When is the nation going to collectively decide that Donald Trump just isn’t nearly as smart as he says he is. Beyond calling his own administration’s climate findings “fake science” based on literally nothing, Donald Trump has now decided he’s an expert on airplanes and piloting. He’s now suggesting that planes are becoming too complex for trained pilots to fly. This notion is based on…what exactly? No one is exactly sure, but make no mistake, that’s what he expects you to believe. I mean, this is just lunacy. Absolute lunacy.
Watching Trump lie is an interesting thing. Because he’s not good at it. Especially when it comes to things that where he has to come at it from multiple angles. If you want a good example of it, look no further than his most recent interview with Fox News (or as S.E. Cupp called in on a CNN, his “infomercial”). Watching him explain why he’s not responsible for the commission of crimes gets almost uncomfortable as he can’t seem to find an avenue to lie that doesn’t force him to almost immediately backtrack and try to move forward. He starts off by trying to claim that he’s not involved with the tabloid that paid off Karen McDougal, but if he was, he didn’t know or didn’t authorize it. But then even if that isn’t the case, what happened wasn’t a campaign finance violation. But if it was a campaign finance violation, than it was Michael Cohen’s fault, not his. But even if it is his fault, why is it a big deal, because Obama did it. But if you don’t believe ANY of that (which you obviously shouldn’t, because literally not a word of it is true), then it’s all fine anyway because all (read: very few) campaign finance lawyers agree that he didn’t do anything wrong. It remarkable to watch in the moment, him caveating each lie with another, trying to hedge his bets, but the problem then becomes that each subsequent lie weakens the previous one, making the whole shebang a weird incoherent mess. At a certain point, Trump might just want to invoke his right to remain silent…
Donald Trump is trying really hard to convince people that his border wall is both paid for, and under construction. Now, if you take any cursory look at the facts, than you’d know that it isn’t true. It’s not a difficult thing to disprove. And yet his base doesn’t seem to care. The Huffington Post recently did an article talking to Trump supporters about their belief in Trump’s lies over the border wall. Most of them either believed him regardless of the evidence, choosing rather to believe that Trump is more reliable than reality, or they just didn’t care. They didn’t care that he was lying about the border wall, because it’s the lie they want to hear, and the lie, I suppose, is better than nothing, I guess? I don’t know. Their responses were baffling. It goes to show that in Donald Trump’s war on Truth, he’s made more headway than we seem ready to admit. And when truth ceases to matter, than we are all in a lot of trouble.
Trump gave an interview to ABC this week, and you better believe I’m going to latch onto the tiniest fragment of it, because it is the embodiment why he is the absolute worst. “I always try to be truthful,” he said. He expanded very little on this statement, and it is a thing that literally made me shout at my computer screen. Because it’s the ultimate lie. It is the lie at the very essence of Donald Trump. Because Donald Trump is a liar. He lies regularly and blatantly. And it’s important to point out that I’m not just talking about things where he could be credibly accused of being dumb or just not knowing all the facts. Donald Trump isn’t just untruthful. HE LIES. To lie requires an intent to deceive, and he lies are the cornerstone of his presidency. He lied when he said he intended to “Drain the swamp”. We know this because he not only didn’t kick out the people in Washington that he claimed were the problem, he brought more in. The exact same, rich, entitled, classist Wall Street scumbags that he claimed he had no interest in serving. He lies about his intentions, the intentions of his opponents, the consequences of his policies, how the world views him and his actions. And the frustrating thing isn’t even that he does it, it’s that there are still an uncomfortable number of people that still believe him. History will not look kindly back at this point in history. It will be asked how someone like him rose to power, how anyone could have believed his lies, and there won’t be a good answer.
Remember when Donald Trump pledged to donate a million dollars to a charity of Elizabeth Warren’t choice if she took a test to prove her Native American ancestry? Donald Trump doesn’t seem to remember. When confronted with that promise, he actually said “I didn’t say that. You better read it again.” Ok. Let’s all read it again.
“I will give you a million dollars to your favorite charity, paid for by Trump, if you take the test and it shows you’re an Indian.”
Well…I just read it, again and again, and I’m pretty sure he said it. What’s worse (for him) is that the publicity and specificity, he might have just screwed himself out of a million bucks. According to the awesomely informative website Law and Crime, this ‘fits the textbook definition of an offer to enter into a unilateral contract.” And they suggest Warren’s lawyers might have a pretty strong case. Whether she’ll feel emboldened to take this to court is another matter, but it would be interesting to say the least if she did.
