Somehow, we're still learning the depths of Trump's dishonesty
Of all of the things that might crystallize a sense of despair about the ruthless effectiveness of Donald Trumps habitual dishonesty, I wouldnt have expected it to be a legalistic six-page memo about the boundaries of the U.S. Constitution.
This week, following reporting from the newly published book Peril, by The Washington Posts Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, we learned new details about the conversations that were unfolding in the White House in the days before the counting of electoral votes at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. Weve learned the extent to which Trumps insistences about the election having been stolen were predicated on information that his team and his allies knew were unfounded. Weve learned from the aforementioned memo that Trump seized upon a fringe opinion about constitutionality as a rationale to pressure his vice president into doing something that he couldnt do and shouldnt have done even if he could. Weve learned more, in other words, about just how shoddy Trumps claim to a second term was a claim that has held a tight grip on his base well after it expended all of its usefulness for keeping him in office.
There is largely no point in trying to rationally rebut an irrational or emotional belief. But I hold the irrational belief that it cant hurt, and I will not be rationalized out of it. So lets walk through what we know about why Trumps claims are false and were known to be false when he offered them.
We can begin with the fact that the former president is fundamentally not credible. The Post has a team of fact-checkers who reviewed every claim Trump made from the outset of his candidacy in 2015. They found tens of thousands of examples of dishonest, misleading or false assertions from him. Often, Trump repeated false things hed said previously, marking at the very least a remarkable disinterest in accuracy. But given that most of his false claims were intertwined with his political rhetoric it was clearly the case that he was more interested in the impression his words left than their accuracy.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/somehow-were-still-learning-the-depths-of-trumps-dishonesty/ar-AAOHPBc
Not to minimize Trump but it's the whole God damn GOP that's stooping to new depths, Moscow Mitch pushing a potential default for example.
Turbineguy
(37,331 posts)Thomas Hurt
(13,903 posts)tanyev
(42,558 posts)Trump was always going to be a wannabe dicatator, but he couldnt have gotten anywhere without all the GOP enablers like Eastman and cowards like this anonymous person in Nov. 2020:
Speaking about President Trumps and his legal teams myriad and baseless claims of massive voter fraud, an anonymous senior Republican official offered a rhetorical shrug.
What is the downside for humoring him for this little bit of time? No one seriously thinks the results will change, the official said. He went golfing this weekend. Its not like hes plotting how to prevent Joe Biden from taking power on Jan. 20. Hes tweeting about filing some lawsuits, those lawsuits will fail, then hell tweet some more about how the election was stolen, and then hell leave.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/11/10/whats-downside-humoring-him-gop-officials-unintentionally-revealing-quote-about-trump-era/