Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 06:40 pm
We have seen how Bernie Sanders stepped bravely into the lion’s den and called out Trump as a pathological liar Sunday.
While Sanders was speaking truth to power, Trump was busy accusing Hillary Clinton of being the liar. At the Democratic Debate Saturday Hillary Clinton called out Trump’s rhetoric, saying ISIL is using videos of him as a recruiting tool. PolitiFact found no evidence of this and rated her claim as “False” but Trump was quick to tweet,
Hillary Clinton lied when she said that "ISIS is using video of Donald Trump as a recruiting tool." This was fact checked by @FoxNews: FALSE
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— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 20, 2015
This is kind of funny really: relying on a “fact check” from Fox News, the two being mutually exclusive. Even if there were facts, Fox News could not find them with both hands and a map. Witness Benghazi.
Trump wasted no time responding, saying Sunday during an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, “She lies like crazy about everything, whether it’s trips where she was being gunned down in a helicopter or an airplane. She’s a liar and everybody knows that.”
His own lies? “toughness and strength,” he says. “My words show strength.”
Of course, Chuck Todd told Ted Cruz on the same show back in October that Cruz calling Mitch McConnell a liar was “tough talk” (“a tough thing to say”) so maybe The Donald is on to something here and we’re coming at this the wrong way.
Even more pathetically, this pathological liar, who lies his way through each Republican debate when he’s not telling lies at his rallies and in television interviews, tweeted that “Hillary LIED at the debate last night. SAD!”
Wait…by your own logic, aren’t Clinton and Sanders just showing “toughness and strength?”
No. Sorry. It doesn’t work that way in the Trumpverse.
Just to prove it, during a phone interview on ABC’s This Week he called Sanders a liar.
George Stephanopoulos then tried to reason with Trump, appealing to fact-checkers in a discussion on This Week. But reasoning does not work as an antidote to demagoguery, because demagoguery functions on an emotional, not a rational level. Trump’s audience feels. The rest of us think.
Watch courtesy of Media Matters for America:
DONALD TRUMP: You know, they make up things in the world of politics. They’re all talk and no action. They’re politicians.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS (HOST): You sure you want to go down that road? The fact-checkers have called you out on more false statements than any other candidate.
TRUMP: Oh, I’ll go down that road. And, you know, people maybe call me out but they turn out to be wrong also. And many of the things I’ve said — and I think just about all of them — they may have been controversial at one point, George, but they’re not controversial in the end because people start to say, you know, Trump’s actually right. And you go into illegal immigration, everybody now is coming my way with illegal — I’ve been 100 percent right as far as crime is concerned, as far as the economy is concerned. I’ve been right on more than anybody else has been right by a big factor.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Well, you’ve never come up with a video of those thousands of people cheering in New Jersey on 9/11.
TRUMP: Oh, there were plenty of people cheering, believe me. And I’ve come up with plenty, and the Washington Post wrote a story that they tried to retract, and there were many other stories written, and a lot of people — thousands of people have been calling and writing and emailing — many people saw it, and it was in New Jersey and it was also all over the world, George, so there’s an obvious problem. Because all over the world, and you’re not even disputing that — but people were celebrating all over the world, and I think it’s disgusting.
STEPHANOPOULOS: There were people celebrating in the West Bank. There were not people celebrating in New Jersey, as far as any evidence we have seen. But I do want to move on —
TRUMP: Of course there were, George, there were articles — George, there were articles written about it, there were people celebrating. And, in fact, if you look at the famous Washington Post article that he tried to retract — there were articles written about it. Don’t tell me that, there’s no reason to apologize, there were people celebrating. When the World Trade Center was coming down, there were people celebrating, George.
STEPHANOPOULOS: Around the world.
For the record, PolitiFact has also fact-checked Trump’s 9/11 claim and rated it “Pants on Fire” – twice. Even the conservative media has debunked Trump’s “thousands of Muslims celebrating.”
Trump told Chuck Todd on Meet the Press in response to Hillary’s recruitment tool claim that “Right, nobody has been able to back that up. It’s nonsense,” but when confronted with the fact of also makings stuff up, Trump just continues to insists its true, that the evidence is there, even if he can’t produce the evidence and neither can anybody else.
This is the point at which, were Clinton a liar like Trump, she would just go on insisting what she said is true despite the lack of any evidence whatsoever. My best is we won’t be seeing that happen.
And look, Trump ought to know about making things up in the world of television. But it seems to be working for him. The problem is, more often than not, the mainstream media abets this scheme rather than calling him out. As Mercedes Schlapp said on Fox News’ Media Buzz Sunday, “the media is becoming Trump’s super PAC.”
Yes, we recently had serial liar Chuck Todd tell Trump, without a trace of irony that, ‘Just because somebody repeats it doesn’t make it true,’ but that – like George Stephanopoulos yesterday – was an anomaly. They are generally content to just let Trump accuse everybody else of lying, in response to almost everything anybody says about him.
Both Chuck Todd and George Stephanopoulos let Trump have the last word, and that very public last word is a lie, passed off as further evidence of Trump’s “toughness” and “strength.”
But it’s all lies. All of it.
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.
