How Did You Feel When a Friend, Partner, Employer/Employee Lied to You?

  When someone has lied to you, you probably started to question your relationship and whether they are lying to you again, right?

When a spouse cheated on you, were you able to forgive and forget? Or did it cause you to question when he or she was “working late” or going on a business trip without you?

When an employee or employer lied to you, did you “let it slide,” or did you begin to question future communications with him/her?

What’s most surprising about Trump supporters is that they know he is a habitual liar, yet they “let it slide” again and again and fall in line with his next set of lies. Here are some of the lies that surely they know were lies:

>  He said he didn’t have sex with porn star Stormy Daniels, but Michael Cohen pleaded guilty to paying for her silence and went to prison for it.

>  He excused his Access Hollywood  genital grabbing language as “locker room talk,” then claimed it wasn’t his voice.

>  He described the Jan. 6 insurrection as a “love fest.” I think we know better.

>  It rained on his inauguration, but he claimed the sun came out when he spoke. He claimed his inaugural crowd was bigger than Barack Obama’s despite photos proving otherwise.

>  He said that Covid-19 was a Chinese hoax, intended to help the Democrats.

>  He accidentally said that Alabama was at risk from Hurricane Dorian, but because he can’t ever admit he was wrong, he not only lied about it with a Sharpie, but he pressured government agencies to confirm his lie.

>  He said the head of the Boy Scouts called him to say his political speech at the 2017 Jamboree was “the greatest speech ever made to them,” but a Scouts spokesman said no such call had been made — Scouts honor!

A Trumper might still believe one or two of that short list of Trump’s lies, but my own experience as a human being is that it only takes one lie from someone to make me question everything that person says in the future. I suspect that’s true for Trumpers — except when it comes to Donald Trump.

That’s very cult-like. “Cult-45.”

So, how do you explain that behavior by Trump supporters, if not by saying it’s a cult?

I think it’s largely racial. Trump has been successful by playing on voter’s racial fears — fears triggered by the U.S. Census reporting that we’re approaching a time when white Americans will be in the minority. He compounded that by claiming that Mexican immigrants were criminals and rapists, or worse — a claim that no amount of factchecking would fix, since it played to what his base wanted to believe.

In the 2020 election, Trump pleaded with suburban women that they should love him, because Democrats would end single-family zoning, bringing inner city crime to the suburbs. Again, the race card. But suburban women didn’t buy it in enough numbers to carry the day for Trump in 2020.

So now we come to the Big Lie — that the election which Biden won resoundingly was “stolen” through fraud. Again, the truth doesn’t matter to Trump supporters. Lesson number one from Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, and other autocrats: repeat a lie often enough and it will be taken as truth.

Trump supporters ultimately should realize they’ve been conned by Trump except for one big thing: he speaks to their fears. They are less wedded to Trump himself than to his philosophy. Tucker Carlson is banking on that.

The one lie which strikes closest to home for me as a journalist, and now a columnist, is that the mainstream media are puppets of the liberal left. I don’t expect any Trumper reading this to be convinced otherwise, and that’s the problem — how to change minds.

The Trump GOP thrives on playing to the fears of its base, but now it’s filling us non-Trumpers with fear that they could succeed, that they could take control of the Congress in 2022 and the White House again in 2024.

 

 

Like Jimmy Kimmel, It’s Hard for Me to Understand Trump’s Larger Following

  Last Friday, Jimmy Kimmel’s late night show on ABC was a re-run of his Nov. 4th show, providing his first monologue after election day, and it resonated with me for the following section, which I had to transcribe for you (emphasis added):

I’m shocked that it was this close… It is unimaginable to me that close to half of American voters saw what this man has done to this country over the last four years, how he kowtowed to Vladimir Putin, he cozied up to Kim Jung Un, he alienated us from our allies, he put children in cages, he villainized the free press, he hid his tax returns, he tear gassed peaceful protestors, he pardoned all his criminal buddies, he extorted Ukraine, he misled us about Covid, he dismantled the pandemic response team, he dismantled health care, he called neo-Nazis “very fine people,” he hired a never-ending parade of imbeciles, he lied, he lied, he lied, and then he lied some more. He’s a liar and a cheat who wants them to stop counting thousands of legitimate votes – and almost half of us are apparently okay with that.  Half of us want to keep it going for four more years. Which, listen, I don’t care what you think of Joe Biden. If Joe Biden stopped by my house every morning to key my car and pee in my pool, still there’d be no question which one of them I would vote for. None! I mean, what more would Donald Trump have to do to show us he’s insane and not fit to lead this country?  I feel like I overestimated the American people, and I underestimated the village people…

   Here’s the bottom line: Donald Trump is going to serve another term.  We just don’t know whether it will be in Washington or in prison yet.

