Great WAPO OP Ed: Trump and the Liar's Paradox: "I am lying." No deniability.

[lindysalsagal]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/post-partisan/wp/2018/01/04/trump-and-the-liars-paradox/?utm_term=.8148ebabd5bc


Richard Cohen, Today:

Until recently, the famous liar’s paradox was a liar saying, “I am lying.” Now, though, it has to be when any of Donald Trump’s friends or associates claims not to have called the president an ignoramus, a liar, an egomaniac or heroically unsuited for the presidency. Their choice is either to confirm the obvious or to appear a liar. Michael Wolff’s new book has put them all on the spot.

Wolff is a controversial figure whose journalistic reputation falls somewhat short of impeccable. What matters at the moment, though, is that most everything he has written in the excerpts I’ve read of “Fire and Fury” strikes me as true and, moreover, has already been said by others.

As every journalist knows, news is not that a dog bit a man but that a man bit a dog. In the same vein, it would be news if someone confided to an author or journalist that Trump was a reasonable man, self-effacing, considerate of others, cautious in his approach to major decisions, knowledgeable about the grand issues of national security or, even, aware that his hero Andrew Jackson did not live to the Civil War. This would be startling stuff. It would be similar in a way to the revisionist assessment of Dwight D. Eisenhower, considered a mumbler in his time, but understood now as a president who cleverly shielded his intentions by being purposely inarticulate. Maybe so.

Great article, and it's almost funny, how the idiot who has behaved like a toddler thinks he can deny his way out of these accusations: Of course we all believe the Wolff accusations: He's proven them to be true every day of his life.

I don't know which is harder to believe: That a potus would act so childishly, or that having acted like this, he'd think he could convince us he's a grown up.