The whirlwind of lies

In September, at a rally in Wisconsin, Donald Trump said:  "Trump is never wrong. I am never, ever wrong."

It was a remarkable statement, from the former president:  I am never, ever wrong.

Yet Trump, of course, tells lies all the time.  

It's an unending whirlwind of falsehoods.

He recently said, for example, that Vice President Harris "wants to legalize fentanyl."  

This was two days after the Vice President had called fentanyl a "scourge on our country," and pledged that as president she would "make it a top priority to disrupt the flow of fentanyl coming into the United States." 

Earlier this year, Trump claimed that he hadn't ever called for the "locking up" of Hillary Clinton.

He said: "I didn't say 'lock her up,' but the people would all say 'lock her up, lock her up.'"

CNN's fact-checker Daniel Dale, to whom I referred in a recent post--and who wrote a piece which is cited later in this post as well--set the record straight on Trump's absurd claim:

https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/02/politics/fact-check-trump-false-claim-lock-up-hillary-clinton/index.html

And there are, of course, Trump's particularly dangerous lies.

His compulsive falsehoods about the 2020 election led to the violence of January 6th.

Various administration officials and aides, Trump confidants, campaign staff members, and his Attorney General, William Barr--whose office investigated allegations of vote fraud--told him he had lost the election. 

Shortly after the election, Trump's campaign hired an outside expert, Ken Block, to investigate claims of fraud. Mr. Block, who was paid some $750,000 by the campaign, told The Washington Post in 2023: "Every fraud claim I was asked to investigate was false."

Yet Trump continues to cling to the election lies, like a security blanket.

Trump's (and his running mate JD Vance's) barbaric and hateful falsehoods about Haitian immigrants and pets, in Springfield, Ohio, led to bomb threats in Springfield, closing schools and government offices. 

Yet Trump played dumb when asked about the bomb threats.

"I don't know what happened with the bomb threats," he said. 

Senator Vance, an Ohioan, had promoted the claims about the migrants, prior to Trump, and Trump then seized upon them--most notably, in his debate with Vice President Harris.

The Republican Governor of Ohio, and city and police officials in Springfield, said Trump's and Vance's claims were false.

Yet the claims continued to be made--and Trump now says he'll deport the Springfield migrants, if elected. 

The migrants are in America legally, under the government's Temporary Protected Status program, Yet Trump said on Tuesday that they are "illegal immigrants as far as I'm concerned."

Trump has also recently told a number of alarming, malignant lies about Hurricane Helene--claims echoed by supporters.

Here are two stories, from CNN.com.  The first, from this Monday, is by Daniel Dale, and is titled: "Fact check: Six days of Trump lies about the Hurricane Helene response."

https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/06/politics/fact-check-trump-helene-response-north-carolina/index.html

The headline of the second story, from Wednesday, is: "Republicans in Congress call out hurricane misinformation coming from within their own party."

https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/09/politics/republicans-congress-hurricane-misinformation/index.html

Today, President Biden spoke of Trump's Hurricane-related falsehoods.  From an Associated Press story:

Speaking at the White House on the government’s work to address Hurricanes Milton and Helene, Biden condemned the “reckless, irresponsible and relentless disinformation and outright lies that continue to flow.”

President Biden said that Trump should "get a life, man." 

October 7th

Today is of course the one-year anniversary of the Hamas terror attacks in Israel, during which some 1200 people were murdered; approximately 800 of those killed were civilians.  Some 250 hostages were taken to Gaza. 

Ninety-seven hostages remain in Gaza, including four Americans.  It is believed that at least 35 of the remaining hostages are dead. 

In a statement today, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken noted that the remaining hostages "include men, women, young boys, young girls, two babies, and elderly people from more than 25 nations."

The October 7th attacks by Hamas (and members of other Palestinian terror groups, including Islamic Jihad) were medieval: the hunting down of victims at the Nova music festival, the kibbutzim massacres, including the burning of homes, and the people within them; the rapes, including gang rape, and the reported acts of sexual mutilation of some of the murder victims.

So, on this day, one thinks of those who died on October 7th, and their families; those wounded (both physically, and emotionally); and one thinks, with sadness and hope, concerning the remaining hostages, and their families.

One also keeps in mind the suffering of the Palestinian civilians in Gaza--though their suffering, Hamas has made cruelly apparent over time, is not the terror group's priority. (I will have more to say about this in an upcoming post.)  

While at the moment a resolution of the Israel/Hamas war seems tragically out of reach, one hopes, deeply, that the war will come to its end soon.

Lastly, I was moved, today, by a ceremony at the Vice Presidential home in Washington. Vice President Harris and her husband, Doug Emhoff, planted a memorial tree on the grounds of the residence, in honor of the victims of October 7th.  

In addition to speaking of the terrible events of last October, Ms. Harris, as she has often done, also addressed "the immense suffering of Palestinians in Gaza.”    

Here is a story about the ceremony, from the Jewish newspaper the Forward.

https://forward.com/fast-forward/661693/kamala-harris-doug-emhoff-october-7-gaza-pomegranate-tree/

Kneeling

(Please note: some edits were made to the piece below, in the hours after its posting.)