Yes, ten million more people voted for Donald Trump in 2020 than did in 2016.  Joe Biden only won because of a historic voter turnout by right-thinking Americans, but it’s still amazing that so many other Americans like this man.

As I’ve written in previous columns, many or even most of his supporters agree the man is a poor excuse for a human, but they like his policies — some because they are wealthy and it has made them wealthier, but others because he speaks to the nascent racism in them which they can’t always express outwardly, but which they can silently express with their votes. As many Trump supporters have said, “He speaks what I’m thinking.” 

I have to admit that I have lived a sheltered life. I was raised in New England by parents who instilled in me that lying and cheating is not acceptable behavior. This was reinforced by the private schools I attended (on scholarship, since we were poor) for 7th grade through 12th grade, where lying or cheating could get you expelled. That is still true, I’m sure.

Having been an employer rather than an employee all my adult life, I have encountered lying and cheating, and every time it was a firing offense.

You probably have the same mentality about it. Namely, if someone lies to you once or twice, or cheats you even once, that is not forgivable. It’s a red flag reflective likely of future behavior which is simply unacceptable.

Willful lying is so offensive, even in political life, that it took a year or longer for the media to use the word. They used softer phrases like “misstated” or “was not truthful,” but hesitated to say, “the president lied.”  That’s how big a deal it was to use the word, yet now it is easily stated multiple times per day by every news organization that isn’t partisan by its charter. And even the supporters of the president must recognize some of his lies, such as when he said in October that we are “rounding the corner on the pandemic,” and that “they won’t talk about it after the election.” Here’s the corner that we were rounding as he spoke:

I Can’t Get Over the Fact that Many People Voted for Trump Based on Lies

   As I watched the Florida returns on Tuesday evening, I was struck by the statement that the majority of Cuban-Americans in Miami-Dade voted for Trump because they had been convinced that Biden was a stalking horse for communism, from which they had fled in Cuba.

That is such a blatant lie, which Trump has been happy to promote in his rallies, and those Cuban-Americans actually believed him.  It they and other Floridians had known they were being duped, it’s possible the state would have gone to Biden, and the election would have been over more quickly.

And that’s just one of the innumerable lies which were utilized by the Trump campaign to draw voters away from the Biden/Harris ticket. How many voters, for example, believed the QAnon line that Democratic leaders like Clinton and Pelosi were part of a Satan-worshipping cult that engaged in pedophilia and drank babies’ blood?

In such a close election, any one lie that is believed by lots of people can make a difference, and the Trump campaign convinced millions of followers of so many lies that one wonders how poorly the president would have done without engaging in any of those lies and if the Russians and other hackers hadn’t spread multiple lies in 2016 as well as this year.

It’s time to realize that our country was suckered in by one of the greatest con men of all times. If you haven’t watched Frontline’s program, “The Choice 2020: Trump vs. Biden,” you can view it free online.  His niece, Mary Trump, describes him as a con artist on that program and in her best selling book, Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.

For that matter, the same picture of Trump was painted by Frontline in their program four years ago, “The Choice 2016: Trump vs. Clinton” (also available to view free online), but it wasn’t enough to counter the big con that won Trump the presidency.

The biggest con, of course, still being played by Trump, is that he’s a successful businessman and great deal maker. It’s simply not true. His business life it littered with failures, including multiple bankruptcies. Mark Burnett can be credited (or blamed) with creating the false mystique about Donald Trump, who was, in fact, rescued from failure by “The Apprentice.”

Now that the campaign is over, it’s useful and appropriate, I believe, to take stock of what we have all witnessed ever since Donald Trump and Melania came down that gold escalator in June 2015. (Did you know that those people in the Trump Tower atrium were in fact extras paid $50 each to be there and cheer him on?)

There are plenty of books written by persons in a position to know which can educate Americans about the big con. The “bible” would have to be the book published earlier this year by the Fact Checker staff of The Washington Post: Donald Trump and His Assault on Truth: The President’s Falsehoods, Misleading Claims and Flat-Out Lies.

Speaking of The Washington Post, I’d like to acknowledge how all the mainstream media have stayed true to their professional standards throughout these years of being ridiculed and called “the enemy of the people.”

One book which really portrays that experience is Jonathan Karl’s best seller, Front Row at the Trump Show.  Karl has known and covered Trump longer than any other White House correspondent, including back when he was a rising real estate developer in New York City. As a journalist myself, I enjoyed his perspective, including his criticism of some other correspondents who strayed, but rarely, from journalistic standards and ethics. If you are intrigued by the role of journalists, I heartily recommend Karl’s book.

Another writer who I recommend is Heather Cox Richardson, a professor of history at Boston College, who writes a nightly newsletter called “Letters from an American.” Visit https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.com/subscribe