Tornado Alley (PROG)

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AN ODE TO "DESPERATE DON"
Trump’s lies reveal an emboldened but vulnerable president
By Charles M. Blow
Opinion Columnist
May 19, 2019

Donald Trump lies all the time. We know that. Some of us are incensed and disgusted by this. Others have been worn out by it. But, few even attempt to deny or excuse it anymore. It has simply become a recognized feature of the man and a predicament for the country.

Last month, The Washington Post’s fact-checker column announced that Trump had reached the ignominious marker of having told more than 10,000 false and misleading claims as president. And, the pace has quickened from the early periods of his presidency, in what The Post called a “tsunami of untruths.”

Trump lies about everything and for every reason. He lies to brag. He lies to deflect. He lies to inflate. He lies to defame. He lies to praise. He sometimes seems to lie just for the sport of it.

He is being trained, right before our eyes, to see that there is no cost for this deceit among the people who support him. He can lie at a rally, right to their faces, and they will still cheer. He can lie in public proclamations, and the Republican cowards in Congress will find a way to defend, rationalize or forgive it.

When a dyed-in-the-wool thief realizes that there are no consequences for theft, everything not nailed down will go missing. The same is true of the liar: When there is no consequence, the deceiver is unbound and unashamed.

But, to me, it is when Trump lies out of desperation, out of the fear of being found out, blamed, reprimanded, possibly even abandoned, that most people can relish it. It is in those moments that Trump is most human and our ire toward this liar is most vindicated and validated.

In those moments, at least when he makes a public appearance in conjunction, his eyes are stretched wide and his face flush. He looks defensive and nervous. The above-it-all posture of imperviousness vanishes, and he is reduced to the most mortal of beings, one for whom, like the rest of us, the truth still has purchase and power.

Last week, court records were unsealed that showed that Michael Flynn, President Trump’s onetime national security adviser, gave Robert Mueller and his team a voice-mail recording of a conversation in which Trump’s lawyers tried to influence his cooperation with the investigators.

This was a smoking gun of a revelation which blew yet another hole in Trump’s false “no collusion, no obstruction” mantra. And it adds weight to the House Democrats’ debate about whether they should perform their constitutional duty to impeach or whether they will allow this man to continue unchastened.

Trump, realizing the threat that the revelation poses, turned to Twitter … and lied. He wrote: “It now seems the General Flynn was under investigation long before was common knowledge. It would have been impossible for me to know this but, if that was the case, and with me being one of two people who would become president, why was I not told so that I could make a change?”

As CNN put it: “Trump’s tweet is misleading and lacks context. For starters, the Justice Department and F.B.I. conduct all their investigations in secret, including the one into Flynn. Trump also fails to mention that he was repeatedly warned about Flynn, though not by the Justice Department, but he ignored that political advice and gave him a top job in the administration.”

Trump knows his statement is off, but he also knows that the truth has the capacity to harm when one operates in an arena beyond it. That tweet, unlike lying about his wall of hate already being under construction, is born of fear. I can just imagine the beads of sweat forming on the philtrum above his upper lip as his thumbs tap this falsehood on this phone. He grimaces; I smile.

We occasionally get a glorious glimpse of this fear fibbing. It’s like the time he held the bracing news conference in Trump Tower to defend his both-sides-ism on Charlottesville. It’s like the time he told the deer-in-the-headlights lie on Air Force One about not knowing about hush money payments to women alleging to have had sexual encounters with him (while he was married, by the way). It is in the police-interrogation-room-like correction that he didn’t mean to side with Russia — and deny our intelligence community — while standing next to Vladimir Putin in Helsinki.

In all those moments, he simply reeks of dread and trepidation. In those moments, we are reminded that Trump knows what other thinking people know: In a world not blinded and numbed by racial tribalism, demographic fears and cultural panic, these issues that barely nick him would cut him smooth and deep.

It is in those moments that we are reminded of what normal felt like, when an apology or explanation was compelled, and politicians confronted their foibles with some degree of contrition.

Trump knows nothing of contrition, but take his moments of desperation as proof that the world has not completely gone mad, that sin still has the ability to convict.
-newyorktimes.com
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/19/opinion/donald-trump-lies.html