> I'm just listening to his words and assuming he means what he says.
That's not how language works. There's a whole field of linguistics called pragmatics that is about how context contributes to meaning [0].
You're taking a few seconds of his words, joining them to all of your priors, and interpreting them in that context.
His original listeners were taking his words in the context of the whole speech, joining them to their priors, and interpreting them in that context.
It's entirely expected that your interpretation would be different than theirs given that disconnect, and the most reliable way to interpret meaning is to look at who the audience was and how they would have interpreted it, because the speaker chose their words for that context, not for yours.
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