Donald Trump tried his hand at journalism with his recent op-ed in USA Today. His article, an attempted rebuttal of Medicare-For-All, was his attempt to both take some of the shine off the concept of government provided healthcare, and (I believe) a forum to make people think he isn’t a big ol’ dumb dumb. You see, often enough, when Trump wants to let his opinion be known to the world, he’ll go on a Twitter tirade full of misspellings, grammatical errors, and misstatements. Or he’ll let his West Wing staff send out a press release that has something more thoughtful written down. And I truly believe he’s getting tired of people calling him a nitwit. But the problem is that he IS a nitwit. He doesn’t understand a lot of basic concepts, and as such, his attempt to show that he’s a clever writer, only reinforces that. Within hours of the article going live, every major news outlet, most prominently the Washington Post, took his article, almost sentence by sentence, and pointed out how every bit of it was wrong. And I don’t mean that in the partisan sense, but empirically wrong. He got exactly one fact right, and the rest of it, by literally all standards was incorrect. I can only imagine that Trump’s advisors made the attempt to get him to not write this article or have it published for this reason, and I have to believe Trump was certain, despite those protestations that people would think him a brilliant journalistic mind when they saw it. And this is without mentioning how much outside editing or what kind of ghostwriting took place in it’s creation. Suffice to say, Trump’s crusade against fake news takes an…interesting new turn now.
The New York Times is really making it their life’s mission to dig up absolutely all of Donald Trump’s skeletons. Them and the Washington Post are dropping bombshell after bombshell, and this last week, it was attacking Trump where it might just hurt the most: his money. You see, the New York Times did a deep, deep dive into the origins of Donald Trump’s wealth. As it turns out, his story that he’s a self-made man minus a small loan from his father (that he paid back with interest), ISN’T actually accurate. At all apparently. Based on mountains of unearthed documents, both public record and not, Trump’s money is the result of creatively helping his dad defraud the government and the gifts he got as a result of that and his inheritance. As a result, adjusted for inflation, a great deal of his fortune, to the tune of half a billion smackeroos, was a result of Fred Trump looking out for him. Which makes a lot of sense. Despite what he wants his supporters to believe, Trump knows a thing or two about failing in business. His business history is one of failure, bailouts, and self aggrandizement. Learning that a good portion of his wealth was essentially a handout comes as no surprise, but at the same time, betrays the image he hopes to project. Because as it turns out, he’s not the shrewd business man, making money with his wits and cleverness. He’s a nitwit who fails upward.
He’s still pretending everything is cool with North Korea! Despite literally everything seemingly falling apart, North Korean officials all but saying so. Also, those remains that Trump kept harping on? Where are they? They’re certainly not here. North Korea has continued accelerating their nuclear program on a number of levels…it’s a fiasco guys It’s a FIASCO. And there Trump is, saying “No! No! It’s all cool guys! Seriously, look at this totally legit letter that Kim Jong Un sent me! That’s more legit than literally everything else!” I mean…is he just going crazy now or what? Because at a certain point, he can’t pretend everything is fine, can he?
Despite Donald Trump’s constant self back pats about his unprecedented success in North Korea, there seems to be a growing cause for concern that MAYBE Kim Jong Un isn’t as committed to de-nuclearizing the peninsula as he first might have seemed. In fact, intelligence reports seem to indicate the exact opposite, with him expanding nuclear research sites and funding into fuel for nuclear weapons. Basically the EXACT opposite of what Trump “negotiated”. Now, pettier people might go for a fun little “I told you so!” number complete with laughter and finger pointing, but I do feel like it’s appropriate to point out that he’s not the first guy to get that promise out of a Kim on the exact same thing that never came to fruition. Though it might ache a little harder for Trump considering he couldn’t help talking up how unprecedented this whole thing was. I just wonder how long Trump will feel it’s appropriate to stay in denial about it before he finally decides he’s been had?
Listen, I think it’s fair to give Trump some credit over this North Korea thing. Not even just because Trump has a bad habit of escalating problems. Frankly, even if Trump was a more laid back character, North Korea likes to be provocative in their own right. So the fact that the summit in Singapore seemingly went off without a hitch, and that some semblance of peace was established for the near future is positive. I won’t try to say that isn’t a victory. BUT, Trump and staff is trying to establish his summit as some unprecedented victory, as if North Korea has never made these promises before and for less. In fairness, I didn’t know until I bothered to look. But the reality is that North Korea has agreed to scrap their nuclear program no less than half a dozen times in almost 30 years, going as far back as when Kim Il Sung was still alive. In 1994, the they agreed to scrap the program and stop researching plutonium and uranium enrichment for food aid. Trump promised to stop our military maneuvers in South Korea, something we’ve done for 50 years, for a re-affirmation of their earlier promises from the last 30 years, with no time table or verfication process, things they’ve given in the past. Hell they didn’t even bother to promise to stop their Uranium program. In fact, by all appearances…the great negotiator got out negotiated. Again, I want to point out, the world feels a little less close to nuclear destruction than it did a week ago, and that’s a positive development. But that Trump secured a loose promise of Denuclearization…well, that feels less impressive.
Mind the Exit 