We Still Wont Admit Why So Many People Believe The Big Lie
How could so many Americans believe in the Big Lie? We see the numbers and we shake our heads. Poll after poll shows that one third of all of us believe the 2020 election was stolen from Donald Trump. Even though the matter has been adjudicated in scores of courts. Even though not a single scintilla of evidence exists that the election was anything but fair.
Six months after the attack on the Capitol triggered by that lie, commentators, political scientists, and families around the dinner table still struggle to come to grips with perverse reality. It is natural to want to understand how we got here. The fate of our democracy turns on not just what our electorate believes but why they believe it. Why are a third of us such gullible rubes?
Its a question serious enough that it deserves a straight answer, even if that answer makes us uncomfortable. And I warn you, dear reader, the answer will make you uncomfortable. So, if you are tender-minded or sensitive to self-criticism, or a credulous stooge yourself, this might be a good time to stop reading.
Our parents lie to us. Our churches, synagogues, and mosques lie to us. Our schools lie to us. Hollywood lies to us. Madison Avenue lies to us. The media lies to us. Our leaders lie to us. Our friends lie to us.
Why Does Trump Lie
He has nothing but contempt for the institutions that exist to keep presidents in check.
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Contributing Opinion Writer
The lies and obfuscations pile up. No, it wasnt tear gas used to clear Lafayette Park for President Trumps Bible-waving photo-op last Monday night, Attorney General William Barr said on CBSs Face the Nation on Sunday. Rather it was pepper balls, he said. Pepper spray is not a chemical irritant. Its not chemical. Wrong, according to The Washington Post pepper balls are very much a chemical irritant. The paper awarded the nations top law enforcement officer four Pinocchios for his claim.
The president himself keeps at it, too. On the morning of June 4, he tweeted: Mueller should have never been appointed, although he did prove that I must be the most honest man in America!
As of May 29, the most honest man in America had uttered 19,127 false or misleading claims in his 1,226 days in office, according to Glenn Kessler of The Post, who has been tracking them since Day 1. Thats 15.6 falsehoods a day, or roughly one per waking hour, every hour, every day. That puts him on track to hit 20,000 lies by Wednesday, July 29 by Nov. 3, at this pace, hell be north of 22,000 but of course that period will constitute the heat of the campaign, when the frequency seems likely to increase.
All right, some still say Yes, Mr. Trump is worse than normal, but they all lie. Whats the big deal, really?
Trumps Conflicts Of Interest
Trump has massive and unprecedented conflicts of interest.
Prior to becoming president, Trump owned and ran a worldwide business empire. This included hotels, golf clubs and other business enterprises. Trump also licensed his name to domestic and foreign owned businesses around the world for lucrative fees. After he was elected, he promised to remove himself from all of his business operations. Instead, he simply transferred day-to-day control of the businesses to his sons by forming a revocable trust and retained his financial interests and the ability to profit from them, as well as the ability to reassume control. 30
Under the terms of the trust instrument, according to published reports, the trustees are required to distribute income or principal to Trump at his request or as the Trustees otherwise deem appropriate. 31 This leaves Trump and his family as the financial beneficiaries of the business operations and leaves his business empire inextricably entangled with his presidency. The steps Trump took, claiming to deal with his conflicts, did not actually address his massive conflicts of interest problems at all.
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Keeping White House Visitor Logs Secret
The president reversed President Obamas policy of making White House visitor logs public.
Not quite three months after taking office, the Trump administration reversed an Obama-era policy that allowed journalists and the general public to review White House visitor logs. 137 The move came late on Good Friday afternoon after much of the White House press corps had departed for the Easter holiday weekend.
President Trump reversed a transparency policy that had been among the most important of the previous administration. The visitor logs provided the public with valuable information about those who had access to the White House including the names of visitors and the dates and times of their entry and exit.
President Barack Obama first made the visitor logs public by routinely releasing them on the White Houses website. In doing so, President Obama said that making the records public would uphold the American publics right to know whose voices are being heard in the policymaking process. 138 By the time he left the White House, Obama had released nearly 6 million records of visits to the Executive Mansion complex. 139
President Trump, however, would release none unless ordered to do so by a court. This made it clear that Trumps real interest was in obscuring the insular nature of the circle of people influencing him and his staff.
President Trumps break from a new tradition of transparency belies his claims to drain the swamp.
Veracity Of Statements By Donald Trump
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During his term as President of the United States, Donald Trump made tens of thousands of false or misleading claims one report gave the number as 30,573. Characterized as the propaganda technique firehose of falsehood, commentators and fact-checkers have described it as “unprecedented” in American politics, and the consistency of these falsehoods became a distinctive part of both his business and political identity. Trump is known to have made controversial statements and subsequently denied having done so, and by June 2019, many news organizations had started describing some of his falsehoods as lies, which are false statements that the speaker knows are false. The Washington Post said his frequent repetition of false claims amounts to a campaign based on disinformation. According to writer and journalist Nancy LeTourneau, the debasing of veracity is a tactic.
