Friday, April 19, 2019

David French: The Trump Adminisration Is Basically Made Of Lies

Now this I absolutely believe:
I’ve finished reading the entire Mueller report, and I must confess that even as a longtime, quite open critic of Donald Trump, even I was surprised at the sheer scope, scale, and brazenness of the lies, falsehoods, and misdirections detailed by the Special Counsel’s Office. We’ve become accustomed to Trump making up his own facts on matters great and small, but to see the extent to which his virus infected his entire political operation is sobering. And the idea that anyone is treating this report as “win” for Trump, given the sheer extent of deceptions exposed (among other things), demonstrates that the bar for his conduct has sunk so low that anything other than outright criminality is too often brushed aside as relatively meaningless.
Basically we are going to have to choose between this lot of lying liars and the shrieking lot that lives in the fantasy world in which Trump is absolutely, positively a Russian agent and there is no other even possible explanation of his actions. And, of course, that isn't even close to being the most fantastical of their fantasies.

2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

It should be noted that French is inveterately NeverTrump. There was never a scenario where he would read the Mueller report and come to a different conclusion than this one. Here's the thing though, when I encounter the Russiagate phenomenon, it's definitely the case that Trump's orbit acted clownishly, but I don't think anyone would expect different of them, and I'm not sure more traditional politicians would have behaved much better in the face of the molten crazy that is Russiagate. Clinton was a very capable politician and his White House was hamstrung by the Lewinsky scandal too. Finally, Trump's lying is so in the open that I don't even think it's a threat. It's embarrassing but not actually risky, but I might be in the minority on that.

With Russiagate though, I don't think anyone came in with the expectation that the media would push an obviously and now provably false narrative for two years asserting the President was a Kremlin agent. And they didn't just push the narrative, they wrote half a million articles about it. Like it or not, Trump will never be that insidiously untruthful. He just doesn't have the bandwidth.

So for some reason French is the sort of person who sees these two phenomena play out and gets really offended that Michael Flynn didn't mention to FBI investigators some contract work he did for some Black Sea nations.

5:01 PM  
Blogger Winston Smith said...

God help me, I don't really disagree...

And: half a million!

10:52 AM  

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