Part Two – The Trump Liar On Full Display….

I do have a high degree of confidence there are enough safeguards built into our constitutional system, that the institutions & balance of power protecting our democracy can withstand this current assault.  But it’s wise not to get complacent & think it’s not important to take an active involvement.  Please do share The Voracs & warn people about the evils of the echo.  Be fully aware we are at risk, considering the dictatorial tyrant personality of our president, the reach & influence of the echo-charlatans on Fox, talk radio & the internet, along with the large percentage of the GOP base who’ve been brainwashed into believing that dangerous rhetoric.  Plus we’re seeing signs of a more aggressive approach from Trump’s legal team & his radical cronies in Congress.  The GOP has been so thoroughly corrupted by Trump & his echo, they barely exist anymore as a functioning party.  That deceptive communications machine out there spreading false narratives has been shaping much of current conservative thought into an alternate reality.

Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein took aim Tuesday at Republican lawmakers who have drafted articles of impeachment against him, saying that he would not comment on documents “that nobody has the courage to put their name on” and asserting that he will not change his behavior in the face of threats. “I think they should understand by now that the Department of Justice is not going to be extorted,” Rosenstein said. “We’re going to do what’s required by the rule of law, and any kind of threats that anybody makes are not going to affect the way we do our job.” Rosenstein’s comments came at the end of a wide-ranging conversation at the Newseum in Washington to commemorate Law Day, which happened to fall a day after The Washington Post reported that conservative allies of President Trump had drafted impeachment articles against the Justice Department’s No. 2 official. Members of the conservative House Freedom Caucus — led by Rep. Mark Meadows (R-N.C.) — have been in a long-running feud with Rosenstein and the Justice Department over what they see as a failure to turn over documents on a number of controversial topics, including the surveillance of former Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

Other articles showing Rosenstein pushing back on those crackpot attacks against him are seen in rosenstein-knocks-republicans-who-wrote-draft-calling-for-his & also rosenstein-says-he-won-t-be-extorted-amid-impeachment-threat.  The leftist Daily Kos weighs in with these articles: Rosenstein-warns-Republican-lawmakers-Justice-Department-is-not-going-to-be-extorted & also Is-This-The-Guy-You-Want-To-Try-To-Extort & also An-Increasingly-Unhinged-Trump-Tweets-a-Threat-to-the-Rule-of-Law.  Rubin chimes in on the topic with her conclusion here from rosenstein-explains-the-rule-of-law:

Rosenstein’s short tutorial makes clear why the White House cannot be allowed to reach down into DOJ to go after this individual or spare that individual. Such conduct violates core principles without which liberal democracies cannot function. Allow the executive to direct law enforcement based on whim, self-interest or partisanship, and you have a king, not a president constrained by the rule of law. Put in FBI officials and DOJ lawyers who would respond to the president’s expressed whims, self-interest or partisanship, and you no longer have constitutional government. Even a first-year law student comes to class equipped with an appreciation for these elementary concepts. Trump, however, who has operated in a world of empty threats, financial muscle, tabloid boasts and flat-out lies (in a family business with no outside accountability), appears unaware that all those tricks are useless when operating in a realm where the rule of law is taken seriously. No wonder Trump is an emotional basket case these days. He’s learning that you cannot extort the Justice Department. If you try, there are serious legal consequences.

Trump Liar

On Friday, Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee released a report based on their cursory investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election. Full of shoddy rationalizations and evasions, it purported to show that America’s intelligence community failed to use “proper analytic tradecraft” in concluding that Russia wanted to help elect Donald Trump, and that there is no evidence that the Trump campaign colluded with Russia. Its real message was that, for Republicans in Congress determined to protect this president, evidence is irrelevant. Consider just one bit of spin about the Trump campaign’s clandestine Russia connections. During the presidential transition, Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and Michael Flynn, who had been named national security adviser, tried to set up a back channel to the Kremlin through the Russian Embassy, in an apparent attempt to evade American intelligence monitoring. The majority report treats this, amazingly, as exculpatory: “Possible Russian efforts to set up a ‘back channel’ with Trump associates after the election suggest the absence of collusion during the campaign, since the communication associated with collusion would have rendered such a ‘back channel’ unnecessary.” This makes no sense — new developments would require new communications. But making sense isn’t the point; the report’s function is to obscure reality, not illuminate it. In reality, as the meticulous Democratic response to the Republican report makes clear, there’s already overwhelming evidence of the Trump campaign’s collusion with Russia. But as details of Trump’s Russia connections have dribbled out over the last year and a half, each revelation has led to a familiar, numbing cycle of shock, impotent anger, and, finally, resignation.

