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Bullshit Trump Says

How do they get wealthy then?
 
I would say Vanessa is off limits, but what are the odds she had to sign a non-disclosure agreement along with a prenup?
 
High. Probably every time they had sex out of habit.
 
Trump and the Truth: A President Tests His Own Credibility

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WASHINGTON — When President Trump told donors at a fund-raiser this past week that he invented a fact during a conversation with Canada’s prime minister, the surprise was not that America’s leader makes things up, but that he openly admitted it.

Or maybe admitted is the wrong word. He actually seemed to boast about it.

In the furor that followed the disclosure of his remarks, attention focused on the impact on relations with Canada and whether the president was right or wrong in his assertion about trade. But the episode goes to the heart of a more fundamental debate about Mr. Trump: When does he know the things he says are false and when is he simply misinformed?

Mr. Trump, after all, has made so many claims that stretch the bounds of accuracy that full-time fact-checkers struggle to keep up. Most Americans long ago concluded that he is dishonest, according to polls. While most presidents lie at times, Mr. Trump’s speeches and Twitter posts are embedded with so many false, distorted, misleading or unsubstantiated claims that he has tested even the normally low standards of American politics.

“His statement this week was another reminder of how cavalier he is with the truth,” said Bill Adair, the founder of PolitiFact, the Pulitzer Prize-winning, nonpartisan fact-checking website owned by the Poynter Institute. “He seems so willing to say whatever suits him at that moment regardless of whether it’s true. In all the time that I was editor of PolitiFact and in the time since when I’ve worked with fact checkers all over the world, I’ve just never seen any political figure distort the truth so recklessly.”

Mr. Trump’s presidency has been marked from the start with false or misleading statements, such as his outlandish claims that more people came to his inauguration than any before and that more than three million people voted illegally against him, costing him the popular vote. He has gone on to assert that President Barack Obama wiretapped Trump Tower, a claim that his own Justice Department refuted, and that he would not benefit from his tax-cutting plan.

The lack of fidelity to facts has real-world consequences in both foreign affairs and domestic policymaking. Foreign diplomats and lawmakers of both parties say they do not assume anything he says is necessarily true. In a White House where one aide described the existence of “alternative facts” and another acknowledged telling “white lies,” staff members scramble to defend his claims without putting their own credibility on the line. News organizations debate when to use the word “lie” because it implies intent.

Since Mr. Trump became a presidential candidate, PolitiFact has evaluated more than 500 assertions and found 69 percent of them mostly false, false or “pants on fire” false. By comparison, it judged 26 percent of the statements by Mr. Obama that it evaluated as false and the same percentage for those by Hillary Clinton.

These are not scientific measurements, of course, because the selection of statements for examination is inherently subjective. Mr. Trump’s defenders say fact-checking organizations like PolitiFact are politically biased, which Mr. Adair and his counterparts adamantly deny. But even among Republicans examined by PolitiFact, Mr. Trump is an outlier.

While PolitiFact did not exist during most of President George W. Bush’s tenure, it has found that 42 percent of statements that it examined by Senator John McCain of Arizona and former Gov. Mitt Romney of Massachusetts, the two previous Republican presidential nominees, were false. The party’s congressional leaders, Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky and House Speaker Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, were both at similar levels, 43 percent and 41 percent.

The White House did not respond to a request for comment on Friday. Mr. Trump’s supporters rarely defend him as a truthteller, but argue that all presidents lie and point to false statements made by his predecessors, like Bill Clinton (Monica Lewinsky), Mr. Bush (Iraq) and Mr. Obama (health care).

Advisers say privately that Mr. Trump may not always be precise but is speaking a larger truth that many Americans understand. Flyspecking, tut-tutting critics in the news media, they say, fail to grasp the connection he has with a section of the country that feels profoundly misled by a self-serving establishment. To them, the particular facts do not matter as much as this deeper truth.

“I think presidents, all of them, actually have a habit of thinking that they’re right, whether they’re right or not,” said Patrick Caddell, a political consultant who advised Mr. Trump at times during the 2016 campaign. “He’s more guilty of that than some sort of preplanned and mendacious statements.”

But Mr. Caddell — who advised Jimmy Carter, beaten up by the media as naïve after famously promising never to tell a lie — said Americans see Mr. Trump in context. “In Washington, D.C., facts don’t matter; people have narratives, including the media, and they just ignore anything that doesn’t fit that,” he said. “Why should the American people punish him when they think the entire political culture” is that way?

Mr. Trump’s reported conversation with Prime Minister Justin Trudeau of Canada occurred during a St. Louis fund-raiser on Wednesday for Josh Hawley, a Republican Senate candidate in Missouri. Reporters were not permitted in the room, but an audio recording was later obtained by The Washington Post.

