No Harm Spilt

President Donald Trump’s blatant, bald-faced lying is amazing and for some, I suppose, refreshing.  American politicians have always been at pains to cloak their lies in some sort of plausibility. When President Bush and Colin Powell were lying about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, they provided the UN Security Council with a computer-generated image of an alleged mobile production facility for biological weapons. It was bogus, of course, but it looked good, and a lot of Americans continued to believe Iraq had weapons of mass destruction long after it was definitively proven that it didn’t. But neither Bush nor Powell continue to assert that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction

Trump doesn’t bother with plausibility. He claimed the “very dishonest” media are purposely under-reporting terrorist attacks and then as “proof” provided a list of 78 attacks that were all covered exhaustively, especially by CNN, which he has singled out as especially dishonest. He has such a total disregard for objective truth and fact that many Americans are starting to worry about their memories. “Maybe the massacre by Islamic terrorists at San Bernardino was never reported. How did we find out about it again? Was it from Trump?”

Despite his narrow Electoral College win, and despite his having lost the popular vote, Trump proudly proclaims that he won in a landslide. The popular vote, he insists, was stolen from him by thousands of illegal votes that all went to Hillary Clinton. He tweeted:

“In addition to winning the Electoral College in a landslide, I won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”

Where is the evidence for such a claim? There isn’t any. Zip.

Nobody quite knows what to do with such lying.  The lies are so blatant that people start to think maybe they aren’t lies.

Supposedly Trump’s first wife Ivana Trump told her lawyer Michael Kennedy that Trump reads a book of Hitler’s collected speeches, which he keeps by his bed. Maybe she was lying. On the other hand…

“…in the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods.

It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously. Even though the facts which prove this to be so may be brought clearly to their minds, they will still doubt and waver and will continue to think that there may be some other explanation. For the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact which is known to all expert liars in this world and to all who conspire together in the art of lying.”— Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, vol. I, ch. X[1]