Newsflash: Trump Utters Outrageous Falsehood
So President Trump, defending himself against the non-fake news that he had not contacted any of the families of the American servicemen killed in Niger, answered by adding yet more flotsam to the endless stream of falsehood that magically emanates from his teeny weeny brain, claiming to be pretty much the only President who has ever called military families.
In other words, he answered the charge that he had failed to do something presidential by arguing — falsely, of course — that other Presidents had failed to do this at least as badly as he.
Let’s get straight about this: Trump was not lying. Lying means deliberately saying what one knows to be untrue. But Trump knows nothing to be untrue, because he simply knows nothing at all. What Trump did here, as in so many previous cases, was rashly spout whatever words he could find in his kindergarten vocabulary that seemed to serve his purpose of the moment, namely to say, in effect, “Even if I didn’t do what I should have done, I didn’t do it less than other Presidents didn’t do it.”
The media jumped at the opportunity to point out that Trump had spoken falsely about Barack Obama’s record on this issue, simply because Obama is the only President the media cares about. But what Trump actually said was:
The traditional way if you look at President Obama and other presidents, most of them didn’t make calls. A lot of them didn’t make calls.
That’s what he said. As for what he was talking about, God only knows — and God’s too out of breath laughing at the success of His ultimate practical joke on America to tell us what Trump was talking about. In lieu of a definitive explanation, I think it’s fair to speculate that Trump was just “being Trump,” i.e., talking through his hat. Well, through something else really, but let’s keep this discussion PG-rated.
On second thought, let’s not. Susan Wright at RedState draws attention to the following response to Trump’s idiocy, from a family member of a serviceman killed during the George W. Bush presidency:
.@realDonaldTrump When my brother was killed, Pres Bush listened while I screamed at him & then held me as I sobbed, you fat fucking liar. https://t.co/SEIw74OeZG
— Delilia O’Malley (@DeliliaOMalley) October 16, 2017
Sorry for the rough language, but occasionally one is reduced to using words Trump and his cultists can understand.
But Delilia O’Malley is wrong on one point. Trump is not a liar, strictly speaking. He merely has no connection whatsoever to the very concept of truth. He is performing, in the manner of the reality TV fraud that he is, at all times — as opposed to living in the manner of an actual human being — and his performance draws from him whatever words “feel right” to him at any given moment. Truth and falsehood never enter into the equation for him, only what “works.”
In short, he is the ideal product of America’s special brand of progressive pragmatism: a knee-jerk acolyte of John Dewey who has never heard of Dewey.
