As if America needed another reason not to hand the White House again to Donald “88 Counts” Trump. Do we really want Dr. Bleach-and-Light Enemas recommending quack remedies and maskless Everydays should we face another deadly pandemic?
Officially, there is only one documented case of bird flu spilling over from cows into humans during the current U.S. outbreak.
But epidemiologist Gregory Gray suspects the true number is higher, based on what he heard from veterinarians, farm owners and the workers themselves as the virus hit their herds in his state.
“We know that some of the workers sought medical care for influenza-like illness and conjunctivitis at the same time the H5N1 was ravaging the dairy farms,” says Gray, an infectious disease epidemiologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston.
“I don’t have a way to measure that, but it seems biologically quite plausible that they too, are suffering from the virus,” he says.
Dr. Irwin Redlener (remember him from 2020?) is concerned:
Mostly dramatically speeding up and ramping up vaccine development and production. And making sure we have sufficient supplies of face masks, hospital equipment and planning for pandemics reviewed by all health care systems and providers. https://t.co/Ev0bGfMe1e
— Irwin Redlener, MD (@IrwinRedlenerMD) May 2, 2024
The U.S. has two vaccines ready should the strain of bird flu circulating in dairy cows begin spreading easily to people, federal health officials said Wednesday. They could begin shipping doses widely within weeks, if needed.
So far, there’s no evidence that H5N1 is spreading person-to-person, although one dairy worker in Texas who worked closely with infected cattle had a mild infection and developed conjunctivitis, or pinkeye, in April.
At a briefing Wednesday, government health officials said they are preparing for a potential scenario of H5N1 jumping from animal to person — or person to person. The virus has taken off in dairy cows, infecting at least 36 herds across nine states, raising concerns that it could acquire mutations that would make it easier to spill over into humans.
Studies “suggest that the vaccines will offer good cross-protection against cattle outbreak viruses,” Demetre Daskalakis, director of the National Center for Immunization and Respiratory Diseases, said on the call Wednesday.
I’m still running into friends I haven’t seen since COVID-19 hit.
“A fucking hellscape… People and violence and, like, looting and fires everywhere… Gay ice cream.”
At Dartmouth College Wednesday night, students holding a peaceful pro-Palestine protest on the college green were quickly met with …. well, let Prof. Jeff Sharlett (“The Undertow“) tell it:
This Dartmouth protest is hours old. Broad coalition. Obstructs nothing. Interferes with nobody’s classes. And Dartmouth has occupied our campus Green with state troopers in riot gear who’ve arrested protesters, faculty, and, reportedly—not confirmed—student journalist.
Meanwhile, Brown University administrators reached a negotiated settlement with student protesters:
This is unprecedented. Brown University strikes a deal with its students to end their peaceful protest & encampment, in exchange for a formal divestment vote from Israeli interests. And no student will be punished for protesting. This is democracy at work.https://t.co/SgJcSoKSyn
Here is the information about Northwestern that I just spoke with @JohnBerman@CNN about. Brown University and others did same. Listening and de-escalation, and also consequences for students who break the law, are not in conflict. https://t.co/gHxdRNrnwl
Which do you think will get more press? Which do you think will fuel the right-wing culture war? Okay, likely all of it.
Charlie Sykes recalls being a kid at the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago when Mayor Daily unleashed his police against Vietnam War protesters. Those clashes helped Richard Nixon win the presidency. “[T]hey hastened the realignment of much of the American electorate. Republicans would hold the White House for 16 of the next 20 years. Indeed, the politics of the past six decades have been shaped by the divisions that sharpened that year.”
We are still suffering the hangover from that period, Sykes believes:
Donald Trump obviously hopes that history will repeat itself, and that the left-wing theatrics of the anti-Israel protests, on college campuses and beyond, will have an outsize effect on the 2024 election. Like Nixon and Wallace before him, Trump (and the congressional GOP) will seize on the protests’ methodology and rhetoric—this time to further polarize an already deeply polarized electorate. The irony, of course, is rich: Even as Trump stands trial for multiple felonies, he is trying to cast himself as the candidate of law and order. Even as he lashes out about the campus protesters, he is pledging pardons for the rioters who attacked the Capitol.
