At this point, it should not be news to anyone that by all appearances, Donald Trump is a deranged lunatic who has a tenuous grip on reality.
Nothing he says makes sense. He wouldn’t know the truth if it walked up to him, tapped him on the shoulder and pointed to the brightly colored “Hello” sticker on its shirt that read, “I’m the Truth.”
He launches verbal attacks against anyone who dares to disagree with or speak against him. This includes people that he handpicked to be a part of his administration. No one is safe from his tirades or his lies, and when all else fails, he will simply accuse people reporting facts of spreading “fake news.”
“Fake news” is his buzz phrase. It doesn’t mean what he thinks it means. If something negative is reported about him, he calls it “fake news” even if it is the truth. He doesn’t care. He is a one man propaganda machine who is guided by his own ego.
He also seems to be a pathological liar.
After lambasting the sworn testimony given by his handpicked chiefs of U.S. intelligence on Twitter, a reporter asked him in the Oval Office on Thursday if he had spoken with those intelligence chiefs about his displeasure with their testimony earlier this week.
“I did and they said that they were totally misquoted and they were totally ... it was taken out of context, so what I do is ... I suggest that you call them. They said it was fake news, so …” he said before being slightly interrupted by the same reporter.
“We just ran exactly what they said to Congress,” the reporter tries to interject, but Trump cuts her off.
“Excuse me, excuse me. It didn’t surprise me at all, but we are here to talk right now about China,” he said.
It is highly unlikely that any of these intelligence chiefs told Trump they were “misquoted” or used the phrase “fake news.” They know that they testified in public and that the testimony was broadcast live on national television.
Trump is upset that their testimony before Congress directly contradicts the picture he has tried to paint of North Korea being his BFF, his denials that Russia is interfering with our country’s elections, and his lies that Iran is in compliance with their obligations on the nuclear deal. Because of that, he not only further damaged his own credibility, but he also calls their credibility into question, and these are people who deal with foreign countries on the behalf of the United States.
How dumb his he?
The other side of this is that Trump is basically telling us that what we saw with our own eyes and heard with our own ears did not happen.
Of course, for those of us with critical thinking skills, we know exactly what he is doing. We recognize it for what it is, and we don’t let it become our truth.
But what about those in his base who simply take everything he says as gospel?
Trump is playing a dangerous game. His constant cries of “fake news” are meant to direct people to not believe what is happening right in front of them. It is the sort of authoritarian propaganda we read about in our textbooks describing other countries. Surely this isn’t happening in America?
Trump is Vladimir Putin’s puppet. He is taking notes directly from Russia’s playbook and using them here. He is doing irreparable damage to our country and to our country’s reputation in the world.
Your little “president” is a pathological liar.
The scary part is eventually, his lies are going to get someone—possibly a lot of someones—killed.