Tag: Andrew Sullivan
There’s No Point in Trying to Understand Trump
“What on earth is the point of trying to understand him when there is nothing to understand? Calling him a liar is true enough, but liars have some cognitive grip on reality, and he doesn’t. Liars remember what they have said before. His brain is a neural Etch A Sketch. He doesn’t speak, we realize; he emits random noises. He refuses to take responsibility for anything. He can accuse his predecessor and Obama’s national security adviser of crimes, and provide no evidence for either. He has no strategy beyond the next 24 hours, no guiding philosophy, no politics, no consistency at all — just whatever makes him feel good about himself this second. He therefore believes whatever bizarre nonfact he can instantly cook up in his addled head, or whatever the last person who spoke to him said. He makes Chauncey Gardiner look like Abraham Lincoln.”
— Andrew Sullivan
Trump Lies to Undermine the Media
And he lied, of course. And I don’t mean in the speech itself. He lied directly to the faces of the media muckety-mucks that afternoon, telling them that he was going to embrace some kind of immigration reform. For a few hours, much of the press duly reported this — until they heard the speech itself, which did no such thing. The lie, we were told, was a ‘misdirection,’ in order to get some favorable coverage from the media that afternoon. … But think about that for a minute. This wasn’t a trial balloon, delivered by some anonymous sources to see the impact of a potential policy. This wasn’t even a defensible fib, for national-security reasons. It was an outright lie from the president himself in order to delegitimize the press. If the New York Times or the evening news reports something completely untrue — indeed refuted just a few hours later — what happens to their credibility? Bannon is not kidding when he describes the free press as the opposition. For shameless demagogues, it always is. And this creepily authoritarian administration will happily lie to its face.
— Andrew Sullivan
Sullivan: Voters Have Repealed the Constitution and Replaced It with Fascism
“When fascism comes to America,” the saying goes, “it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross.”
Writing on November 3, 2016, five days before the presidential election, Andrew Sullivan made a convincing case that Donald Trump is the fascist who has come onto the scene wrapped in that flag and carrying that cross:
Andrew Sullivan Debates Obama’s Record with Bay Buchanan
The venue for this debate is Anderson Cooper’s show on CNN. Meanwhile, Fox is signaling that it is terrified of this story. The network’s spokesmodel hosts have been trashing Sullivan’s article while refusing to invite him on to debate it. (They even blurred his name on a graphic of the Newsweek cover.)
The biggest surprise is that Andrew Sullivan is surprised that the GOP’s propaganda network won’t allow its viewers to hear a dissenting view:
I knew from afar that they were a propaganda channel. Now, in this close-up personal interaction, you realize just how deep the rot goes. This is a channel dedicated to money, power and entertainment, in that order.