Before events Dartmouth, Brown and Northwestern, Paul Waldman predicted (irony being dead) Team MAGA will dial its law-and-order claxon up to 11. Never mind that these mostly peaceful camp-ins isolated to a few college campuses had no impact on 99.99% of Americans. You won’t be accosted by “antifa” at the McDonald’s drive-thru at breakfast. The right-wing media machine will insist They are coming for you in your bed with their long, curved knives:
Yet Republicans would have you believe that these protests are causing “chaos” from sea to shining sea, that the nation is on the verge of a complete breakdown of law and order that threatens every American. The solution to the protests is for the kids saying things conservatives don’t like to shut up, and if they won’t, some good old-fashioned skull-cracking is necessary to protect the rest of us from their anarchic criminality.
This has become the dominant theme of the right’s response not just to these protests but to the state of the country in general: America is in chaos. You hear that word repeated over and over; to take just one example, when Speaker of the House Mike Johnson went to Columbia University for a photo op, he demanded that the university’s president “resign if she could not immediately bring order to this chaos.” While Columbia students have since taken over a university building, that hadn’t happened at the time; they were just occupying the quad. On the other hand, one student did yell “Mike, you suck!” so it was probably pretty scary for him.
People who have actually reported from the protests (see here or here) have by and large found them to be well-behaved. Are there problematic things being said at some of them? Yes there are. Have there been antisemitic incidents around some of them? Yes there have. But nearly everything resembling “chaos” has come in the crackdowns. Scenes of violent confrontation you’ve witnessed on TV or social media have occurred when the police moved in, often in riot gear to remove and arrest students and sometimes faculty (and in at least one case, when counter-protesters stormed a protest). At the universities where the administrators had the sense to just let the students have their say, there has been almost no violence. But this is how Republicans portray what’s happening:
Are there a few students uttering noxious things? Sure. (Ever been to a hockey game?) But where administrators allowed student to “have their say,” there has been “almost no violence.” But, you know, skulls must be cracked. Donald Trump is itching for it.
Furthermore, the chaos narrative fits in with their broader claims about life in America today, which is supposedly a nightmare of economic misery and violent mayhem, where people have to dodge murderous gangs just to make it to the store to buy a gallon of milk for 25 bucks and immigrants are pillaging our communities.
Not where you live, of course, but everywhere else. This is the trick: convincing people that even as their own days proceed in an ordinarily mundane fashion, chaos awaits just a few miles away, particularly in American cities, which liberals and their permissive policies have turned into hellholes of crime. This is a regular feature of conservative rhetoric, whether it’s from politicians or Fox News hosts or “bro country” singers.
If you point out that in fact crime is dropping quite dramatically, Republicans will laugh in your face. How can you not realize that America is in chaos? After all, that’s what they see every night on “Hannity”! And sure, the only immigrants they know are washing their dishes or putting a new roof on their neighbor’s house, but haven’t you seen the hundreds of “CHAOS AT THE BORDER!!!” segments on Fox? It’s a jungle out there! If you doubt, just head over to bidenbloodbath.com, a website set up by the Republican National Committee to warn people about the immigrant “invasion” (another word repeated endlessly on the right). Or check in with your favorite Republican PR ghoul, who will tell you that we’re on the verge of a complete breakdown of the social order:
J.D. Vance insists 21st century hippies go home and “take a shower.” The 1950s weren’t the only good old days for Republicans. Chaos, real or imagined, sells papers and right-wing crackdowns, especially to red state residents completely cut off from reality.
The reaction to the protests, MSNBC’s Chris Hayes notes, is “out of proportion to the protests themselves.” But for the right, a shiny distraction from carnage in Gaza. And politically useful.
WATCH– @chrislhayes: It's easier to argue about what college kids are doing than to confront the human misery and destruction that's happening in the actual conflict which is, of course, the source of these protests. pic.twitter.com/sHYhTMnZmd
— All In with Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) May 2, 2024
Waldman again:
While the campus protests will quiet when students return home for the summer, Republicans will continue to talk about them for as long as they can, spinning out a tale in which every college in America became the scene of berserker rioting that left half the country aflame. That’s the way they still talk about the summer of 2020; if you asked the average Fox News viewer, they’d tell you that in the wake of George Floyd’s murder, cities like Portland were literally burned to the ground, leaving nothing more than a pile of rubble. The fact that it’s not true is meaningless; those viewers will never visit the cities they’ve been convinced are something out of Mad Max, just as they’ll have no firsthand experience with the current atmosphere at the nation’s universities.
