Armored in Willful Ignorance, Trump Claims Nobody Opposes Keystone and DAPL

Last updated on July 17th, 2023 at 09:57 pm

This morning, Donald Trump took his lies straight to a gathering of sheriffs at the White House and immediately bragged about his support for two controversial pipelines, Keystone XL and DAPL, claiming nobody opposes his support for either project.

As Trump fact checker Daniel Dale of the Toronto Star related this morning,

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Of course, if Trump doesn’t know people oppose Keystone XL and the Dakota Access Pipeline it is because he doesn’t want to know. It is ignorance of a willful sort, of the type so frequently exhibited on the campaign trail and since his inauguration.

Trump claimed,

“As you know, I did the Dakota pipeline and nobody called up to complain because it was unfair. Years of getting approvals, nobody showed up to fight it. This company spends a tremendous — hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars, and then all of a sudden, people show up to fight it. It’s not fair to our companies. And I think everyone is going to be happy in the end, okay?”

We have a president who armors himself in ignorance. He claims to be a smart guy but is somehow ignorant not only of the fact that Keystone XL will not create thousands of jobs (it will create 35) but that nobody opposes DAPL despite numerous beatings, bitings and pepper sprayings, blunt force trauma and open wounds inflicted by police and hired thugs perpetrated on protesters blocking its path. Despite President Obama ordering the Army to re-route the pipeline.

Despite Malia Obama making headlines by protesting DAPL.

Despite Trump’s own and his energy secretary’s own economic interest in seeing DAPL completed, we are supposed to believe that he is unaware of opposition to these projects and that everybody is happy with his decision. Even as supposedly inviolate treaty rights are violated.

It is literally impossible to remain unaware of opposition to DAPL.

The Standing Rock Sioux have responded to Trump’s support for DAPL and he will find it difficult to pretend people are not opposed to his rape of the land and his racism directed against Native Americans:

Donald Trump says DAPL protests “weren’t fair to our companies” but apparently depriving the people of Standing Rock of their only supply of clean drinking water so Trump and Rick Perry can line their pockets is.

Of course, Trump also brought a cheering section to the CIA and then pretended that it was the CIA employees who were cheering for him. There is not a lie Donald Trump is unwilling to tell, bald-faced and obvious, it will still be embraced and spread as gospel by the most corrupt administration in American history.

Hrafnkell Haraldsson

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.