As Mr. Trump told the story, the Canadian leader assured him that the United States did not have a trade deficit with Canada.

“I said, ‘Wrong, Justin, you do,’” Mr. Trump said, according to a transcript published by The Post. “I didn’t even know. Josh, I had no idea. I just said, ‘You’re wrong.’ You know why? Because we’re so stupid. And I thought they were smart. I said, ‘You’re wrong, Justin.’ He said, ‘Nope, we have no trade deficit.’”

The president also asserted that Japan bars American cars from its market through an odd test. “They take a bowling ball from 20 feet up in the air and they drop it on the hood of the car,” he said. “And if the hood dents, then the car doesn’t qualify.”

At a briefing the next day, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press day, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, acknowledged that the bowling ball anecdote was false. “Obviously, he’s joking about this particular test,” she said, “but it illustrates the creative ways some countries are able to keep American goods out of their markets.”

And even though the United States trade representative’s office says the United States had a $12.5 billion trade surplus with Canada in 2016, she asserted that Mr. Trump was actually right because he was including items not included by the government agency. “Once you include those, it shows that there actually is a deficit,” she said. She later said on Twitter that the president was referring only to trade in goods, not trade in goods and services, the common measurement.

But the point was that Mr. Trump acknowledged to the donors that he made the claim having no idea whether it was right or wrong. And it was not even the only time that day he made false statements.

In a public conversation at a Boeing factory in St. Louis, he lauded the number of jobs created on his watch and said “nobody would have believed that could have happened.” But in fact, 2.5 million new jobs were created in his first 13 months as president, almost exactly the same as the 2.6 million created in the 13 months before he became president and Mr. Obama was in the White House.

As a businessman, Mr. Trump often fabricated or exaggerated to sell a narrative or advance his interests. In his memoir, “The Art of the Deal,” he called it “truthful hyperbole” or “innocent exaggeration.”

When trying to lure investors to a hotel project, he had bulldozers dig on one side of the site and dump the dirt on the other to give the impression that the project was making progress. He would call reporters and pretend to be a publicity agent for himself named John Barron. He claimed to earn $1 million from a speech when it was $400,000. He claimed to be worth $3.5 billion when seeking a bank loan, four times what the bank eventually found.

“He’s a salesman and that’s not about telling the truth, that’s not the DNA about being a salesman,” said Gwenda Blair, the author of “The Trumps: Three Generations of Builders and a President,” a biography of his family. “The DNA of being a salesman is telling people what they want to hear. And he’s got it.”

Jack O’Donnell, who was president of the Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City, recalled Mr. Trump telling New Jersey authorities that he had secured bank financing for a new casino and would not use junk bonds, only to turn around and then use junk bonds.

In my experience with him, there are times when he just compulsively lies and there are times when he strategically lies,” said Mr. O’Donnell, who wrote a scathing book about Mr. Trump. “In both regards, after he says something, I do think he believes that whatever he says becomes his reality. That’s my experience with him. It doesn’t have to be anything big but it certainly can be.”

Mr. Trump continued his practice as president. The Washington Post’s fact-checker documented more than 2,000 false or misleading claims in Mr. Trump’s first year in office, a rate of more than five a day, many of them repeated even after he was corrected.

Polls show that only 35 percent of Americans consider him honest, while 60 percent do not. In their first terms, more than 50 percent considered Mr. Bush honest and more than 60 percent considered Mr. Obama honest, although those numbers fell for both by their second terms.

Republicans as well as Democrats express concern. Amanda Carpenter, a former aide to Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and former Senator Jim DeMint of South Carolina, has a new book coming out in May called “Gaslighting America: Why We Love It When Trump Lies to Us.” On the cover is an illustration of Mr. Trump with a Pinocchio nose.

Her explanation is that Mr. Trump’s supporters do not see deception, they see a commitment to winning. “Donald Trump’s lies and fabrications don’t horrify America,” says the publisher’s summary of her book. “They enthrall us.”

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Where’ the official president Trump thread go? Oh we, I’ll just put this here.

Chris Hayes: What ‘Law and Order’ Means to Trump

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Donald Trump is not subtle. While normal political language functions through implication and indirection, Mr. Trump luxuriates in saying the quiet part loud. But in doing so, Mr. Trump exposes what drives the politics of the movement he commands. That is most evident in the way he talks about crime and punishment.

No president since Richard Nixon has embraced the weaponized rhetoric of “law and order” as avidly as Mr. Trump. “When I take the oath of office next year, I will restore law and order to our country,” he said during his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in 2016. “I will work with, and appoint, the best prosecutors and law enforcement officials in the country to get the job properly done. In this race for the White House, I am the law and order candidate.”

