed by allies about the campaign and its messaging. “Our message discipline is second to none,” he said. “It’s why President Trump was able to take out Joe Biden in the debate, it’s why we’ve been so successful thus far, and it’ll be why President Trump will win the election.”
“Message discipline” is something that should be apparent from the content of your speech. If you need to explicitly assert it, you probably don’t have it. (In this it’s reminiscent of Donald Trump’s repeated assertions, “I’m, like, a really smart person.”)
Putting that aside, is it good to be “second to none”? It could mean — it’s supposed to mean — we’re the best. But if he had said “worse than none” this would be formally the same statement, but would be understood to mean, completely useless. Worse than useless.
I’m reminded of the joke “When you’re hungry, nothing is better than pizza. And when you’re hungry, dry bread is better than nothing. So when you’re hungry dry bread is better than pizza.” Applied to the Trump campaign, they might say, nothing is better than our message discipline, and letting the candidate rant about sharks and electrocution and the opponent’s racial identity is better than nothing. And that’s how they came to decide that crazy ranting was better than message discipline.