But they’ll know in their hearts that it’s madness out there. Bar the door, buy some more guns, prepare for the collapse of civilization if Joe Biden wins. The chaos is coming for you, and only voting for Donald Trump can stop it.
Madness! Antifa-da! Urban hellscapes! Somewhere I cannot find at the moment, a conservative visiting New York recently was shocked to find that the city was not awash with the homeless, with brown-skinned immigrants, bombed-out neighborhoods, etc.
George Hahn mocked that imaginary liberal Mad Max America during the pandemic, you’ll recall.
Navigating the nightmarish hellscape that is New York City.
But as Waldman points out, the truth is not the point for Trump. Even his persona is a lie. Truth has never been what Trump is selling his marks.
Trump: If we don't win this election, I don't think our country is going to survive. I will say it, and I've never said that publicly. pic.twitter.com/MbkREu1VBd
A far-right Russian philosopher who’s called for Russia to expand its borders and rise up against the West says his interview with Tucker Carlson shows Americans are ready to accept his fascist ideas.
Alexander Dugin, dubbed “Putin’s brain” for supposedly influencing the Russian leader’s geopolitical crusades, took to Telegram in the wake of his interview with the former Fox News host to note that he’d made it into the “American mainstream” by sitting down with Carlson, and that the “American public is a little ready for my ideas.”
He claimed there’d been a “defamation” campaign against him hatched by “globalists” and “left-wing liberals” who portrayed him as “Dr. Evil” and “the most dangerous philosopher in the world.” Of course, Carlson himself used precisely those descriptors in trying to hype the 20-minute interview on X, falsely claiming Dugin’s ideas are “so dangerous” that “Amazon won’t sell his books.” (In fact, several of his books are currently available for purchase on Amazon in Russian.)
[…]
In his interview with Carlson released this week, Dugin blamed the “Anglo-Saxon world” for the rise of liberalism, claimed films like The Terminator and The Matrix will become a reality in the West, and declared that Vladimir Putin is the one man who can save the world from such horror.
Writing about the right’s newfound love of all things Russian a few years back, I described Dugin as “the influential neo-fascist Russian philosopher Alexander Dugin, who promotes what the Daily Beast describes as “the modern incarnation of ‘Eurasianism,’ a geopolitical theory positing Russia as the inheritor of ‘Eternal Rome.'” Dugin has ties to virtually every American white supremacist leader in one way or another.”
Indeed he does.
Ep. 99 Aleksandr Dugin is the most famous political philosopher in Russia. His ideas are considered so dangerous, the Ukrainian government murdered his daughter and Amazon won’t sell his books. We talked to him in Moscow. pic.twitter.com/4LrO0Ufg9P
Because Donald Trump must always be seen as wielding absolute mastery over his hapless, flailing opponents, he and his propagandists want you to believe his hush-money trial in Manhattan has proven nothing but a smashing political success for him.
On Monday night, Trump posted a video on social media featuring Fox personality Jesse Watters gushing that his trial may win him the White House. Trump also promoted a video of Fox’s Jeanine Pirro insisting that it showcases his ability to “withstand pressure.” Other Fox figures have spun Trump’s buffoonish outbreaks of narcolepsy in court as proof he’s Owning the Libs: Certain of acquittal, he can do some power-napping while showing the trial the contempt it deserves.
Greg points out that Trump doesn’t seem quite as sanguine. According to the NY Times he’s been talking trash about Todd Blanche, his previously favorite attorney, because he isn’t being aggressive enough. (He’s also not happy with attorney’s fees…) Apparently, he’s venting that he doesn’t have “a Roy Cohn” again.
He knows that this trial is making him look small and vulnerable even though stooges like Watters try to say that the trial is great for Trump because it’s denying the media “an opportunity to twist Trump’s words.”
The reality is that Trump looks tired (very tired!) weak and vulnerable and the trial exposes him for the despicable creep he has always been. But not on Fox:
That’s far from the fearsome, dominant figure depicted in MAGA propaganda about the trial. Note that both Watters and Pirro insist Trump is shining in the role of defendant. They are trying to depict Trump as simultaneously a victim and a formidable warrior, one who is fighting back against corrupt, powerful forces that are persecuting him. Similarly, as Media Matters’ Matt Gertz details, Fox figures praising Trump’s courtroom naps are practically painting them as acts of heroic defiance against an illegitimate prosecution.
