In an interview published yesterday in Time magazine, Donald Trump defended his administration by saying, ‘I’m President, and you’re not.’ While true, his being president doesn’t imply what he thinks it implies.
And it’s a childish defense, the sort of thing you’d hear on a playground. Trump claimed,
“I’m a very instinctual person, but my instinct turns out to be right. Hey, look, in the meantime, I guess I can’t be doing so badly, because I’m President, and you’re not.”
Poorer logic is difficult to imagine. Which might explain some of Donald Trump’s many mistakes, and why he thinks he never makes them. In fact, as a Ryan Lizza tweet reveals, a House Freedom Caucus source said of Trump’s understanding of healthcare, “He seems to neither get the politics nor the policy of this.”
Hard to be right when you don’t know what you’re talking about, and then lie about it.
The response to Trump’s interview has been devastating:
Pretty amazing.@Jezebel redacted everything that's not verifiably true from Trump's TIME interview about the truth https://t.co/vBhqqEnMpn pic.twitter.com/2u5FBEXTGV
— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) March 24, 2017
As Chelsea Clinton no doubt enjoyed putting it after all the lies Trump told about her mother,
Removing the alternative facts, half truths and untruths from Trump's @Time interview reveals how little remains https://t.co/AgzObgkUiK
— Chelsea Clinton (@ChelseaClinton) March 24, 2017
If you want some numbers, The Toronto Star‘s Trump fact-checker-in-chief Daniel Dale provides some:
Donald Trump made 14 false claims in his Time interview on the subject of whether he makes false claims. #TrumpCheck pic.twitter.com/11TdYuPDCO
— Daniel Dale (@ddale8) March 23, 2017
In other words, Trump lies a lot about whether or not he lies.
The fact that he is president just further exposes his rampant dishonesty. It doesn’t mean he is right about, well…anything. Or that he isn’t doing badly. He is doing very badly indeed, as the scandal surrounding his possible collusion with Russia amply demonstrates.
At every opportunity, Trump tells us how smart he is, but there is plentiful evidence he got played by Vladimir Putin.
And Ezra Klein makes a compelling argument for Donald Trump having been played by Paul Ryan, not exactly the smartest guy in the room himself.
And according to Klein, “it doesn’t appear to have been very hard” for Ryan to prove to the world that Trump is not such a smart guy after all.
This is not really a surprise about a guy who, if he sees it on TV or reads it in a newspaper, believes it’s real, unless it’s something he doesn’t like, and then it’s “fake news.”
And who, by the way, doesn’t believe it’s true if it comes from his own intelligence community, but does believe it’s real if it comes from the Kremlin.
Trump insists,
“What am I going to tell you? I tend to be right. I’m an instinctual person, I happen to be a person that knows how life works.”
Except that he happens to be wrong quite a lot, and then lie about it. Like he did in the interview.
If Trump thinks winning an election is some sort of vindication of his endless lies, the evidence suggests he is about to learn a very painful lesson indeed.
- Resistance Leader Maxine Waters Receives Standing Ovation at MTV Movie Awards - Mon, May 8th, 2017
- A Desperate Trump Lashes Out As Sally Yates Prepares to Testify - Mon, May 8th, 2017
- Idaho Republican Claims ‘Nobody Dies Because They Don’t Have Access to Health Care’ - Mon, May 8th, 2017