Time and again, the president denounces “illegals” and “criminals” and the “American carnage” they wreak on law-abiding Americans. He even advised an audience of police officers to rough up suspects they were arresting.

Yet this tough-guy stance disappears when the accused are in the president’s inner circle. In defending Rob Porter, the White House senior aide accused of abuse by both of his ex-wives, the president wondered whatever happened to due process while praising a man accused of giving his wife a black eye. (Mr. Porter denies the abuse.)

It’s no surprise that Mr. Trump’s critics pounced. Where was this concern for due process, they asked, when the president and his supporters chanted “Lock her up” about Hillary Clinton, who hadn’t even been formally accused of a crime? Where was his devotion to due process when he called for the Central Park Five to be executed, and then, after their exoneration, still maintained that they were guilty?

As tempting as it is to hammer Mr. Trump for his epic hypocrisy, it is a mistake. The president’s boundless benefit of the doubt for the Rob Porters and Roy Moores of the world, combined with off-with-their-heads capriciousness for immigrants accused of even minor crimes, is not a contradiction. It is the expression of a consistent worldview that he campaigned on and has pursued in office.

In this view, crime is not defined by a specific offense. Crime is defined by who commits it. If a young black man grabs a white woman by the crotch, he’s a thug and deserves to be roughed up by police officers. But if Donald Trump grabs a white woman by the crotch in a nightclub (as he’s accused of doing, and denies), it’s locker-room high jinks.

This view is also expressed by many of the president’s staff members, supporters and prominent allies. During the same week that the White House chief of staff, John Kelly, repeatedly vouched for Rob Porter’s integrity, Mr. Kelly also mused that hundreds of thousands of unauthorized immigrants who did not fill out the paperwork for DACA protections had refused to “get off their asses.”

A political movement that rails against “immigrant crime” while defending alleged abusers and child molesters is one that has stopped pretending to have any universalist aspirations. The president’s moral framework springs from an American tradition of cultivating fear and contempt among its white citizens against immigrants, indigenous people and people of color, who are placed on the other side of “the law.” It’s a practice that has taken on new strength at a time when many white people fear they may be outnumbered, outvoted and out of time.

This is the opposite of what we like to tell ourselves is the traditional American civic creed: one symbolized by a blindfolded Lady Justice who applies the law without fear or favor to whoever may come before her. It is one of Mr. Trump’s most insidious victories that he has given his supporters permission to drop any pretense of insisting that their actions and views should conform to this principle.

If all that matters when it comes to “law and order” is who is a friend and who is an enemy, and if friends are white and enemies are black or Latino or in the wrong party, then the rhetoric around crime and punishment stops being about justice and is merely about power and corruption.

And this is what “law and order” means: the preservation of a certain social order, not the rule of law. It shouldn’t have taken this long to see what has always been staring us in the face. After all, the last president to focus so intensely on law and order, Richard Nixon, the man who helped usher in mass incarceration, was also the most infamous criminal to occupy the Oval Office. The history of the United States is the story of a struggle between the desire to establish certain universal rights and the countervailing desire to preserve a particular social order.

We are now witnessing a president who wholly embraces the latter. America can have that kind of social order, or it can have justice for all. But it can’t have both.

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Trump’s lies appeal to people who lie to themselves.
 
Trump’s lies appeal to people who lie to themselves.

Yep. And that's also why Fox News is so successful with the rubes - they deliberately tell these folks what they want and expect to hear, instead of what's actually happening. It's been a very successful business and news model, and now it's been transferred to politics and government administration by Trump. The only problem is that governing requires some connection to reality and real-world problems to work for very long, and it's very difficult to govern when you ignore that. We'll see how far down the rabbit hole Trump and Company can take us before it all falls apart (as it will at some point).
 
The nice thing about Trump is that he always gives an indication of the real insecurities that set off his nonsense:

“Trudeau came to see me. He’s a good guy, Justin. He said, ‘No, no, we have no trade deficit with you, we have none. Donald, please' ... Nice guy, good-looking guy, comes in — ‘Donald, we have no trade deficit.’ He’s very proud because everybody else, you know, we’re getting killed. ... I said, ‘Wrong, Justin, you do.’ I didn’t even know. ... I had no idea. I just said, ‘You’re wrong.’ You know why? Because we’re so stupid."

Link

 
St. Patrick’s Night Massacre forthcoming?
 
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It’s really surprising that Trump hasn’t capitulated and confessed his crimes by now.
 
 
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