The Witness Chronicles, June 14, 2024
Lies and lying liars
This is a reader supported newsletter. Please consider helping out by upgrading to a paid subscription or donating a small amount through Buy Me A Coffee, a site for small financial contributions. Thanks, ME
Republicans Lie Their Way Into a Corner
It works for Trump because he doesn’t care. For the rest of them? Not so much
Bumbling is almost an understatement, but congressional Republicans and the various Trump pundits had a bad stupid lousy day yesterday trying to keep up with their guy.
First he goes to Milwaukee, the city where the Republican National Convention will meet next month to anoint Trump President or something like that. He may not be there because he may be in jail or under house arrest after his sentencing a few days before the convention.
I want you to think about that last sentence. I know I had to stop for a second to let it sink in, and I wrote it. The GOP will vote to nominate a man as their candidate for President who may not even be there because he was inconveniently was convicted of 34 felonies and may be in jail.
That’s pretty nuts, but pretty much everything the Republican Party does these days is pretty nuts.
But during Trump's visit to Milwaukee, the major city in a state he must win, he decided to publicly tell the world that “Milwaukee is a horrible city”. To be clear, he was not speaking of some aspect of Milwaukee, he indicted the entire city.
Of course mayhem ensued, not just because the citizens of Milwaukee were understandably ticked off, but because Party members bungled trying to explain that he either did not say it or he meant something else, like crime in Milwaukee is bad, the worst in the country.
It is, by the way, not even close to the worst in the country and is actually down 45% since 2022. So, even if that was what he meant, it was still an uniformed indictment of the city. But he actually said the place was horrible, with no qualifiers.
I have to note that when Trump says a place is horrible, it inevitably is a place with a large population of people of color. Black and Latino voters might want to think about that.
This incident, one of many so common we don’t really pay much attention to them anymore, tells me something interesting. Trump can lie with impunity because he simply does not care. Virtually every statement he makes either is an outright lie and contains lies within it.
At one point earlier this year, fact checkers at the Washington Post estimated he had lied publicly and on the record over 70,000 times since first running for office in 2015.
It’s the Trump equivalent of strategy. If an issue has a hot button that looks bad, simply lie about it without bothering to back your statements up. It obviously works for him, which is a terrible statement about those who support him, but it really does not work when they try to lie themselves.
After Trump made his statement about the city being horrible, his supporters tripped over themselves trying to explain it away, starting with saying he never actually said it. He did and it is on the record.
This continues an aspect of politics these days that befuddles me: the willingness of the right to deny events that are recorded, witnessed, in writing, or otherwise captured for posterity, by simply denying them.
For some reason it works for Trump, but he has a lifetime of experience doing it and, as mentioned earlier, he simply doesn’t care. But his admirers are really terrible at it, because on some level they care or know the lying will catch up to them.
Then they backtrack and try to fix it, and they are bad at that too, laughably bad. But there’s a thing about lying to cover up other lies that they don’t get:
When you lie all the time, you start to lose track of where you are and you look like an idiot. And the Republican Party looks like a bunch of incompetent idiots these days.
After all, they are going to nominate a 34 time convicted felon as their candidate at an event he may not even be able to attend because he is incarcerated and obviously doesn’t care, because it takes place in a ‘horrible’ city.
Sounds like institutional idiocy to me, but that’s the Grand Old Party these days.
~ I write The Grasshopper, an occasional letter on the creative life and it’s sister, mostly daily publication The Witness Chronicles, a place for my articles on politics and climate. They share a free and paid subscription. I also write The Remarkable, a recovery letter, about my addiction and reentry experience. I don’t paywall any content in these, however this is how I live and I strongly believe all writers and creatives should get paid, if we provide value. Your support with a paid subscription helps make that happen.
If you want to show support but don’t want to commit to a subscription, you can always buy me a coffee!
Believe me, it makes my day. M