I guess that goes without saying. According to Fox, Trump can do no wrong. But as Gregg points out:
Trump is not wielding absolute mastery over events. Trump’s own lawyers are not treating his trial as fundamentally illegitimate. Voters outside the MAGA information universe regard the charges against him as serious, and they see the other prosecutions against him in a similarly grave light. A whole lot of people will likely see Trump’s sneering dismissal of these proceedings—the dozing off, the attacks on jurors, the rage fits against the supposed unfairness of it all—as whiny entitlement, as contempt for the very notion that he should ever be held accountable for anything.
You’d think he’d just act confident and self-assured about the outcome and treat the whole thing as a minor inconvenience instead of turning his whining up to 1. But then I guess he knows his cult better than anyone and understands that they love his whining and complaining more than anything. I can’t imagine why that is, but he seems to be right.
Yesterday, the Democratic leadership announced that they would vote to save Mike Johnson if Marjorie Taylor Greene went ahead with her threatened motion to vacate the chair. Marge is having a temper tantrum over it:
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene announced Wednesday she will move ahead with her attempt to oust Speaker Mike Johnson from the House’s top job — though her plan seems doomed to fail.
“Mike Johnson is not capable of that job,” she said. “He has proven that over and over again.”
Greene, joined by Republican Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, aired a litany of grievances she has with Johnson, who she described as a Democratic speaker working against former President Donald Trump’s agenda. At one point, Greene donned a red “Make America Great Again” hat as she addressed reporters and denied she was defying Trump, who hosted Johnson at Mar-a-Lago last month and said he was doing a “good job.”
Greene and Massie were flanked by two blown-up poster boards featuring photos of Johnson embracing House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
She criticized Johnson for working across the aisle to avoid a government shutdown, passing a FISA extension and his recent ushering of $95 billion in foreign aid to Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan through Congress. She called them three “betrayals” against the GOP caucus.
Johnson released a short statement in response to Greene’s continued threat to try to remove him.
“This motion is wrong for the Republican Conference, wrong for the institution, and wrong for the country,” Johnson said.
Greene’s press conference came one day after House Democratic leadership announced that if a motion to vacate Johnson is brought to the House floor for a vote, they would vote to table the effort — effectively saving the speaker from ouster.
The motion to vacate is unlikely to succeed as most Republicans have joined Democrats in vowing to spike it.
Greene has already passed up several opportunities to force a vote on her motion, which she said she initially filed as a warning to Johnson.
Still, Greene said she wanted lawmakers to go on record on this issue.
“I think every member of Congress needs to take that vote and let the chips fall where they may,” Greene said. “And so next week, I am going to be calling this motion to vacate. Absolutely calling it. I can’t wait to see Democrats go out and support a Republican speaker, and have to go home to their primaries and have to run for Congress again having supported a Republican speaker.”
Greene continued, “And I also can’t wait to see my Republican conference show their cards and show who we are because voters deserve it.”
Asked why Greene is pledging to move forward with this in defiance of Trump, Greene told ABC News’ Correspondent Elizabeth Schulze, “We have to have a Republican majority in January and under Mike Johnson’s leadership we are not going to have one.”
Apparently, she has a few votes to advance it to the floor but Democrats plan to help Johnson kill it before it ever gets there. I doubt this good deed will go unpunished by the House Republicans but I guess they figure it looks better for them if they are not seen as aiding and abetting Greene in her quest for attention.
I’m not really sure what she hopes to accomplish but it sounds as though she thinks they’re going to lose in November and she will be in a position to blame Johnson and other “RINOs” for it. Or something …
Here’s the showboater and her henchman Thomas Massie this morning:
“The American people know … between me and Mike Johnson, who is supporting President Trump and his agenda.”
