by Nick Taylor
Anniversary triggers have lashed Trump’s starved ego into overdrive. Two hundred and fifty years since the founders declared independence from the British crown, and Trump wants to sign the declaration with his Sharpie.
Don’t tell him somebody wrote that. He’ll really want to do it.
The Washington Monument reflecting pool is the perfect metaphor for Donald Trump’s second administration. The first was bad but this one’s worse. The reflecting pool saga tells us everything. Trump bragging that he’s restoring Washington, D.C. to a bygone glory. The cheap repair whose cost ballooned. The no-bid contract with a Mar-a-Lago neighbor. The pool sealant with the patriotic name that apparently didn’t have time to set before a presidential motor fleet of ten-ton cars drove into the drained pool. The aerators that didn’t work. The flakes of sealant drifting to the surface. Algae growing in the stagnant water, turning it green and killing ducks. The fictional vandals attacking the president’s good work.
“Who would do such a thing?” he asked
Who, indeed?
One of Trump’s great powers is projection. It’s a Freudian term. He finds or creates other people to accuse of the unacceptable things he does himself so he won’t have to face the feelings they cause. Like inadequacy or shame.
So he lies a lot, By “a lot” I mean constantly. He’s good at it, like a virtuoso musician. He likes the sound of himself lying.
Back in May I watched one of his cabinet meetings. It was the usual orgy of self-congratulation followed by hallelujahs and amens from his secretaries of this and that.
When he wasn’t nodding with his chin on his chest, the president held forth on his usual themes — his forthcoming but elusive victory in his “excursion” in Iran, the giddy stock market, the reflecting pool, and on and on. So much work, all needed to rescue the country from the mistakes of Sleepy Joe Biden and Barack Hussein Obama.
Then he brought up the border, another favorite subject. He loves to talk about it. Just think, he said, “We took the most unsafe and violent and open border in the world and created the most safe border in the history of our country — zero illegal aliens admitted to the United States in the last twelve months.” He didn’t cite sources.
The cutoff in illegal aliens was especially dramatic since Biden admitted a lot of murderers, according to Trump. Last year, he said, “we achieved the largest drop in the murder rate ever recorded. The murder rate was quite high and we achieved the largest drop in the murder rate ever recorded, to the lowest level in 125 years, since 1900. And that’s despite the fact that many people came in from prisons and from very rough countries and from mental institutions and from lots of other places, drug dealers. They came in illegally during the Biden administration and we’ve gotten many of them out, but we still have some that we’re looking for.”
He had a precise number for the murderers admitted — 11,888, he claimed. “And more than half have committed more than one murder,” he went on. “That’s what they allowed in. They should never be forgotten for the horrible things they’ve done to this country.”
Eleven thousand, eight hundred and eighty-eight murderers? It’s a figure he’s used before. Where does he get this stuff?
Wait a minute. That figure sounds vaguely familiar. Then I remembered his call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger after the 2020 election. Georgia voters gave Biden 11,779 more votes than they gave Trump, and in a long phone call that Raffensperger recorded, Trump said, “All I want to do is this: I just want to find 11,780 more votes, which is one more than we have . . .” Eleven thousand some odd has been creeping around in Trump’s subconscious for a while now.
Some actual murder figures do exist. For the last ten years, between fiscal 2017 and April of this year, the U.S. Customs and Border Patrol counted the numbers of murders and manslaughters committed by criminal aliens. The total? 221. In ten years.
Granted, we’re talking about murderers entering the country as aliens versus murders committed by aliens once they got here. But if 11,888 murderers responsible for nearly 18,000 deaths came into the country under Biden, why didn’t the alien murder rate skyrocket?
It didn’t because they didn’t. This is just one example of what The New York Times calls Trump’s “tenuous relationship with facts.”
Trump’s lies have multiplied in his current term, as has his corruption and corrosion of democracy. He wants everyone to believe the truth is only what he says it is. But he’s often, or almost always, lying, and we shrug and say, “That’s Trump.”
But objective truth that people can agree on is one of democracy’s cornerstones. It’s the only basis for an honest political debate. AowWe should stop treating his lies as normal, and we should object when the media treat them that way. The facts are out there to be found.
His turgid reflecting pool reflects him. It shouldn’t reflect us, too. But I’m writing this on July 4, Independence Day, and I believe if we can get through the next year and a half we’ll be good for another 250.
photo by Ali Khan.
