What Goes Around

Max Boot is no liberal wingnut. He was on the conservative side of the political spectrum long before Donald Trump got there. Boot writes that Trump is perfecting the Big Lie:

The Post reports that he began his presidency by making an average of 4.9 false or misleading statements a day. Lately, like a Stakhanovite, he has ramped up production to an average of six falsehoods a day.

He refers to the lie Trump told Justin Trudeau, then he moves on to other lies:

Like Trump’s claims that Gen. John J. Pershing slaughtered Muslims, or that his inauguration drew record crowds, or that he would have won the popular vote if millions of illegal immigrants had not voted, this is another example of a would-be dictator’s desire not just to sneak lies by us but to shove them down our throats. Trump is signaling that he doesn’t care what the truth is. From now on the truth will be whatever he says, and he expects every loyal follower to faithfully parrot the official party line.

There was the lie about Rex Tillerson's firing:

The White House initially claimed that Tillerson had been notified the previous Friday that he was being let go, but on Tuesday Steve Goldstein, the undersecretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, contradicted that spin by telling reporters that Tillerson was “unaware of the reason” for his firing and had just found out about it. Goldstein was immediately canned and, in a significant bit of symbolism, replaced with a former host of “Fox & Friends,” Trump’s favorite TV show. 

And, on Friday, Trump fired Andrew McCabe:

The same vindictiveness was apparent in Attorney General Jeff Sessions’s decision Friday night to fire former FBI deputy director Andrew McCabe after 21 years of service, just more than 24 hours before he was due to receive his pension. The excuse apparently was McCabe’s supposedly unauthorized communications with the media about an investigation into the Clinton Foundation, followed by alleged attempts to mislead investigators. But Trump’s gloating tweet makes it obvious this was punishment for telling the truth about the Maximum Leader’s attempts to obstruct justice and end an investigation into his links to the Kremlin.

Apparently, Mr. Trump has never learned one of life's first maxims: What goes around comes around. Rest assured it will.

Image: You Tube

He's In The Twilight Zone

 
Donald Trump's press conference yesterday was surreal. He spent a minute announcing his new choice for Secretary of Labor and then spent the next seventy-eight minutes lambasting the press and the intelligence community for doing in his national security advisor, Mike Flynn. Michael Harris writes:

This is where the alternate universe stuff kicks in. The firing was conducted by President Trump. The next day, the other half of the presidential personality — The Donald — kicked in: Flynn was suddenly a wonderful person who had been treated badly by the “fake” media. At a press conference yesterday that looked more like primal scream therapy, Trump said Flynn was just doing his job. In fact, the president went one further. If Flynn hadn’t been phoning Russia and other countries, Trump would have ordered him to make the calls.

Not even Trump’s malapropisms can hide the truth. Flynn was fired because the intelligence community leaked what he had actually talked about to the Russians. That turned out to be a very different thing than what he told Vice-President Pence or the American people. It was not Flynn’s outrageous communication with the Russians per se that caused Trump to ditch this guy. It was getting caught in a lie that made Trump’s right-hand man look like a dork. Worse, it was the truth getting out.

It's been obvious for a long time that Trump is allergic to the truth. So he invents his own. But more than his aversion to the truth there is a much more devastating indictment of the man. He is appallingly ignorant:

Donald Trump’s grasp of geopolitics is no deeper than Bob the Builder’s. Yet there is one area of foreign affairs where his views have been consistently expressed — the relationship with Russia. He has publicly stated that Vladimir Putin, for all the blood on his hands, was a better leader than President Obama. He has ridiculed and threatened NATO. He even got the GOP to soften its hard stand against Russian intervention in Ukraine. And two of his top campaign workers, Paul Manafort and Michael Flynn, had close ties with Russia.

And he has worked very hard to keep Americans ignorant of the fact that he is in deep hock to foreign lenders:

Evelyn Farkas, the former top Russia expert at the Pentagon, is calling for an investigation of Trump himself. Not for alleged unconventional bathing habits. She is concerned that Trump’s business and financial dealings may have left him open to blackmail. After all, the giving, lending or guaranteeing of money could be used to exercise powerful influence over a person. So far — like dead men — the Donald’s taxes have told no tales.

Coincidentally, Donald Trump owes approximately $300 million to Deutsche Bank, which has just gone through all of Trump’s business dealings with the bank to see if there were any connections to Russia. Deutsche Bank was recently fined $640 million by the U.S. and U.K. for failing to stop the laundering of $10 billion of Russian funds through its Moscow branch. The bank will not comment on the outcome of its internal review, but it is being pressured to farm out its assessment to independent auditors.

Not even Rod Serling could have dreamt up this story. But Trump has entered the Twilight Zone. And he has hauled the entire nation in there with him.

Image: deadline.com

Big Brother Is President

On Saturday, Donald Trump went to C.I.A. headquarters and gave a speech, in which he claimed there was no feud between him and the intelligence community. It was fake news perpetrated by the media. And, when three times as many people showed up to protest his inauguration than those who showed up for it, he sent his press secretary out to claim that a million and a half spectators were there to cheer for the Donald. Michael Harris writes:

President Trump’s new press secretary, Sean Spicer, went on to set a record for most lies told in a maiden press briefing. Amongst other whoppers, he asserted that the greater use of metal detectors in a wider area had kept hundreds of thousands of people from entering the National Mall. But law enforcement had a different story. ABC News reported officials told them that all checkpoints and magnetometers were cleared of all line-ups before the Inauguration ceremony began.

Spicer also said that the white floor covering on the Mall “highlighted” any empty spaces. He added that it was to Trump’s disadvantage, since this was the first time such floor covering had ever been used. Wrong. It was used for Obama’s second inauguration. The reason it wasn’t picked up by cameras then is a little embarrassing for Trump. Back in 2009, people were actually standing on it.

On Sunday, when Chuck Todd of NBC confronted Kelly Anne Conway about Spicer's numbers, she said that Spicer was using "alternate facts." When Todd responded that "alternate facts" was a euphemism for falsehoods, she lit into Todd: “Your job is not to call things ridiculous that are said by our press secretary and our president. That’s not your job.”

We're in George Orwell's world. Big Brother is president.

Image: ExtremTech