— Donning a MAGA hat, Marjorie Taylor Greene rejects the idea that her push to oust Mike Johnson as House Speaker is defying Trump’s wishes. pic.twitter.com/xy7SnE50Bi
Thomas Massie says Mike Johnson was totally unqualified to be Speaker, there is nothing in his background which suggested he could do this job, he is in over his head, and he was picked because he was the only candidate who no other Republicans hated so he was chosen by default. pic.twitter.com/seqAtAZY0t
Donald Trump has said many things that should have chased him out of politics a long time ago. But in an interview with Eric Cortellessa of Time Magazine this week he finally said something so outrageous that it could make a difference in this upcoming close campaign. When asked if states should monitor women’s pregnancies so they can know if they’ve gotten an abortion after the ban, Trump replied:
“I think they might do that. Again, you’ll have to speak to the individual states.”
In other words, he’s fine with whatever medieval torture a state might want to inflict.
That wasn’t all. He went on to say that states prosecuting women who get abortions is none of his concern and said that he would reveal his position on a possible national ban on the widely used drug Mifepristone in two weeks. (The two weeks have passed and when Time approached him to see if he had an update he extended it.) He may be waiting to see if the Supreme Court lets him off the hook with a ruling in the FDA v. Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine case which they heard last month. And he was unwilling to say whether he will vote to overturn the 6 week abortion ban that just went into effect in his home state of Florida just this week next November and, again, he said that it would be up to the state.
Trump thinks he’s brilliantly found a way to evade responsibility for the backlash by insisting that by turning it back to the states he solved the problem and it’s now off the table. He really seems to believe that by putting the words “states’ rights” on repeat, and constantly pushing the lie that ending Roe v Wade, for which he proudly takes credit, was what every expert and the majority of Americans wanted he can convince people the controversy is over. Here he is telling the press that people are very happy with what he’s done:
Trump says everyone is happy with his statement on abortion and all Republicans and Democrats wanted to see Roe overturned so the states could decide. pic.twitter.com/0zGYGSYqH9
Trump believes, with some reason, that he can change reality just by saying something over and over again. His Big Lie is proof that there are tens of millions of people who are ready to believe anything he says. But this position that the Supreme Court ban is exactly what “everyone” always wanted is a lie too far, even for him.
Support for abortion rights has grown since the Supreme Court issued the Dobbs decision and there is no evidence that this fatuous “states’ rights” rationale means anything, especially since we all know that the extremists are planning to exhume archaic laws like The Comstock Act to further restrict reproductive rights on a federal level.
The Time interview comes on the heels of a flurry of belated reports in the press about his second term agenda which many of us have been screaming about for months. Project 2025 and Agenda 47 among other plans being pulled together by the MAGA establishment, which now includes venerable institutions like the Heritage Foundation and the Club for Growth, have been public for months but the media seemed to be reluctant to take them too seriously. Perhaps this was since Trump campaign officials Susie Wiles and Chris LaCivita put out several statements insisting that none of these plans were official campaign policies and any lists of personnel or plans were mere suggestions. But the election is just six months away now and it is long past time that Trump is confronted with what we’ve been hearing and this interview makes it clear once and for all that the candidate is on board with all of it and even has some extreme ideas of his own to add to the list.
For example, Trump confirmed in this interview that he plans to control the Department of Justice and ensure that his Attorney General does his bidding. He said that if the Supreme Court does not grant the president total immunity then Joe Biden will be prosecuted for a plethora of unnamed crimes. (He later said he didn’t want to hurt Joe Biden because he has respect for the office but essentially he blames Biden personally for all of his legal troubles and payback’s a bitch.)
He plans to round up millions of immigrants, put them in camps and deport them, using the military if necessary. If the local police won’t cooperate he’ll withhold federal funds from their cities until they comply. He will destroy the civil service as we know it and replace the personnel with loyalists and any member of his administration must swear that they believe the 2020 election was stolen. He’ll close the pandemic preparedness office (!) because he know how to deal with it without spending all that money.
On foreign policy he believes that the whole world is in awe of his awesomeness and that world peace will be achieved the moment he becomes president again. And if our allies don’t comply with his edicts, as he’s said on the campaign trail, their enemies “can do whatever the hell they want.”
Does Trump think there will be violence if he doesn’t win the election in November?
“I don’t think we’re going to have that. I think we’re going to win. And if we don’t win, you know, it depends. It always depends on the fairness of an election.”
That is a threat. (Nice little election you’ve got here…)As we all know, there is no such thing as a fair election that Trump doesn’t win. He’s made that crystal clear. And by saying over and over again to his people that he’s way ahead in the polls (not true) and that it’s impossible for him to legitimately lose, he’s setting the stage for more violence if it happens.
