0828blog
Listen Up
We can destroy Trump’s reelection chances by getting lots of insiders to write tell-alls that will expose his tawdry ways.
Oh, never mind, it’s been done to the tune of “Too Much and Never Enough”; “The Worst President in History”; “The Cult of Trump”; “Another Kind of Madness”; “9 Presidents Who screwed Up America”; “Fear: Trump in the White House”; “The Rage”; “Fire and Fury: Inside the Trump White House”; “A Higher Loyalty”; “A Warning”; “The Room Where it Happened”; and more certainly to come. You get the point but it hasn’t worked well.
One way to defuse the insanity is through fact checking.
CNN determined that Trump made more than 20 false, exaggerated or misleading claims at Thursday’s RNC debacle. His lies touched on everything from the economy to his administration’s performance regarding the COVID -19 pandemic and his outrageous claims about Joe Biden.
The N.Y. Times reported a smorgasbord of deceit, dishonesty, disinformation, distortion, evasion, fabrication, falsehood, fiction, inaccuracy, myth, perjury, aspersion, calumniation, falsification, mendacity, prevarication and not to mention, obloquy.
Trump bloviated his response to the COVID-29 pandemic, promising a vaccine by the end of the year. He even claimed he had lived up to a campaign promise to build a southern border wall. Fact checking has really blunted Trump. Not.
The system will certainly work in defanging the man with the gross orange hair and ungainly, oversized physique. He can be taken to court over his immigration policies; he can be challenged over using defense funding to build his dumb wall; sued for profiting from hotels because of his position; an independent investigator can look at his Russia connections; he can be forced by prosecutors to release his tax returns; and he can be impeached. And finally the court of public opinion will undoubtedly kick him out of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. You mean it’s all been tried and he who shall not be named is still standing? Let’s move on.
If nothing else, he is a master hypnotist getting so many undesirables to swallow his pablum and he has more tricks than Houdini in his bag of deception and evil.
So why is Bone Spurs so effective? If he was literate, he could have said the following to explain his success and his strategy:
“Therewith one started out with the very correct assumption that in the size of the lie there is always contained a certain factor of credibility, since the great masses of people may be more corrupt in the bottom of their hearts, than they will be consciously and intentionally bad, therefore with the primitive simplicity of their minds they will more easily fall victims to a great lie than to a small one.
“It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.” Mein Kampf by Adolph Hitler.
Joseph Goebbels, Nazi minister of propaganda, could have been Trump’s tutor when it comes to the “big lie.”
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
Hitler (Trump) claimed the mantle of moral crusader, fighting the forces of iniquity, corruption, and deceit. Hitler (Trump) appealed to many Germans who recoiled against the loosening of moral standards in Germany after World War I. Hitler (Trump) claimed he would make Germany great again.
Trump’s biggest lie to date has to be his claims that COVID-19 has been licked. It compares with Hitler’s biggest lie when he said in 1943 that Germany did not lose in the first world war, evidently to give strength to his lies about the indestructibility of the Reich.
Edwin L. James wrote in the N.Y. Times edition of April 11,1943: “IT is quite evident that when one undertakes to pick the biggest lie told by (Adolf Hitler) one at once undertakes to cover a wide territory indeed. The very record of the man is marked by a series of falsifications and deceptions perhaps beyond the record of any other man who has played a role in public life.”
You can easily plug Trump’s name in the place of Hitler.
“A struggle between the truth and a lie is taking place. As always, the truth will emerge victorious.” Adolph Hitler. The dictator meant that what he said was the truth, and what others said were lies. Sounds familiar.
Trump said at a rally in July 2018: “Just remember: What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.” The adoring crowd went wild over Trump’s claims that whatever the “fake news media” is saying about him is a lie.
Here’s what Benito Mussolini had to say about the truth: “You must believe me because I have the habit — it is the system of my life — of always and everywhere telling the truth.”
Hitler and Mussolini came to power without getting the majority of the vote until after they were in office not unlike Trump and their leadership ended badly for their countries. The U.S. could most definitely be facing the same fate.
It is no surprise that Trump idolizes Vladimir Putin, he of the most outrageous and toxic disinformation. After Russian troops and aircraft invaded Ukraine in 2014, for example, Putin denied troops had invaded, which clouded Western response. To a lesser degree but in a similar way, Trump denied anything improper when he attempted to blackmail Ukraine into investigating Hunter Biden.
A staple of the Trump dialectic is the conspiracy theory, from the birthers to the “hoax” of the Russia probe to his embracing of the Democrats as part of a deep state conspiracy against him. Told enough times, lies become truth to many while reality is blurred with two realities and two memories. It is called cognitive dissonance and it is a powerful tool.
Stalin also used absurd conspiracy theories of a vast network planning his assassination (sounds like deep state) to justify the arrest of 8 million people, many of them tortured, enslaved and killed.