Somehow, we're still learning the depths of Trump's dishonesty
Of all of the things that might crystallize a sense of despair about the ruthless effectiveness of Donald Trump’s habitual dishonesty, I wouldn’t have expected it to be a legalistic six-page memo about the boundaries of the U.S. Constitution.
This week, following reporting from the newly published book “Peril,” by The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward and Robert Costa, we learned new details about the conversations that were unfolding in the White House in the days before the counting of electoral votes at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6. We’ve learned the extent to which Trump’s insistences about the election having been stolen were predicated on information that his team and his allies knew were unfounded. We’ve learned from the aforementioned memo that Trump seized upon a fringe opinion about constitutionality as a rationale to pressure his vice president into doing something that he couldn’t do and shouldn’t have done even if he could. We’ve learned more, in other words, about just how shoddy Trump’s claim to a second term was — a claim that has held a tight grip on his base well after it expended all of its usefulness for keeping him in office.
There is largely no point in trying to rationally rebut an irrational or emotional belief. But I hold the irrational belief that it can’t hurt, and I will not be rationalized out of it. So let’s walk through what we know about why Trump’s claims are false and were known to be false when he offered them.
We can begin with the fact that the former president is fundamentally not credible. The Post has a team of fact-checkers who reviewed every claim Trump made from the outset of his candidacy in 2015. They found tens of thousands of examples of dishonest, misleading or false assertions from him. Often, Trump repeated false things he’d said previously, marking at the very least a remarkable disinterest in accuracy. But given that most of his false claims were intertwined with his political rhetoric it was clearly the case that he was more interested in the impression his words left than their accuracy.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/somehow-were-still-learning-the-depths-of-trumps-dishonesty/ar-AAOHPBc
Not to minimize Trump but it's the whole God damn GOP that's stooping to new depths, Moscow Mitch pushing a potential default for example.
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