Donald Trump means to win by repetition if not by attrition. Trump once told Billy Bush his theory of the Big Lie after saying on camera that “The Apprentice” had No. 1 ratings on TV. It wasn’t true. Challenged once the cameras were off, Trump said, “[Y]ou just tell them and they believe it. That’s it: you just tell them and they believe.” Whatever the truth is, lie bigger.
Trump turned last night’s State of the Union Address into another reality show. Trump awarded ailing Rush Limbaugh the Presidential Medal of Freedom live on national TV. Seated in the gallery was an army wife, a mother of two, whose husband had been deployed to Afghanistan for seven months. Trump introduced her, then produced her husband like a mystery guest for an on-camera reunion.
If he had asked the audience to look under their seats for envelopes, his night would have been complete except for the string of lies in a speech he used to launch a new season of settling scores.
The Washington Post does yeoman’s work fact-checking the lies in last night’s speech. Like Lewis Carroll’s oysters, they came thick and fast.
“Many of these claims have been fact-checked repeatedly, yet the president persists in using them,” the Post explains. He repeats them to wear down the “fake news” and to exhaust the rest of us until we accept reality as he says it is.
There were so many lies that the Post lacked space for addressing Trump’s claims about “a socialist takeover of our healthcare system” that would “bankrupt our Nation by providing free taxpayer-funded healthcare to millions of illegal aliens .”
Kaiser Health News addresses the claim:
“Medicare for All would dramatically shift how we pay for health care, but not necessarily how much we spend in total,” said Larry Levitt, a vice president at the Kaiser Family Foundation. “It’s hard to make the case that it would bankrupt the country.” (Kaiser Health News is an editorially independent program of the foundation.)
Furthermore, to suggest that providing undocumented immigrants with insurance would bankrupt the country is misleading. Those immigrants make up a small number of the population — about 11 million, compared to the total national population of approximately 327 million.
“A very, very small percentage of the total cost is associated with that 11 million people,” said Linda Blumberg, an analyst at the Urban Institute, a Washington think tank. “We’re talking about a strawman.”
But breaking reality is easy if you reject objective truth. It’s even easier if you introduce technology. Iowa Democrats did that Monday night with a phone app intended for reporting caucus results. The app failed for many and phone lines meant as backup became jammed. Wednesday morning, we’re still trying to learn who won and how many delegates each candidate carries going into New Hampshire.
NPR reports:
When things began to go awry, the party was vague for hours about what was causing the delay, leaving the public and campaigns confused, frustrated and even suspicious. The party had promised the new app would also mean quicker results, but instead the hours dragged on with nothing to report.
“The media is ready to go and everyone’s ready to declare a winner and the candidates have their speeches and there’s this sense of anticipation,” says Rick Hasen, an election law expert who’s just written a book — Election Meltdown: Dirty Tricks, Distrust, and the Threat to American Democracy — about all the things that could go wrong in 2020.
“If the Iowa Democratic Party had said, ‘well, it’s going to be a day or two before we have results,’ people’s expectations would have been managed,” Hasen said.
Speed kills, roadside warnings once said. In the Republican-controlled Senate’s desire for a speedy end to Trump’s impeachment, the body is expected to acquit Trump today on charges of abuse of power and obstruction of Congress. No witnesses testified for or against the president in his “trial.”
Speed may have killed the Iowa caucuses on Monday. We’re just awaiting the autopsy. One wonders if the same is true of the republic.
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