Cortellessa asked Trump if he thinks that his loose talk about dictatorship is “contrary to our most cherished principles” and Trump blithely replied, “I think a lot of people like it.” Well, he certainly does.
Trump and the MAGA establishment have laid out a vivid plan for a revolutionary imperial presidency, with no checks and balances. He’s said before that the Constitution can be suspended and repeatedly insisted when he was president that he had “an Article II” that gave him unlimited power. Now he’s got the Supreme Court contemplating giving him immunity from prosecution for any of his crimes. As Biden would say, it’s not a joke. He means it.
That’s nothing more than a threat., plain and simple. And we know he’ll carry it out because he did it before.
Trump: “Doing what they did – using the DOJ & FBI to go after their political opponent .. that means that I can do it too. In other words, the Pandora’s box is open, and that means that I can do it too.” pic.twitter.com/FYafQE2Wc0
—Said he wants to let states “monitor women's pregnancies so they can know if they've gotten an abortion” —Said he supports states “prosecuting” women who get an abortion —Said he might ban abortion medication nationwide —Signaled he may incite… pic.twitter.com/NwrG0J2iVw
Q: You said you want to let states ‘monitor women's pregnancies’ and ‘prosecute’ women who get an abortion. Are you following your convictions or following the polls?
House Republicans want to launch investigations into federal funding for universities. Young-uns, like minority groups conservatives disfavor, ought to know their places and stay in them. But no. Around the U.S., students upset at the disproportionate carnage and destruction Israeli forces are visiting upon the Gaza Strip are acting out. Naturally, the Deputy Fifes in the House Republican caucus want to nip that in the bud.
House Republicans on Tuesday announced an investigation into the federal funding for universities where students have protested the Israel-Hamas war, broadening a campaign that has placed heavy scrutiny on how presidents at the nation’s most prestigious colleges have dealt with reports of antisemitism on campus.
Several House committees will be tasked with a wide probe that ultimately threatens to withhold federal research grants and other government support to the universities, placing another pressure point on campus administrators who are struggling to manage pro-Palestinian encampments, allegations of discrimination against Jewish students and questions of how they are integrating free speech and campus safety.
The House investigation follows several recent high-profile hearings that precipitated the resignations of presidents at Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania. And House Republicans promised more scrutiny, saying they were calling on the administrators of Yale, UCLA and the University of Michigan to testify next month.
“We will not allow antisemitism to thrive on campus, and we will hold these universities accountable for their failure to protect Jewish students on campus,” said House Speaker Mike Johnson at a news conference.
Reports of antisemitic behavior among some protesters is are indeed appalling. Threats to Jewish students are unacceptable. But that’s not why Republicans are threatening to withold funds from the universities. The Gaza protests simply give them an excuse.
The people who argue that prosecuting Donald Trump for indictments brought by grand juries of his peers represents selective prosecution demand without blinking selective accountability for people they do not like. And they don’t like funding liberalizing institutions. See: Wisconsin. Also see: North Carolina.
Republicans are also turning to the issue at a time when election season is fully underway and leadership needs a cause that unites them and divides Democrats. The House GOP’s impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden has fallen flat and the Republican conference is smarting after a series of important bills left GOP lawmakers deeply divided. Democrats have feuded internally at times over the Israel-Hamas war and how campus administrators have handled the protests.
Rep. Pete Aguilar, the No. 3 House Democrat, at a news conference Tuesday said that it was important for colleges “to ensure that everybody has an ability to protest and to make their voice heard but they have a responsibility to honor the safety of individuals.”
“For many of Jewish descent, they do not feel safe, and that is a real issue,” he said, but added that he wanted to allow university administrators to act before Congress stepped in.
But the Republican speaker promised to use “all the tools available” to push the universities. Johnson was joined by chairs for six committees with jurisdiction over a wide range of government programs, including National Science Foundation grants, health research grants, visas for international students and the tax code for nonprofit universities.
States’ rights and limited government go out the window when it’s politically expedient, don’t they?
Ahead of the 2016 election Donald Trump won, The New York Times cited a now-famous paragraph from Donald Trump’s ghost-written “The Art of the Deal.” David Barstow wrote:
“I call it truthful hyperbole. It’s an innocent form of exaggeration — and a very effective form of promotion.”
