Flawed From The Start And Dissolved In Disgrace
To justify his lies that millions of people who voted illegally cost him the popular vote in 2016, President Trump appointed a Presidential Advisory Commission on Election Integrity to investigate false claims of illegal voting. 151
Led by its Chair and Vice Chair Vice President Mike Pence and Kansas Secretary of State Kris Kobach the commission was flawed from the start. 152 The president stacked it with partisan officials who had long records pushing discriminatory policies to make voting harder and less accessible for eligible Americans, especially communities of color, young people, those who move frequently, and the elderly. 153 The commission appeared to be part of an effort to put a presidential imprimatur on policies that would decrease accessibility to the ballot for eligible Americans.
After facing at least eight lawsuits and mobilized grassroots opposition, President Trump abruptly shut down the commission in January 2018. 154
Among its many missteps, the commission requested voters personal data from every state. 155 Vice President Pences office confirmed that the commission intend to run the state voter rolls it requested against federal databases to check for potential fraudulent registration. 156 The request led to a bipartisan rebuke from election administrators throughout the country, including by Mississippis Republican Secretary of State, who told the commission to go jump in the Gulf of Mexico. 157
Trump Attacks On The Rule Of Law
A government of laws and not of men. John Adams, 1780
President Trump treats as nonexistent the rule of law, a foundational tenet of our constitutional system of government. His repeated attempts to influence the administration of justice to serve his personal or partisan goals reflect his apparent view that we are a government of men and not of laws, in direct opposition to core principles that have always governed us.
Trumps repeated assaults on the Justice Department and the FBI are designed to pressure those agencies to make investigative and prosecutorial decisions based on his political desires, often against his political adversaries. President Trump saw the role of Attorney General Jeff Sessions and FBI Director James Comey as protecting him. He told Sessions it was his fault they were in the current situation after the Special Counsel probe was launched. 103 He fired Comey after failing to get a requested commitment of loyalty from him, with the clear implication it was Comeys job to serve Trumps interests, not the obligations of his office. 104
According to the The New York Times, Mr. Trump has made clear that he sees the attorney general and the F.B.I. director as his personal agents rather than independent figures, lashing out at both for not protecting him from the Russia investigation. 105
Strategic Petroleum Reserve Oil Stocks Declined Under Trump Contrary To His Claim
The U.S. Strategic Petroleum Reserve was set up in the 1970s as an emergency source of oil in the event of unexpected supply disruptions. When Donald Trump took office as president in January 2017, the reserve held 695.1 million barrels of crude oil. The last full week before he left office in January 2021, it held 638.1 million barrels, or about 8% less.
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Trump Personally Interviewed Us Attorney Candidates
Breaking with well-established tradition of independence, President Trump is inviting a conflict of interest by personally interviewing potential U.S. Attorney nominees.
Flouting the American principle that no person is above the law, President Trump personally interviewed multiple candidates for U.S. Attorney positions who, if confirmed, would have jurisdiction over him and his businesses. 172 These positionsthe top federal prosecutors in each jurisdictionreport to the attorney general and are among the most powerful law enforcement officers in the country.
Ordinarily, presidents are much less involved in the hiring of U.S. Attorneys. It has been longstanding practice that candidates for these positions are vetted by the Department of Justice in consultation with home-state senators, even if those selected are ultimately nominated by the White House. 173 Particularly in the wake of President Trumps demands for loyalty pledges from law enforcement appointees including fired FBI Director James Comey, his close involvement in the selection process risks the appearance of corruption and favoritism. Preet Bharara, the former U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York, explained that it is neither normal nor advisable for Trump to personally interview candidates for U.S. Attorney positions, especially the one in Manhattan. 174
‘no One’s Paying Any Attention’: The Week That Republicans Ignored Trump’s Election Lies
Losing candidates in Republican primaries this year aren’t resorting to the former president’s routine.
05/22/2022 07:00 AM EDT
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Donald Trump has been lying about voter fraud for so long that his impugning of yet another election seemed almost inevitable.
What was more revealing was that, for the first time, Republicans appeared not to be listening.
Mehmet Oz, the Trump-backed Senate candidate in Pennsylvania, did not prematurely declare victory last week, as Trump said he should. David McCormick, who is running narrowly behind Oz, has not claimed the election is unfair.
