Facts, Schmacts & The Big Lie

If you've spent any time in internet forums, Twitter or in political discussions on Facebook you've encountered the admonition to "educate yourself" or "do the research" and "don't believe everything you read". While this is sound advice, for many people "research" involves finding the first thing in a Google search that you agree with. For many followers of Donald Trump, "research" involves substantially less effort, it begins and ends with parroting back what Trump or his allies say. Why else would his rallies still feature chants of "lock her up", when there has never been anything close to credible criminal charges? When after two years of obviously partisan Congressional hearings, no suggestion of wrongdoing surfaced? Trump is very much aware of the tendency of his followers to avoid rational thought, so he tells them what the truth is, or ought to be...as he sees it. Trump employs several methods - gaslighting, deflection and ad hominem attacks.

It's debatable whether Trump's use of these logical fallacies is anything like a strategy, or it's merely the defensive flailing of a man who has deceived even himself.

Ad hominem attacks have been part of Trump's playbook from the start of his political life, paired with deflection, one of his standard moves is to distract from what he is being accused of by pointing at someone else as a horrible human being, who "hates America".

In the context of the ongoing impeachment inquiry, gaslighting has been especially prevalent. To refresh your memory, the inquiry was initially spurred by a whistle-blower who alleged that Trump had made improper promises to a foreign head of state. The Increasingly-Misnamed Justice Department and the Acting Director of National Intelligence sat on the complaint until the Intelligence Agencies' Inspector General notified Congress of the complaint. The complaint was made public and it indicated that in a phone call with the President of Ukraine, Trump had asked for a political opponent, former Vice President Joe Biden, and his son, be investigated. The White House released a reconstructed transcript of the call, which verified virtually all of the whistle-blower's allegations. Trump's lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, verified that he was working on Trump's behalf to get this investigation opened.

What Trump has been doing, on a daily basis, is claiming that the "transcript" debunked the whistle-blower's allegations. This is manifestly untrue. The only possible point of contention is that the threat to continue withholding aid to Ukraine was implied, rather than explicit. To most observers, the implicit threat was obvious and inarguable. Trump has a history of denying his intentions by pointing out that he did not use specific words. An earlier example is when he asked the White House Counsel to remove the Special Counsel, Trump's defense was that he "never said fire".

This is a classic example of gaslighting. Here we have something that is extremely easy to independently fact-check. You don't have to rely on the White House, or the media or Adam Schiff. The complaint and the "transcript" are both available to be read in their entirety, minus a redaction or two for national security purposes. Read both of these documents and no other conclusion can be reached other than that the whistle-blower was accurate in his complaint. Yet Trump continues to say, and his followers believe and repeat, that the whistle-blower got it all wrong. There are other examples involving the timing of each document's release, but the main point can easily be checked, yet Trump pushes an alternate reality that people believe! A related incident is Acting Chief of Staff Mulvaney admitting that there was a quid pro quo, with reporters asking follow up questions to verify that that's what he was actually saying and the very next day he denies that he said it, even though he is recorded saying it!

One of the things that a serial liar does is to keep telling the same lie over and over until people believe it, it's even better when it's a "big" lie. Adolph Hitler in Mein Kampf wrote that "...in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility...[they] would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously". Joseph Goebbels added that to deceive properly, the big lie must be continuously repeated.

What's horrifying is not that a man with so rickety a moral foundation as Trump self-servingly and constantly lies, but that he was convinced a substantial minority of Americans that Lies are Truth.

Corruption

Did Hunter Biden accept a position on the board of the Ukrainian energy company Bursima when he knew little to nothing of energy or Ukraine? Yes he did. Is it likely that Bursima expected to gain advantage from the fact that Hunter Biden's father was the Vice President of the United States who was also the point man in talks with Ukraine? Sure. Is that illegal? No.

While I hate to use the excuse "everyone does it" (Whataboutism), it is in fact true that everyone does "do it". While I do not believe that a comprehensive list exists of politicians' relatives who hold positions or seats on boards for which they possess no qualifications, my guess is that it would be quite an extensive list.  Whether the practice is ethical or not is a matter of debate and reasonable people might disagree, but what is inarguable is that it's perfectly legal.

The second part of the supposed corruption of the Bidens involves Vice President Biden pushing to remove a Ukrainian prosecutor who some imagine was investigating Bursima and Hunter Biden. The prosecutor in question was pushed out because he wasn't investigating corruption and he wasn't investigating Bursima. The replacement prosecutor did investigate and found no wrongdoing.

