Donald Trump stepped into deep water on Day 1 of his administration and has been piling on false claims faster than anyone can dig out of them. The Bush administration claimed to invent new realities daily but Trump is making those claims look like chump change.
Trump tweeted last night:
There is an incredible spirit of optimism sweeping the country right now—we're bringing back the JOBS! pic.twitter.com/BNSLvKiEVj
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 6, 2017
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As Guantanamo prosecutor Col. Morris Davis put it,
How delusional is @realDonaldTrump / @POTUS to believe that what's sweeping across America is "an incredible sense of optimism?" pic.twitter.com/6Yqvxqk0T9
— Col. Morris Davis (@ColMorrisDavis) March 7, 2017
In fact, what Donald Trump calls a ‘spirit of optimism’ sweeping the country is actually a wave of bullsh*t.
And it is working for the same reason it worked for the Bush administration, because, as Brandolini’s Law states,
“The amount of energy needed to refute bullshit is an order of magnitude bigger than to produce it.”
If it is not lies about what other people have done, like President Obama wiretapping him, then it is false claims about what he has done, like creating jobs he had no part in creating, or, also from Davis:
“@realDonaldTrump promise of ‘insurance for everybody’ turns out to be a bait-and-switch just like pipelines built with American steel. SAD!”
And not only that, as a GOP aide points out that Trump’s wiretapping claims provided a helpful distraction for the GOP’s Obamacare repeal and it’s appalling no insurance alternative.
Bullsh*t like the promise of “something special†in his Obamacare replacement, which turned out to be no actual healthcare but big tax breaks for insurance companies.
Talk is cheap, and Republicans have been getting by on the cheap for years. Trump only picked up the ball and ran with it like a pro.
As Erick Erickson described it, “The GOP replacement plan will jack up rates so high on senior citizens, they won’t even need death panels.” Yeah, it’s not a spirit of optimism you’re smelling.
And then there is Ben Carson with the claim that slaves were actually some new species of immigrant, only packed like sardines and chained to the cargo holds. Next, we’ll learn that was just an early experiment in “economy class.”
As Twitter wit John Fugelsang quipped,
Ben Carson has just about had it with all this negative revisionist history by liberals & the media about the Fugitive Slave Act.
— John Fugelsang (@JohnFugelsang) March 7, 2017
Or, as singer-songwriter Ricky Davila put it,
No Ben Carson, slaves were not immigrants. I'm starting to think he did brain surgery on himself and failed. Wow. pic.twitter.com/jGrJdpjw5C
— Ricky Davila (@TheRickyDavila) March 6, 2017
But hey, Carson says he can zap 60-year-old memories out of your brains too and experts say that is just as impossible as slaves being immigrants.
Given the quality of work we’re used to seeing from Republicans, we can safely say Davila hit that one out of the park.
Fake news and alternative facts are no longer sufficient to describe what we are hearing out of this administration. Andy Borowitz wrote in The New Yorker back in February that Trump complained, “the press has consistently refused to report the voices he hears in his head every day.”
The trouble is, those voices have been given form and like a biblical apocalypse, they’re rolling like a tsunami of excrement over our country.
They could be stopped at their source in the Oval Office except for greedy Republicans willing to sell their souls for their long-sought-after conservative agenda of screwing over the poor for the sake of the wealthy.
Edie Brickell used to sing that we should “shove her into shallow water” but it was already too late for her, and it’s too late for Donald Trump. It’s up to his neck, and we can only hope he drowns in it before we do.
Hrafnkell Haraldsson, a social liberal with leanings toward centrist politics has degrees in history and philosophy. His interests include, besides history and philosophy, human rights issues, freedom of choice, religion, and the precarious dichotomy of freedom of speech and intolerance. He brings a slightly different perspective to his writing, being that he is neither a follower of an Abrahamic faith nor an atheist but a polytheist, a modern-day Heathen who follows the customs and traditions of his Norse ancestors. He maintains his own blog, A Heathen’s Day, which deals with Heathen and Pagan matters, and Mos Maiorum Foundation www.mosmaiorum.org, dedicated to ethnic religion. He has also contributed to NewsJunkiePost, GodsOwnParty and Pagan+Politics.