No ones paying any attention to it, said Christopher Nicholas, a longtime Republican consultant based in Harrisburg.
Ever since the 2020 election, the Republican Party has been transfixed by Trumps baseless claim that the 2020 election was rigged, a falsehood large majorities of Republicans still believe. Its an obsession that has animated primary campaigns across the country. And it will almost certainly resurface in the general election, when Republicans are running against Democrats, not one another.
Yet in Pennsylvania, Trumps earliest effort to graft his 2020 complaints onto ballot counting in a midterm primary is falling flat. MAGA hard-liners whove lost primaries in other states in recent weeks have not contested the results. And when the primary calendar turns to Georgia on Tuesday, Trumps election conspiracy crusade is likely to take another hit.
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Shout At The Messenger
Whenever in doubt, Trump attacks what he calls the dishonest media, accusing reporters of bias, inaccuracy and a failure to show the size of his rallies. He ignores that reporters quote him extensively, call his campaign for comment, interview his supporters, his rivals campaign and independent voters and experts. He often cites news stories about Clinton, and even praised fact-checkers in a presidential debate for catching her in a falsehood.
At every rally, Trump says the cameras refuse to show his audience, even though his campaign forces cameras to stay within a small pen, where they pan to show the crowd as anyone at his rallies or watching online can see. Only one camera at each event stays fixed on Trump: the shared pool camera, whose footage networks share and which stays on Trump so as not to miss his speech.
Last week, NBCs Katy Tur, a target for criticism from the podium, noted that Trump has joked in private with reporters about how he understands how the pool camera works.
This is a shtick that he does to rile up his base, she said, to give them an excuse for polls that might not be in his favor, to give them an excuse to berate someone thats not Donald Trump.
Russias Interference In The 2016 Election
This Russia thing with Trump and Russia is a made-up story, Trump said May 11, 2018.
From Day One, Trump has disputed what the U.S. intelligence community has concluded as a fact: Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. election with the goal of boosting his bid while working to tear down his Democratic opponent, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.
He repeatedly called the then-special counsel Robert Mueller’s two-year probe into the matter a “witch hunt against him and the inference itself a hoax, despite clear and sizable evidence that the Russian government worked to influence the outcome of the election in sweeping and systematic fashion, as Muellers report concluded. Multiple people were indicted as a result of the investigation, including a former Trump campaign aide, while other close Trump associates were charged with unrelated crimes uncovered in the course of Muellers probe.
The report gathered evidence that the president worked to stymie the investigation, but determined that the Department of Justice could not charge a sitting president and therefore would not determine whether he had broken the law. Trump, meanwhile, falsely claimed that Mueller’s report totally exonerated him from any wrongdoing, including allegations of his campaigns collusion with Russia.
When asked directly if the special counsel did actually totally exonerate the president, Mueller said no.
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If Trump Is A Pathological Liar What Type Of Liar Is Biden
Photograph Source: Matt Johnson CC BY 2.0
Bernie Sanders has routinely called Trump a pathological liar. The term pathological liar, a controversial one for psychiatrists, in common usage coveys someone who is an extraordinarily unrestrained liar. And so, Bernie knows that it is in no way radical to use this term to describe the unrelentingly self-serving Trump who unhesitatingly lies if he judges it to be in his self-interest. While Bernies diagnosis of Trump is a politically safe one, a more uncomfortable assessment for him would be: What type of liar is Joe Biden?
Ill get to Bidenwhose lies, not his gaffes, are what the Blue Team should worry most about. But first, some of what makes Trump an exceptional and extraordinary liar, even for a US president. Trump is obviously not the first politician to have zero allegiance to the truth, but he remains extraordinarynot merely in the sheer quantity of his lies but also in other ways.
The most obvious area of Trumps extraordinariness as a liar is his staggering number of lies. President Trump Made 16,241 False or Misleading Claims in His First Three Years was the headline of the Washington Post in January 2020, which reports, He averaged six such claims a day in 2017, nearly 16 a day in 2018 and more than 22 a day in 2019. This was before his 2020 epidemic of false and misleading claims around COVID-19.
Wicked or merely stupid? It is not only the British ruling class that provokes that question.
