There Are Four Lights!

"The party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears."
~ George Orwell "1984"

"What you're seeing and what your reading is not what's happening"
~ Donald Trump

The entire presidency of Donald Trump has consisted of Trump and his enablers insisting that what was staring us in the face, was plainly visible, was not in fact happening.

His defense in the face of the impeachment proceedings and ramping up during the Senate trial, has been only the most recent example of this.

If you had watched the "debates" between Trump and Clinton in 2016 you might recall an early example of this. No matter what you think of Secretary Clinton, she clearly "won" those debates, stating her positions clearly and handling provocations by Trump professionally while Trump struggled to even understand the questions. The only way that Trump could be considered to have come out ahead in those debates was if you considered shouting "wrong", and "no puppet...YOU'RE the puppet", stalking Clinton around the stage and regurgitating applause lines to be an indication of fitness for the presidency. Yet the next morning he was crowing about how he had dominated the debates. And let's not forget his claims of "the biggest inauguration crowd ever" when the photos and the National Park Service estimates told a very different story.

Trump lies all the time. Even when there is a recording that contradicts him, he lies. Even when there's no benefit to the lie, he lies.

One of Trump's root rallying cries in relation to the impeachment is "Read the Transcript(s)" - supposedly because reading the transcript will reveal that it was a "perfect" call. Firstly, it's not really a transcript, it's a reconstruction based on notes taken by White House officials who listened in on the call. (Since that's somewhat unwieldy, I'll refer to it as the "transcript" - the quotes indicating that it's not technically a transcript.) But when you do read the transcript, it's pretty damning. Trump, right after being thanked for military assistance, Trump asks for a favor - actually two favors: look into the location of a DNC server which is, according to fringe conspiracy theorists, in Ukraine, and investigate Burisma, the company that once employed Hunter Biden. This is not a perfect phone call. Even if you stretch your imagination to come up with legitimate reasons for this request, it's at the very least a suspicious and disturbing phone call. So suspicious and disturbing that the White House legal team took the notes from the meeting and locked them away in a super-secure, password-protected location so that they wouldn't inadvertently leak out.

Trump's legal defense team has been focusing taking the different elements out of context. Like pointing out that Trump said "Do us a favor", instead of "Do me a favor". Or zeroing in on one sentence from Ambassador Sondland where he answers "I presume" in response to the question "Was there a quid pro quo?", when the rest of his testimony makes clear that all involved in Ukraine were knee-deep in pushing for a Burisma-Biden investigation in exchange for a White House meeting and release of appropriated aid.

The House Impeachment Managers spent 24 hours laying out their case in excruciating detail. Trump's defense team spent three hours offering an alternate reading of events. Yet we're supposed to believe that they "completely obliterated the prosecution" and "exposed their weak case". Trump's Twitter feed this morning is full of assertions by the Trump Cult about how the Democrats' case has crumbled. I listened to most of the defense's presentation yesterday, and I didn't see that they did anything other than blow a lot of smoke and confuse the issue by emphasizing irrelevant information and glossing over critical facts. We all know that all of this really isn't for the Senate. They're going to vote to acquit no matter what. It's aimed at the voters, and a lot of voters are just going to believe that the Democrats' arguments have been debunked without having heard the actual arguments or the supposed debunking.

Scary.