Lies, damned lies, and Presidential tweets
By Michael Sean Winters for the National Catholic Reporter
https://www.ncronline.org/news/opinion/distinctly-catholic/lies-damned-lies-and-presidential-tweets
It's 9:52 a.m. Do you know how many lies the president has tweeted today?
Last Thursday morning, the president of the United States acknowledged the one-year anniversary of the appointment of former FBI Director Robert Mueller as a special counsel to examine Russian interference in the 2016 election. With three tweets, Donald Trump displayed the quintessence of the Trump political psyche: unhinged from reality, unbounded by any concern for veracity, and petulant like a whiny child.
SNIP
It is news to no one that presidents lie. Indeed, there are times when statecraft demands deceit. "In war, truth is such a valuable commodity, she must always be accompanied by a bodyguard of lies," Winston Churchill observed during his premiership. Bill Clinton famously told us he "did not have sex with that woman." Richard Nixon insisted he was not a crook when he was.
Still, this is different. Churchill, Clinton and Nixon knew they were lying. It is not at all clear if Trump is aware he is lying or if his solipsism is so complete he actually believes his own propaganda. And, more importantly, his lack of interest in doing anything about Russian interference in our elections raises a related question: Is his solipsism so complete that he is indifferent to foreign interference in our politics, so long as it helps him?
Either way, we are in uncharted territory here — I had almost written terror-tory. What is certain is that our children are getting a crash course in how not to run a democracy and it isn't pretty and it isn't going away anytime soon.
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