Deregulatory Task Forces Operating In Secret
Trump ordered deregulatory teams to review regulations to repeal, operating behind closed doors with secret membership.
Weeks after taking office, President Trump ordered federal agencies to create task forces to review federal regulations and recommend rules that the administration should push to repeal, replace, or modify. 162 According to a joint investigation by The New York Times and ProPublica, the task forces were being conducted in large part out of public view and often by political appointees with deep industry ties and potential conflicts. 163
Most government agencies declined to disclose any information about the deregulation teams to inquiring journalists. 164 Instead, to examine who exactly was on these task forces, the journalists used public information requests and interviews to determine as much as it could, and were able to do so for the membership of a limited number of teams. They discovered numerous conflicts of interest. 165 As part of the investigation, they identified 85 known current and former team members, including 34 with potential conflicts. At least two of the appointees may be positioned to profit if certain regulations are undone and at least four were registered to lobby the agencies they now work for. 166
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More: Trump Not Backing Down On Claim That Alabama Could Have Been Hit By Hurricane Dorian
But many experts, including a former director of the National Hurricane Center, took the side of Birmingham forecasters on social media and called the parent statement was “so disappointing,” — illustrating how Trump’s falsehoods eroded the credibility of the institutions around him, too.
“Either NOAA Leadership truly agrees with what they posted or they were ordered to do it,” Bill Read wrote on Facebook. “If it is the former, the statement shows a lack of understanding of how to use probabilistic forecasts in conjunction with other forecast information. Embarrassing. If it is the latter, the statement shows a lack of courage on their part by not supporting the people in the field who are actually doing the work. Heartbreaking.”
As with most of Trump’s false or misleading statements, enabled by the power of the presidency and his allies, “Sharpiegate,” too, appeared to blow over.
ABC News’ Ben Gittleson, Jordyn Phelps and Meg Cunningham contributed to this report.
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Erikson added that with Trump’s departure, the public might see Republican senators revert back to the truth, noting Republican Leader Sen. Mitch McConnell is “already done with Trump” in reportedly telling senators to vote their conscience in the upcoming impeachment trial on an article which stems from the election lie.
“If they don’t stand up for the truth, then they’re overestimating the power of this base that still wants them to falsely believe the election was stolen,” Erikson warned.
The most recent Gallup poll on Trump’s favorability found that he is leaving office with his lowest approval rating of his four years in office at 34%. Trump is the only president not to reach 50% approval rating during his time in office, since Gallup started polling the number in 1938.
But despite no evidence to support the view, according to a recent ABC News/Washington Post poll, one out of every three Americans — and two in every three Republicans — believes that there was widespread voter fraud in the presidential election, indicating damage on the country’s democratic institutions needing repairs far beyond the Capitol’s shattered glass.
TRUMP: The coronavirus pandemic is under control.
TRUTH: The US exceeded the White House’s 2020 death estimate by 100K lives.
One of the most dangerous lies of Trump’s involved the most serious threat to his presidency: his downplaying of the coronavirus pandemic.
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All The Presidents Lies: Media Coverage Of Lies In The Us And France
Reuters Institute Fellow’s Paper
Heidi Taksdal Skjeseth, the US correspondent for Dagsavisen, a leading Norwegian daily, since 2010, has written a research paper on the apparent increase in politicians lies called All the presidents lies: Media coverage of lies in the US and France. Heres how Heidi describes her research:
The political lie has existed since the dawn of politics. Yet something changed in 2016 with the election of Donald Trump as president of the United States. Mr. Trump presented falsehood upon falsehood throughout his campaign. While US journalists tried to hold him accountable, the falsehoods, or lies, had few consequences. He won. Many expected Mr. Trump to change after the presidential inauguration. He didn’t. According to a list published in the New York Times, Mr. Trump lied in public at least once every day in the first 40 days of his presidency.
In this paper I have looked at how US journalists cover Mr Trump´s lies and how the many falsehoods coming from the White House are changing the relationship between the political journalist and politicians, and therefore the very essence of political journalism. The relationship between political sources and the political journalist, though not always easy, has always required a degree of trust. This trust is now eroding, and according to my sources, it is changing the way political journalists work.