The story that Trump and his sycophants are pushing now is that yes, we asked the Ukrainian president to investigate corruption, and yes, this included Joe and Hunter Biden, but only because we were concerned about Ukraine rooting out corruption. This story fails the bullshit test for many reasons.

1. There is no indication that Trump or anyone in his administration cares about corruption in Ukraine or anywhere else
2. The timing, right after Biden announced his candidacy for president and the polls that show him beating Trump, is pretty suspicious
3. The literally dozens of instances of the Trump family benefiting financially from the presidency make the sudden concern with self-dealing and family influence a bit hypocritical

Once again, Trump's lies sound like the lies a toddler tells before he figures out what's plausible or believable and what's not

No, impeachment is NOT "a coup"

Despite the weird assertions by his supporters that he is "the best president ever" or his own proclamations that he has accomplished more than any other president, Trump's presidency has been a shitshow since Day One. He has demonstrated complete ignorance of the process by which things get done in government. And I'm not talking about how periodically the electorate gets all worked up about Washington insiders and wants to elect an outsider to shake things up. No, I'm talking about things like not understanding that Congress is an independent branch of government, not his employees. Like being ignorant of the fact that by law regulatory changes require a process, and can't be changed by fiat. Like being so arrogant as to think that a bureaucracy of thousands can be managed by him alone without relying on career experts. 

But stupidity is not an impeachable offense.

You can't impeach a president because you don't like his policies. You can't impeach a president because he is incompetent. You can't impeach a president because he is a buffoon.

But you can impeach a president for being irredeemably corrupt.

Trump likes to throw the word "corrupt" around. The mainstream news media, which for two years he was content to label "fake", is now "corrupt". Joe Biden is corrupt. Rep. Adam Schiff is corrupt. The late Rep. Elijah Cummings was corrupt. Lately it's been the label of choice for anyone who is has the ability to actually harm him, who dares to bring out the truth. "Corrupt" Trump opposition is in a class beyond "losers", those that get the "corrupt" mud thrown at them are those who Trump is trying to smear so that the truth that they speak will be ignored.

But as many have noticed, Trump is often guilty of projection. He accuses others of what he is doing. Trump's corruption dates to well before he became president. His family engaged in fraudulent practices in order to illegally raise rents in New York and to avoid taxes. Trump himself engaged in serial fraud during his days as a casino operator. Recently documents have surfaced indicating that Trump committed either bank fraud or tax fraud - the value and occupancy of several of his buildings were reported as significantly different on his tax returns and on his loan applications.

Although all of that should have alerted the electorate that he was unfit to be president. None of that is impeachable.

The Mueller Report, while it didn't conclude that there was coordination between the Trump campaign and Russia, and that the contacts between them did not rise to the level of conspiracy as legally defined, it was overwhelmingly obvious that Trump and his campaign accepted and encouraged assistance from Russia during the 2016 election. The Report did however point out numerous instances of obstruction by Trump and his campaign. Obstruction of justice - exactly what Nixon would have been impeached for if he hadn't resigned first.

Instead of being happy that he dodged the impeachment bullet that the Mueller Report could have been, Trump doubled down on his corruption and brazenly asked for the help of a foreign government in investigating a political opponent. Trump openly did the very thing that was obvious to all in 2016 but couldn't conclusively be proved, he colluded with a foreign power to influence a U.S. election. Although in this case he wasn't the passive recipient of aid initiated by another country, but the instigator of it. When his actions were revealed by a whistle-blower, he released a reconstruction of the conversation that, despite his insistence that it was a "prefect" phone call, verified virtually everything that the whistle-blower alleged. His personal lawyer, who had been bypassing the State Department in dealing with this foreign government, admitted on national television that he had been doing in person what Trump did in his phone call: soliciting foreign help in investigating a political opponent. Virtually every State Department official who has been interviewed clarifies the picture of the president using the power of his office for personal gain. If that's not an impeachable offense, I don't know what is.

And right in the middle of an impeachment inquiry, where the main issue is him putting his own needs ahead of the country's, he announces that a major international summit meeting will take place at one of his own properties!

As the inquiry proceeds headlong toward actual impeachment, Trump and his sycophants alternate between gaslighting ("the whistle-blower got it all wrong") and claiming that, yes, he made that call, and Giuliani had those meetings, but there was nothing wrong with it, because he was rooting out corruption. Throw in some deflection, projection and utter bullshit ("Schiff is corrupt", "no transparency" and "Pelosi is sick", "Deep State!" "It's a coup") and you have the panicked flailing about of a man who knows the bloodhounds are closing in.