In these excerpts from in-a-post-truth-world-there-is-no-democracy, Rubin emphasizes the need to purge DC (drain the swamp?) of all the liars who are advocating for this post-truth world.  Democracy will never survive a populace dumbed down by believing a littany of lies we’re always getting from the far-right & Trump sycophants:

Former CIA director Michael Hayden writes: “We in the intelligence world have dealt with obstinate and argumentative presidents through the years. But we have never served a president for whom ground truth really doesn’t matter.” When the commander in chief is irrational and driven by personal animus and emotion, intelligence briefings and skilled advisers may not be sufficient to steer the ship of state away from the rocks. Hayden is correct in pointing out that the United States needs a coalition of truth-tellers. (“In this post-truth world, intelligence agencies are in the bunker with some unlikely mates: journalism, academia, the courts, law enforcement and science — all of which, like intelligence gathering, are evidence-based. Intelligence shares a broader duty with these other truth-tellers to preserve the commitment and ability of our society to base important decisions on our best judgment of what constitutes objective reality.”) The pro-truth coalition must step up its game, pursue facts zealously and call out lies — again and again. Threats, insults and a morass of lies spread via social media must be identified for what they are — an attempt to suppress truth and thereby make those with power unaccountable.

 

One way to disable the attack on objective reality is to break up the collaboration between the White House and the GOP Congress. There must be consequences for lawmakers who are bent on creating a parallel universe in which the FBI and Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein are the enemies of democracy, we are in the midst of a crime wave cause by illegal immigrants, climate change is a fraud, tariffs are good for workers and tax cuts pay for themselves. If you’re pushing the narrative that the FBI is corrupt, then you should be booted from office. If you said the tax cuts would pay for themselves (despite a mound of evidence), you really have no business being in charge of taxpayers’ money. In reaffirming the primacy of reality, voters can readily identify the lawmakers who have failed to uphold their oaths of office.

 

Fortunately, every House member and a third of the Senate will be on the ballot in November, along with dozens of governors and hundreds of state lawmakers. At a time when Trump’s pet evangelical figureheads have shed any pretense of upholding values, the rest of the country must insist on the value of truth-telling. Trump’s legislative allies need to be confronted with facts, shamed into acknowledging reality and, if need be, removed from office. If one or both houses flip to Democratic control, open oversight hearings and perhaps an independent commission or two will be essential to restore rational decision-making and accountability. You see, the purpose of flipping the House and/or Senate is not to remove the president but to stymie his crusade against reality. It’s only then that we can repair our democracy and begin addressing our policy challenges.

In these excerpts also from Rubin in not-in-any-other-administration-would-you-see-this, she again highlights this all-out assault on truths.  The final paragraph should be enlightening to those out there in echo-land who complain the media is out to get Trump:

We’re in a house of mirrors when it comes to President Trump. He’s in a heap of trouble because of his interference with the Justice Department including firing and misrepresenting the reasons for firing former FBI director James B. Comey. So when more than 40 questions, including many about Russia collusion, get released, Trump misrepresents them (no collusion questions!) and falsely suggests they did not come from his own side.

 

If he cannot tell the truth about what the questions printed by the media are, how in the world is he going to possibly answer four dozen without either incriminating himself or lying? Lying about questions probing his lies is the essence of the Trump presidency. Look for him to keeping trying to fend off an interview for as long as possible (maybe even challenging a subpoena if special counsel Robert S. Mueller III is forced to go that route) or assert the Fifth Amendment — however incompatible that may be with his obligations as president.

