Trump’s Defense: “Cohen has been lying for me for years, so you can’t trust him.”
Russian collusion investigation headline: “‘Kettle is black,’ Pot claims.”
Reality TV president Donald Trump, faced with the awkward revelation, or allegation depending on your point of view, that he was fully informed at the time (2016) that high-ranking members of his campaign (including his son) were meeting with a woman they all believed was an operative of Vladimir Putin’s government, for the express purpose of getting Russian state-collected dirt on Hillary Clinton — a claim which Trump has vehemently denied up to now — has sent out his reality TV lawyer Rudy Giuliani to accuse the man who “revealed” Trump’s alleged knowledge, Trump’s long-time lawyer Michael Cohen, whom Trump repeatedly defended personally up to the moment Cohen started cooperating with Robert Mueller’s investigation, and whose most important assignment as Trump’s lawyer seems to have been making secret pay-offs to gold-digging bimbos Trump used up and threw away during the married portion of his “personal Vietnam,” of being — get this — “a pathological liar.”
Trump knows this about Cohen, of course, because he was the man paying Cohen to lie pathologically all those years.
I was going to continue with a few comments about this, but why bother?
Is Cohen a pathological liar? I assume so — but not on Giuliani’s word, since Giuliani is merely acting as mouthpiece for a man who serially hires pathological liars to lie for him, and therefore he cannot be trusted, either as conduit for Trump or even on his own terms, given his boss’s history, to which Giuliani himself is drawing attention, of hiring pathological liars.
The Trump presidency seems to be on a mission to prove empirically that Kant’s categorical imperative works. From what we’ve seen so far, it is already clear that, as Kant speculated, if we universalized the maxim “I should tell a lie,” we would eventually create a social environment in which lies would no longer be meaningful, since the default condition of mutual trust, upon which lying depends, would be fatally undermined.
Kant was only speculating, since of course the environment in which the maxim “I should tell a lie” is universalized has never existed in practice, in order that we might see the real result. But now, thanks to Trump, Giuliani, et al, we have our first physical evidence to verify Kant’s theory. If everyone lies, trust disintegrates, and so “I should tell a lie” is a maxim that rationally contradicts itself.