“I do it to discredit and demean you all”
by digby
This piece by Jim Rutenberg of the New York Times about Trump’s relentless lying is interesting, if kultimately kind of depressing. He notes all of the usual atrocities from the past few days and then asks:
Is it working?
The short answer is yes. Increasingly, the president’s almost daily attacks seem to be delivering the desired effect, despite the many examples of powerful reporting on his presidency. By one measure, a CBS News poll over the summer, 91 percent of “strong Trump supporters” trust him to provide accurate information; 11 percent said the same about the news media.
A Suicidal Nanny, an Underground Industry and 3 Babies Stabbed
Mr. Trump was open about the tactic in a 2016 conversation with Lesley Stahl of CBS News, which she shared earlier this year: “I do it to discredit you all and demean you all, so when you write negative stories about me, no one will believe you,” she quoted him as saying.And with the president settling on “fear and falsehoods” as an election strategy, as The Washington Post put it last week, the political information system is awash in more misleading or flatly wrong assertions than reporters can keep up with. It’s as if President Trump has hit the journalism industry with a denial-of-service attack.
That quote reveals a much more strategic thought process than I think we all commonly recognize. It also means he knows what he’s doing and these Republicans who excuse him by saying it’s all in good fun or just “Trump being Trump” are accomplices in this massive propaganda campaign.
That’s what it is. Propaganda. It’s stupid and puerile but Trump knows his Redhats and that’s what they want.
The rest of the article features a number of experts talking about either ignoring Trump, only concentrating on his Big Lies or otherwise trying to get around this. None are satisfying. And frankly, I don’t think any of that will work.
He must be removed from office. Maybe he’ll be impeached, I don’t know. But there is an election in two years in any case. If we can survive until then, he should be ignominiously defeated.
The resistance is about to test its muscle in the first election since this nightmare began. If it’s strong, it will show that this miscreant and his avalanche of lies isn’t able to completely defeat common sense and reason.
I don’t know what to say about members of his cult. Maybe they just need to take some cold showers. Right now they are stark raving nuts.
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