For example, in the now-infamous Trump University litigation, Mr. Trump was asked in a deposition about a script that had been prepared for Trump University instructors. According to the script, the instructors were supposed to tell their students the following: “I remember one time Mr. Trump said to us over dinner, he said, ‘Real estate is the only market that, when there’s a sale going on, people run from the store.’ You don’t want to run from the store.”
No such dinners ever took place, Mr. Trump acknowledged. In fact, Mr. Trump struggled to identify a single one of the instructors he claimed to have handpicked, even after he was shown their photographs. Nonetheless, Mr. Trump was not bothered by the script’s false insinuation of real estate secrets shared over chummy dinners. Asked if this example constituted “innocent exaggeration,” Mr. Trump replied, “Yes, I’d say that’s an innocent exaggeration.”
Trump’s entire life is hyperbole, like the book he did not write, the buildings he did not own, and the fortune he did not make. Theologians will tell you the Devil can tell the truth when it suits his purposes. It’s just not his preferred mode of communication. Nor is it Trump’s. Whatever he’s selling, Trump is always selling himself, and it’s always false advertising.
Heather Cox Richardson comments on the Time article posted Tuesday about Trump’s plans for a second presidency. To head off critics, Time included transcripts of interviews behind the profile, and fact checks on Trump’s claims. They demonstrate, Richardson writes, that his “narrative is based largely on fantasy.” The material reveals more about the right’s stance on the truth:
Trump’s own words prove the truth of what careful observers have been saying about his plans based on their examination of MAGA Republicans’ speeches, interviews, Project 2025, and so on, often to find themselves accused of a liberal bias that makes them exaggerate the dangers of a second Trump presidency.
The idea that truthful reporting based on verifiable evidence is a plot by “liberal media” to undermine conservative values had its start in 1951, when William F. Buckley Jr., fresh out of Yale, published God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of “Academic Freedom.” Fervently opposed to the bipartisan liberal consensus that the federal government should regulate business, provide a basic social safety net, protect civil rights, and promote infrastructure, Buckley was incensed that voters continued to support such a system. He rejected the “superstition” that fact-based public debate would enable people to choose the best option from a wide range of ideas—a tradition based in the Enlightenment—because such debate had encouraged voters to choose the liberal consensus, which he considered socialism.
Buckley was not opposed to superstition, nor to self-creation. His bias was for his own, puffed up with a “preposterously mellifluous,” “patrician accent” filled with nouns, verbs and adjectives from the Oxford English Dictionary and a fondness for Latin.
Trump’s trial in Manhattan for falsifying business records and violating campaign finance laws is poking holes in the false image Trump has spent his life constructing with pufferey. Buckley’s heirs are frantically applying tape to those holes to keep the Trump balloon from deflating before everyone’s eyes.
Because Donald Trump must always be seen as wielding absolute mastery over his hapless, flailing opponents, he and his propagandists want you to believe his hush-money trial in Manhattan has proven nothing but a smashing political success for him.
On Monday night, Trump posted a video on social media featuring Fox personality Jesse Watters gushing that his trial may win him the White House. Trump also promoted a video of Fox’s Jeanine Pirro insisting that it showcases his ability to “withstand pressure.” Other Fox figures have spun Trump’s buffoonish outbreaks of narcolepsy in court as proof he’s Owning the Libs: Certain of acquittal, he can do some power-napping while showing the trial the contempt it deserves.
In private, Trump appears less confident. “Indeed, this saga shows how deeply flimsy the vast illusion that MAGA propagandists have woven around Trump and his legal travails has truly become.”
Aided by his cultish fans, Trump must prop up the fiction that he is and always will be, in Seinfeld terms, master of his domain. What’s more buffoonish than Fox’s contortions are the lengths to which MAGAworld and Trump himself will go to reimagine the morbidly obese former president as impossibly ripped and powerful even as he nods off in court.
Sargent concludes:
Voters outside the MAGA information universe regard the charges against him as serious, and they see the other prosecutions against him in a similarly grave light. A whole lot of people will likely see Trump’s sneering dismissal of these proceedings—the dozing off, the attacks on jurors, the rage-fits against the supposed unfairness of it all—as whiny entitlement, as contempt for the very notion that he should ever be held accountable for anything.
That very survival of the republic could rest on bursting that Trump bubble.
