"On 9/4/18, I reported that suicide victim, Mr. Efrain De La Rosa, could have been saved ... Mr. De La Rosa was not being treated with psychotropic medication; instead he was remanded to segregation."
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Trump Timeline ... Trumpocalypse
- Thread starter CdnGuy
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The Meghan Markle lie falls into this latter category of small lies. What is the point of it? Why does he try and get away with such blatant untruths on such trivial issues — and why should it matter so much to the rest of us?
Back in November 2016, days after the president-elect had ridiculously claimed in a tweet that he had “won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally,” McGill University political theorist Jacob T. Levy published an essay entitled “Authoritarianism and Post-Truth Politics,” in which he offered an explanation for why Trump tells such lies, and for why they are so dangerous, by leaning on the works of “the great analysts of truth and speech under totalitarianism — George Orwell, Hannah Arendt, Vaclav Havel.”
They recognized, Levy said, that “a leader with authoritarian tendencies will lie in order to make others repeat his lie both as a way to demonstrate and strengthen his power over them.”
“Saying something obviously untrue, and making your subordinates repeat it with a straight face in their own voice, is a particularly startling display of power over them,” explained Levy. “It’s something that was endemic to totalitarianism.”
Consider: Fox News published a supportive, 10-paragraph story on its website headlined “Donald Trump says he never called Meghan Markle ‘nasty,’ calls comments about Duchess ‘fake news.’” Only in the tenth and final paragraph did it concede that “there is an audio recording circulating of President Trump saying the exact quote about Duchess Meghan that had been reported.” The @trumpwarroom Twitter account, which claims to be affiliated with the Trump 2020 reelection campaign, shared the audio recording of Trump saying the word “nasty” while denying he said it: ...
Reality does not matter to these people. It is irrelevant. In fact, Trump’s strategy, to quote Levy once more, is to “undermine the existence of shared belief in truth and facts.”
Why?
“The ideal subject of totalitarian rule,” wrote Arendt in her 1951 classic “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” “is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.” In a later interview, she went further: “If everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer. And with such a people you can then do what you please.”
Per Arendt then, Trump isn’t just bullshitting or deflecting; he isn’t just demented or defensive; he is actively and consciously borrowing from the authoritarian’s playbook. He lies because he can — and because it serves his purpose. To control, to bully, to degrade those under him and around him. To both command and demonstrate unbending loyalty from his cultish base. This is who he is — and who he has always been.
Donald Trump had to be rescued from a tricky moment by his wife, Melania, when he failed to recognise a statue at Buckingham Palace that he had given the Queen last summer.
The US president was shown a pewter horse that he gave as a gift when they met in July last year, and was asked whether he recognised it. He replied “no”.
Melania came to his rescue, saying: “I think we gave that to the Queen.”
He had given the thoroughbred statue in polished pewter on his visit to Windsor.
It happened as the Queen was showing the president and First Lady around an exhibition at the palace picture gallery of American artefacts.
Fixed It ...
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President Trump once declared himself “Mr. Brexit” and before his trip this week, he offered advice on Britain’s negotiations to leave the European Union.
But after arriving in London on Monday, he showed little interest in expending his time or political capital to rally the Brexit movement, which he sees as the result of the same nationalistic forces that lifted him to the presidency.
Instead, Trump spent the day tending to grievances with his critics on Twitter — he called the mayor of London a “stone cold loser” — before visiting with Queen Elizabeth II and touring Westminster Abbey. He mostly avoided talk of Brexit, the contested departure of the United Kingdom from the European Union.
Trump’s approach leaves him as the world’s most famous nationalist, but one who is somewhat distant from the debates destabilizing Europe.
Both here and elsewhere, Stone misstates what the Report found in really interesting ways, which I may return to in more depth (as it may indicate where Stone thinks the discovery he has seen suggests the government may be headed).
But for now, I just want to note that after insisting to Judge Amy Berman Jackson that Russia didn’t hack the DNC, Stone lawyers Grant Smith and Robert Buschel are arguing to Judge John Koeltl that Russia did hack the DNC.
I wonder what Donald Trump will say when he discovers his rat-fucker has given up on the hoaxes claiming Russia didn’t do the hack?