One of the words Donald Trump uses often, as others have noted, is "Sir."  He routinely tells stories in which people called him "Sir."   

He obviously needs to let people know that he is treated with deference (whether people in fact called him "Sir" or not; I suspect he regularly adds "Sir" for effect).

Another word Trump has used often is "begged."  He has made many public comments about those he regards as enemies--people, he has claimed, who had "begged" him for a job, for his endorsement, etc. 

I am guessing Trump has made up--or imagined--most of these claims.  It is, it seems, another manifestation of his need to show people how powerful he is--that people routinely beg him for favors.

CNN's fact-checker, Daniel Dale, wrote a piece in 2020 about a number of the people who, according to Trump, had resorted to such begging. 

One of instances cited by Daniel Dale involved both the use of "begged," and "Sir."  Mr. Dale wrote:

After the New York Times reported that former national security adviser John Bolton’s unpublished book alleges Trump said he wanted to withhold aid to Ukraine until Ukraine helped with investigations into Democrats, Trump tweeted – among other jabs – that Bolton had “‘begged’ me for a non-Senate approved job, which I gave him despite many saying ‘Don’t do it, sir.’”

Yet there are other instances of Trump's invocation of begging, not part of Mr. Dale's report, that have involved an additional detail.  This additional detail reveals a great deal about Trump.  

The stories involve not simply begging--but kneeling.  There is a deep ugliness to the stories.

In March of 2016, Mitt Romney delivered a speech highly critical of then-candidate Trump.  He spoke of "the bullying, the greed, the showing off, the misogyny, the absurd third-grade theatrics." He said: "We have long referred to him as 'The Donald.' He is the only person in America to whom we have added an article before his name. It wasn't because he had attributes we admired."

Trump, as part of his response to Mr. Romney, called him a "choke artist," concerning Mr. Romney's 2012 presidential campaign.  But the most self-revelatory thing he said about Mr. Romney was this:

"I don't know what happened to him," Trump said. "You can see how loyal he is. He was begging for my endorsement.  I could have said, 'Mitt, drop to your knees.'  He would have dropped to his knees." (Italics added.) 

A former aide to Mr. Romney wrote at the time, on Twitter: "I was with Mitt every time he saw @realDonaldTrump, and guarantee Mitt never begged Trump. Wish I could have recorded Trump kissing Mitt's ass."

There is also the following, about Elon Musk, and Trump. While Mr. Musk is today a vocal supporter of Trump--and who, like Trump, routinely spreads falsehoods and conspiracy theories (in Mr. Musk's case, on X, the platform he owns)--they were not always as friendly. (Anderson Cooper referred to the following story on one of his weeknight programs on CNN last week.) 

In 2022, Mr. Musk said, online, that it was "time for Trump to hang up his hat and sail into the sunset."

As reported by The Hill, Trump, in a caustic reply, posted the following on his social media site Truth Social:

“When Elon Musk came to the White House asking me for help on all of his many subsidized projects, whether it’s electric cars that don’t drive long enough, driverless cars that crash, or rocketships to nowhere, without which subsidies he’d be worthless, and telling me how he was a big Trump fan and Republican, I could have said, ‘drop to your knees and beg,’ and he would have done it,” Trump asserted. 

In December of 2020, the month after the presidential election, and not long before he left the Trump administration, Attorney General William Barr, in an Associated Press interview, disputed Trump's claims of election fraud. He said that "to date, we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.”

According to Michael Wolff's book,  Landslide: The Final Days of the Trump Presidency, as reported by Business Insider, Trump was (not surprisingly) infuriated by Mr. Barr's comments. The Business Insider story included a quote from Trump which appeared in Mr. Wolff's book: 

Trump [wrote Business Insider] also appeared to acknowledge at one point that he had lost the election to Joe Biden, saying, "If I had won ... Barr would have licked the floor if I asked him to. What a phony!"

"Licked the floor": a variant of Trump's assertion that people would have dropped to their knees and begged.

In July 2022, Trump gave a speech to the conservative group Turning Point USA, in which he said that "Americans kneel to God, and God alone." 

Unless, of course, they're kneeling to him.

In October of 2023, after Kevin McCarthy was removed as Speaker of the House, Republican Representative Tom Emmer of Minnesota was nominated for the post by the House Republican conference.

Trump objected, and made phone calls to House members. He criticized Mr. Emmer on Truth Social, calling him a "Globalist RINO." In a January, 2024 piece, David A. Graham of The Atlantic wrote: "Among the complaints: Emmer had voted to certify the 2020 election of Joe Biden, and he had not yet endorsed Trump's 2024 race.  Emmer quickly realized he couldn't win and decided to drop out." Mr. Graham cited a Politico story which reported that Trump told a confidant: "He's done. It's over. I killed him.'" Mr. Emmer later endorsed Trump's candidacy.

A January, 2024 New York Times story (also cited by Mr. Graham) said this: 

“They always bend the knee,” Mr. Trump said privately of Mr. Emmer’s endorsement, according to a person who spoke to him.