 

Lying, exaggerating, distorting and otherwise misleading the public are par for the course in the Trump presidency, as my colleague Glenn Kessler has dutifully catalogued. “In the 466 days since he took the oath of office, President Trump has made 3,001 false or misleading claims, according to The Fact Checker’s database that analyzes, categorizes and tracks every suspect statement uttered by the president,” Kessler reports. “That’s an average of nearly 6.5 claims a day. . . . [S]ince we last updated this tally two months ago, the president has averaged about 9 claims a day.” With a president like this, lying and other unethical conduct become second nature in the White House and Cabinet.

 

The Trump apologists complain that the coverage of this president is too negative. Candidly, the media can barely keep up with the lies, the lies about lies and the grotesque self-enrichment. If anything, the media needs to do a better job of contrasting this White House with all who preceded it. Trump and this administration are in a class by themselves — unabashed about misleading the public, unashamed to be feeding at the trough, unworried by their own incompetence and untroubled by conflicts of interest. Trump repeatedly says he’s not like other politicians. In that he is quite right.

When the Trump liar persona has built his narrative based on lies, no wonder he’s lost control of it: trump-revelations-narrative.html.  Here’s just one paragraph from the article:

For Mr. Trump, it is about creating a narrative that suits his desired image, and dictating the terms of his own life — in media coverage, in his business, in politics, even in his medical care. But he now risks losing his grip on the story line he has long sought to control, in part because of his own treatment of associates like his doctor and the lawyer who paid the porn star.

The echo-bubble is that surreal world where truths are only optional & even derided.  Once we get outside that Trump worshipping echo-world, we see logical Americans can easily see the chronic lying coming from the prez, as these excerpts show from poll-60-percent-of-americans-say-trump-is-usually-dishonest:

A majority of Americans think that President Trump either rarely or never tells the truth, according to an NBC News/SurveyMoney poll released Wednesday. Overall, 61 percent of respondents to the online poll believe that Trump tells the truth either some of the time or never. The survey results came a day after The Washington Post’s Fact Checker reported that Trump has made more than 3,000 false or misleading statements since taking office last year. Perceptions of the president’s honesty are largely divided along party lines. According to the NBC News/SurveyMoney poll, 94 percent of Democrats and 76 percent of independents believe that Trump tells the the truth only occasionally or even less frequently. Republicans, on the other hand, overwhelmingly view Trump as a consistent truth-teller. Seventy-six percent said that he tells the truth either all or most of the time, while 22 percent believe that he tells the truth only some of the time or less.

Max Boot weighs in on this post-truth existence the leadership in DC finds itself in, as current circumstances have found America sinking to such depths as having a leader who’s actually a con man, seen in these excerpts from trump-is-a-grifter-same-as-ever:

Critics of President Trump, including me, have regularly compared him to authoritarian rulers such as Viktor Orban and Vladimir Putin. But a more apt comparison may be with Jordan Belfort or Frank Abagnale. Who? you ask. Belfort is the high-living Wall Street stockbroker who was convicted of fraudand subsequently had his life story dramatized by Martin Scorsese in “The Wolf of Wall Street.” Abagnale is the con artist who pretended to be a doctor and airline pilot, among other disguises. His life story was told by Steven Spielberg in “Catch Me If You Can.” That title appears ever-more-appropriate for the Donald Trump life story as more of the president’s scams come to light.

 

Trump’s whole business career was littered with broken promises — in other words, swindles. Trump paid $25 million to settle civil suits by students at Trump University who claimed that he had not delivered on his promises to teach them the secrets of his money-making success. Actually, he did: The lesson came in the way they were fleeced. Having gotten in the habit of lying regularly about matters big and small, Trump has set new records for mendacity while in office. The Post reports that he has made more than 3,000 false or misleading claims since the inauguration, and that his rate of deception has increased from 4.9 to 9 falsehoods a day. Does any of this matter? From a political perspective, probably not. Voters knew what sort of huckster Trump was when they elected him. But it should give us pause to consider what it says about America, circa 2018, that so many of us are so ready to accept a Jordan Belfort or Frank Abagnale — a con man, in other words — as our leader.