good interview by Jonathan Karl...
https://www.ualrpublicradio.org/post/abcs-jonathan-karl-writes-about-front-row-trump-show
….But it's like, he lies for effect. He lies to make you feel better. He lies to make himself look better. He lies for all kinds of reasons.
INSKEEP: ...the president stood in front of a town hall on Fox, and he said, let's reopen the country by Easter. And when questioned about that, he acknowledged there was no data behind that. There's no science suggesting that's possible. It just seemed like a beautiful time.
KARL: Exactly. It sounded good, sounded better. This is often the way he operates. So when you hear him say something that is either way misleading or without any data behind it or just flatly wrong, there's always, like - or there's often, not always, some way to couch it.
So I pressed him on that right after the Fox town hall. And then he's like, you know, it's basically - I'm trying to provide hope. It's a beautiful day, and if we can do it, it'll be beautiful. But, of course, that's not the way you hear it when he says it.
I mean, my mom, who, you know, she's in her 80s. She lives in Florida. I've been very worried about her, telling her to stay at home. And late yesterday, she's like, so do you think I can start going out now? Like, no, Mom. No, you can't.
INSKEEP: Jon, you're telling me that that kind of attitude by the president of the United States could get somebody killed, could get your mom killed.
KARL: I am saying that - that it can be very dangerous. And this is another theme that I explore in the book, which was obviously written before this pandemic happened. But what concerns me most about what we are seeing and what we are witnessing in this administration is this is a time when, more than ever, we need to be able to trust the information that we get from official sources, that people need to have faith in what they are hearing. They need credible information.
And what we have seen now for the past three-plus years is we have seen a situation where the president's own credibility has been undermined with roughly half the country, who will not believe anything he says, and where the other half of the country, roughly, will not believe anything that they see in a mainstream news account because he has undermined and worked so hard to make people disbelieve what they read in the newspapers, what they hear on the radio, what they see on television. And that is a really dangerous place to be. It always mattered. And I make a very forceful case that it matters, but now it is literally potentially a matter of life and death.
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