Philip Bump: We're watching Trump's distortion of reality on Ukraine in real time

[Dennis Donovan]

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2019/10/14/were-watching-trumps-distortion-reality-ukraine-real-time/

By Philip Bump

Oct. 14, 2019 at 10:41 a.m. EDT

The timeline isn’t complicated. Responding to news reports about President Trump’s interactions with Ukraine’s president, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) announced that her party was initiating an impeachment inquiry in the House. The following day, Sept. 25, the White House released a rough transcript of Trump’s call with President Volodymyr Zelensky, which demonstrated that Trump had, in fact, asked Zelensky to investigate former vice president Joe Biden. The next day, the White House released the complaint written by an intelligence community whistleblower that contextualized Trump’s requests in the broader context of how the president and his attorney Rudolph Giuliani were trying to get Ukraine to act against Biden.

It’s proven to be difficult for Trump to argue that his actions were appropriate. Instead, he and his allies have tried to argue around the edges, criticizing how the whistleblower filed his complaint or how the Democrats are conducting the impeachment probe instead of defending Trump’s actions on the merit.

In recent days, Trump has gone further, misrepresenting how Rep. Adam B. Schiff (D-Calif.) came to criticize Trump’s call with Zelensky. It’s a remarkable glimpse at how Trump tries to shift reality in front of our eyes, but also a good example of how hard it can be to suss out the line between a mistake and a lie.


On Sept. 26, the day after the rough transcript was released, Schiff offered a paraphrase of its contents during a hearing of the House Intelligence Committee, of which he serves as chair. The paraphrasing cast Trump’s call in a deliberately negative light, with CNN’s fact-checker Daniel Dale writing that Schiff “did make it easy for viewers to get confused” about what Trump had actually said.

In short order, Trump seized on Schiff’s depiction of the call as problematic to the point of criminality. This is standard operating procedure for a guy who spent decades in New York real estate, inflating everything to its extreme. But over time, as Dale noted on Sunday, it also led Trump to reorder history to try to make Schiff look even more dishonest than Trump’s misrepresentations.

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[Six117]

1. "Shifting reality" nah, just flat out lies.

None of which change anything and is only useful to that thing's supporters who are looking for anything to hold on to. This is more of usual kabuki theater nonsense with the gop and the press. If that thing's lips are moving -it IS lying. Full stop.