Warm and still this early-evening Monday here in California’s Central Valley — we’re forecast with more of the same for the next couple of weeks.
Indeed, we’re nicely, easily, seeping into autumn.
Not so nice, however, is one big lie empowered by a second big lie — T-Rump’s lifetime agenda:
New Column: Trump is not being prosecuted for what he's doing now or might do in the future. He's being prosecuted for what he did in the past. Let's be clear about this! https://t.co/6hv5udX7Lk Follow @newrepublic
— Michael Tomasky (@mtomasky) September 11, 2023
Michael Tomasky at The New Republic this morning on T-Rump’s legal bullshit and his use of shithead-lying:
The Big Lie, as it quickly became known, was that Donald Trump actually won the 2020 election. He’s still out there peddling this nonsense, and a lot of people still believe it, though thankfully, they constitute a clear minority of voters.
But now there’s a new lie being peddled. Call it Big Lie Two. Trump has been hawking this one for a while too, but it has been, to my mind, oddly little remarked-upon. That needs to change: Big Lie Two is more insidious and dangerous than Big Lie One, for two reasons. First, it has nothing to do with the settled past, but rather with the unsettled present and future. And second, unlike Big Lie One, a majority of Americans believe it.
The lie is that the indictments against Trump represent a collective effort to stop him from running for president. Trump talks of this all the time; “election interference” is the phrase he often uses. They can’t stop me legitimately, he says—they know I won in 2020, and they know I’ll win again, so this is how they’re trying to block me.
It’s not true. What’s true is this. Credible evidence has emerged on a number of fronts that Trump may have broken the law: that he absconded with boxes of sensitive, classified documents to Florida; that he approved a hush-money payment to a woman with whom he’d had sexual relations; that he tried to influence officials in Georgia to rig the 2020 election; and that he led or directed an insurrection against the government of the United States.
He is presumed innocent until proven guilty in all these matters. Yet in each of them, there is ample enough evidence of guilt on these fronts for prosecutions to proceed, and a lot of that evidence is, as Orwell might put it, right in front of our noses. We’ve seen the photographs of the boxes of classified documents, and we’ve heard that audio tape of him admitting that, contrary to his public statements, he knew that as an ex-president he could not declassify them. We have the testimony of his former attorney that Trump ordered him (Michael Cohen) to cut the check to Stormy Daniels. We have the tape of him badgering Brad Raffensberger to find him 11,780 votes. And we have video evidence, as well as congressional testimony from former aides, speaking to the idea that Trump encouraged the January 6 violence and was enjoying it—and even, from Cassidy Hutchinson, that he so desperately wanted to go to the Capitol while the rioting was taking place that he reached for the steering wheel and lunged at the Secret Service man who blocked him.
[…]
But most people don’t believe it. A CBS/YouGov poll from about a month ago asked respondents if they believed the indictments were “an attempt to stop Trump’s 2024 campaign.” And 59 percent said yes, to 41 percent saying no. Among independents—the group whose views matter most, because it’s a small sliver of them who’ll decide whether Trump returns to the White House—it was 63–37. There was a little good news in the poll. By 57–43, respondents also believed the indictments were an attempt to uphold the rule of law. And by a narrow 52–48, they agreed that the indictments were handed out to defend democracy. On those two questions, independents were, respectively, 52–48 and 47–53. (Not a lot of “no opinions” when it comes to Donald Trump.)
But the depressing reality is that three out of five Americans apparently believe that these indictments are politically motivated. About half of those, probably a little more, believe every word Trump says. I suspect some portion are Democrats—31 percent of whom agreed with the overall majority—who think they’re political and simply don’t disapprove. But a lot of them are jaded, cynical people who think everyone’s corrupt.
How the f*ck did the legal wires get so crossed that people believe asshole-known-liar over vast amounts of criminal cases — there were something like 60 separate legal instances that failed in courts across the country trying to depict some kind of fraud in the 2020 elections — one victory for the T-Rump team, supposedly, a technicality in that one.
An age of bad, terrible misinformation is peak now.
And reportedly with the advent of AI processed into the election next year will intensify the lie, big, little, first or second — fraud be as fraud not seen.
And to charm us out of here this evening, Annie Lennox asks the pertinent question:
Courtroom lies, or not, yet once again here we are…
(Illustration out front is of a New York state high-school student exhibit: ‘The piece was displayed during student-driven art show at Shenendehowa High School. It consisted of at least 12 identical black-and-white pictures of Donald Trump. There was also a sign above the pictures that read, “Draw on Me.” Using markers from the art classroom, Isome students opted to scribble critical messages and profanities on the pictures‘ — and found here.)