This reminds me of the scene in Chapter 5 of Part II of Foundation by Isaac Asimov. They use "symbolic logic" to boil down the statements of two politicians to its base components. One says, "You give us what we want in one week or we take it my force" and the other says nothing.

We're getting there.

Funny, this is the second time the Foundation novels have come up this election. We got a note from a Trailhead reader shortly after the New Hampshire primary, when news of Hillary Clinton's teary eyes were making the rounds, pointing out that a prime minister to the emperor in one of the Asimov novels, having been exposed as a robot, held a press conference during which he laughed and cried in order to defuse suspicion.

I haven't read the novel, but a blogger named Timothy Birdnow did a writeup on it.

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