In The Daily Parker's occasional series on logical fallacies, we now come to my favorite:
Non sequitur
"It does not follow." That is, the argument does not have anything to do with the point under discussion. Sometimes non sequiturs make you wonder about the other person's sanity. Example, in poetry:
Haikus are simple
But sometimes they don't make sense
Refrigerator
If you look up "non sequitur" in the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary, you will see this quote:
"They've won five wars where the armies that went against them froze to death. It's pretty amazing. So, we're having a good time. The economy is doing great."--President Trump, 19 July 2017.
The conclusion "the economy is doing great" has nothing to do with the Russian Army's historical prowess fighting in winter.
Then from two weeks ago: "We've got 32,000 soldiers on South Korean soil, and we've been helping them for about 82 years. And we get nothing. We get virtually nothing."
Our agreements with South Korea have nothing to do getting anything from South Korea other than protecting our own interests in the region. In fact, South Korea would prefer not to have thousands of foreign troops on its soil. (Also, we haven't had troops there since 1937.)
And the day before that: "We want to allow millions of people to come [into the U.S. legally] because we need them... because we have many companies coming into our country. They're pouring in... We have companies coming in from Japan, all over Europe, all over Asia. They're opening up companies here. They need people to work... Thousands and thousands of companies are leaving China now because of the tariffs."
I mean, where does one begin? I'll leave that as an exercise for the reader.