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WASHINGTON – "What you see and what you read is not what happens."
When the story of the Trump era is written, this quote from our president will play an important role in explaining the illness of our moment and the dysfunction of his administration. Trump spoke about the media coverage of his trade war, but he also described his genuinely innovative approach to government: he believes that reality itself can be negated and that big lies can be confusing enough to prevent the truth from occurring.
This has benefits for Trump because it lessens the impact of any new revelation. Take the recording of his September 2016 conversation with his former lawyer Michael Cohen which was released Tuesday night.
Cohen's lawyer released the recording, which, as reported Carol Leonnig and Robert Costa of the Washington Post, shows that Trump "Karen McDougal sold her story to the parent company of National Enquirer, American Media Inc. The tabloid never directed his account, which clearly protected Trump from this embarrbading tale before the election, although his direction denied that it was his intention .
Trump's lawyer and ram Rudy Giuliani insisted that the recording portrays a Trump who "does not seem familiar with anything" that was being discussed. It was, let's say, an eccentric way of hearing the conversation.
Obscured in this back and forth is the fact that four days before the 2016 elections, Hope Hicks, the Trump campaign spokesman, denied the whole affair.
Trump's behavior would be bad enough if it was only his personal life and his treatment of women. For example, the Commerce Department, which administers the census, said earlier this year that it was adding a question asking whether respondents were citizens in response to the Justice Department's desire to enforce the law. 1965 Voting Rights Act
The question is a terrible one. Six former Census Bureau directors under the Republican and Democratic Presidents urged Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross not to include him. They warned that this would "significantly increase the risks for the 2020 enumeration".
The fear is that many immigrants, documented and mostly undocumented, would be reluctant to respond to the census if the issue were part of it, leading to undercoverage of places with a large population born in the country. foreign.
But for the Trump administration, this is not a problem. That's the goal. The undercoverage of immigrants would shift political power – as well as federal money – largely to those Republican areas with a smaller immigrant population.
And the documents returned this week in response to a lawsuit against citizenship Ross lobbied for his inclusion much earlier and more actively than his sworn testimony later stated. "Lying in Congress is a serious criminal offense, and Secretary Ross must be held accountable," said Elijah Cummings, D-Md., The Democrat's representative on the government's oversight and reform committee. Former Trump strategist chief Steve Bannon also insisted on the issue when he was at the White House.
The Ministry of Justice acted months later, a clear sign that the so-called civil rights concern was only a pretext for a political imbalance. valuable public information. Distorting data collection is also an attack on the truth.
Contrary to liberal fears, most of the country does not believe it. Trump's core support, measured by the proportion in Wednesday's NPR / PBS News Hour / Marist Poll that strongly approve, is 25%.
The bad news is that among Republicans, its high rate of approval is 62%. Trump's hope of hanging on to power rests on the badumption that he can continue to invent enough fake stories to keep his party at bay. His theory seems to be that a lie is as good as the truth as long as the right people believe it
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