Politifact live fact-checked the newly minted 47th president’s inaugural address. Trump started lying as soon as he was sworn in (without placing his hand on the Bible) about everything from the number of Americans who died building the Panama Canal to the price of apples. Read the facts here.
The Hill: In his rambling May 31 monologue following his felony convictions, Donald Trump somehow found time to reference the ill-fated Nord Stream 2 natural gas pipeline between Russia and Germany. Trump declared: “I ended the Russian pipeline. It was dead. He [Biden] comes in and approves it.” Trump went on to allege that Biden did so because money from the former mayor of Moscow’s wife was paid to the Biden family.
Similarly, in a speech at CPAC last year, Trump noted that he “got along very well with Putin even though I’m the one that ended his pipeline. … I ended it. It was dead.” Trump added that “nobody ever heard of Nord Stream 2 until I came along.”
In fact, Trump did not stop Nord Stream 2 — he enabled it. The Nord Stream 2 pipeline went from zero to 90 percent completed during Trump’s presidency. Rather than stop it “dead,” the Trump administration rejected years of bipartisan congressional calls for imposition of sanctions to stop the project. Only when Congress, in frustration, passed mandatory sanctions did the administration finally take concrete action. But by then it was too late.
On Fox News, MAGA propagandist Kellyanne Conway told Trump-aligned presenter Maria Baritoromo, “You got Donald Trump in Detroit talking to 8,000 people at a Black church.” Politico.com headlined its story about this event in Detroit on June 16: “Trump Courts Black Voters in Detroit.”
In fact, there were fewer than 300 people in the pews and an estimated 90 percent of them were white. According to Raw Story:
The evangelical church is in the heart of Detroit’s west side and has a mainly Black congregation.
But photos caught by the media, and shared widely online, showed a lot of white people in the audience.
“It’s all lies, smoke, and mirrors,” wrote Jeff Timmer a Republican and senior adviser at the anti-Trump Lincoln Project, on X.
Jeffrey Evan Gold, a frequent legal analyst on networks including CNN and ABC, wrote, “MAGA whites in the hood for Trump.”
And Ben Meiselas, the co-founder of the progressive Meidas Touch, wrote, “Everything is a scam!!!!”
Adam Serwer in The Atlantic: “A simple but obvious fact has been lost over the past few years, amid Trump’s direct attacks on the FBI, and liberal defenses of the FBI against those attacks: FBI agents are cops. Law-enforcement officers, including the FBI, have long been disproportionately conservative, but in the past few decades, like the rest of the nation, they have also become far more polarized by party, a reality reflected in the rhetoric and positioning of advocacy groups such as the Fraternal Order of Police. There are liberal and moderate cops, but they are not close to comprising a majority. Simply put, the FBI is full of people who would prefer not to investigate Donald Trump. He remains under federal investigation only because of his own inability to stop criming.”
Republicans’ and MAGA right-wingers’ lies about and mockery of the attack on Paul Pelosi in the face of contradictory facts are an assertion of power and the first step toward autocracy. So argues Greg Sargent in an op-ed piece in the Washington Post.
It’s a compelling argument:
In 2020, Donald Trump’s lies about voter fraud provided a fake pretext to overturn his presidential election loss. Now that has metastasized: Many Republicans in the MAGA vein are employing “big lies” on numerous fronts, but their purpose has taken a dark new turn: It’s as if all the lying is becoming an assertion of power in its own right, a kind of end in itself.
The embrace of political lying as a declaration of power — of the power to say what reality is — has long been studied by academics. Some see it as a harbinger of autocratic political tendencies.
Read the rest in this gift article here.
It’s the Pope’s funeral, so Trump’s gotta go.
It wouldn’t be like him to miss such a show.
But when he arrives he might squall,
Because of arcane Vatican protocol
Trump might find himself seated in the back row.