As part of attempts to overturn the 2020 United States presidential election, Trump and his allies repeatedly and falsely claimed there had been massive election fraud and that Trump had really won the election. Their effort was characterized by some as an implementation of “the big lie“.
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Who Truly Was The Most Dishonest President
Former President Donald Trump was often accused of having a complete disregard for the truth. Yet some of his predecessors’ falsehoods ranged from the bizarre to the horrifying. So how does Trump truly compare?
When Saddam Hussein invaded the oil-rich emirate of Kuwait in August 1990, President George HW Bush snarled: “This will not stand.”
But as US troops were scrambled to the Gulf, the American public was dubious about the justification for military action.
The Kuwaiti government-in-exile promptly hired a US public relations firm, Hill & Knowlton, whose Washington DC office was run by Bush’s former chief of staff.
The PR firm coached a purported witness, introduced as a 15-year-old girl called “Nayirah”, to tearfully tell US congressmen in October 1990 that Iraqi soldiers had entered a hospital in Kuwait, removed babies from incubators and left them to die on the cold floor.
Nayirah, reporters were assured, was using an assumed name for fear of reprisals against her family back home.
Only after the war would it emerge she was the daughter of Kuwait’s ambassador to the US. And her story was completely baseless, as John MacArthur details in his book, Second Front, Censorship and Propaganda in the 1991 Gulf War.
Bush is recorded as having publicly touted this tall tale at least six times as he blew the bugle of war.
MacArthur writes that the hoax helped rally the American people behind calls for military action.
Operation Desert Storm launched days later.
Russia China And Iran Are Trying To Hack 2020 Election Microsoft Warns
In the second half of his presidential term, Trump began to raise a conspiracy theory that Ukraine and the Democrats framed Russia for election interference in an attempt to discredit his win. At the same time, Trump also began to advance a theory that Biden, then a likely 2020 front-runner, had acted corruptly while serving as vice president to benefit his son Hunters foreign business interests. There is no evidence of wrongdoing by either Biden.
The conspiracy theory that Russia was being framed for election interference, a version of which was first publicly posted on a far-right message board, 4chan, in March 2017, fit into Trumps yearslong effort to discredit Mueller’s investigation and undercut the idea that a foreign government helped get him elected. But according to the Trump administrations own experts, he played into a narrative advanced by Russia.
Trump’s former Russia expert, Fiona Hill, called the idea that Ukraine meddled in 2016 a “fictional narrative” promoted by Russian intelligence and rebuked House Republicans for using it to defend the president against impeachment. Trump, and members of the GOP, have contended that the actions his administration took toward Ukraine were motivated not by political or personal interest, but by legitimate concern about corruption in that country, including alleged Ukrainian election interference.
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Meme Misattributes Quote On Afghanistan To Trump
A viral meme falsely claims that former President Donald Trump suggested that the chaotic U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan was an orchestrated distraction by Democrats. A spokesperson for Trump has denied he made that remark. A very similar statement, not attributed to the former president, previously went viral on Facebook.
Trump Rejected Generals Advice Too
Rep. Mike Rogers, the ranking Republican on the House Armed Services Committee, said congressional testimony this week showed that President Joe Biden ignored the advice of top generals about what to do in Afghanistan while former President Donald Trump did listen to it. Thats not entirely accurate.
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Biden Leaves Misleading Impression On Us Debt
In promoting his own spending priorities, President Joe Biden blamed his predecessors unpaid tax cuts and other spending for increasing the national debt by nearly $8 trillion over four years. The total debt figure is correct, but trillions of that were due to bipartisan coronavirus relief packages.
Letter To The Editor: I Finally Figured Out Why Democrats Hate Trump
I finally figured out why Democrats hate Trump
I kept wondering just why Democrats and liberal media hated President Donald Trump so much. Even before his inauguration, they wanted to impeach him. Then I realized that to them, he cheated to steal the election.
Look at all they did to get Hillary Clinton in office. She basically bought the Democratic National Committee because it was broke. She got them to give her all the super delegates and cheated Bernie Sanders out of the nomination. The media whitewashed her record and never reported anything negative about her. At one of the debates, Donna Brazile, the DNC chairwoman, gave Clinton the questions she would be asked so she could be ready.
Still, Trump won. So, he must have cheated, right? No, Trump believed in the people and the people believe in him. He won and America won.
For over three years, the Democratic House of Representatives has tried everything it can to get rid of Trump. The lies and half-truths have been numerous. To them, he is guilty they just need a reason.
Enough is enough. It is time to stop this bull and for all of Congress go to work for America. Trump will continue to succeed for America because he loves America, not the power.
Therein lays the difference between Trump and the Democrats. They love the power, not America.
America is the greatest nation on Earth lets keep it that way.
Michael P. Ayo,
