Donald Trump is probably the most casually dishonest serious candidate for president that this country has ever seen. He lies so easily, so shamelessly, and so regularly that media outlets have largely given up trying to factcheck his more, er, problematic assertions.
Politifact, a site that exposes politicians’ lies, awarded their Lie of the Year prize last year to “the campaign misstatements of Donald Trump.” There were so many they couldn’t pick just one.
Trump is worse than a mere fibber; as more than a few observers have noted of late, he’s also a master gaslighter, as are the political operatives closest to him. Gaslighting is a favorite tactic of abusers who’ve mastered the art of lying so baldly that their victims are led to doubt what they’ve seen and experienced, and begin to think they’re literally going mad.
Trump’s campaign manager Corey Lewandowski responded to reporter Michelle Fields’ claim that he had assaulted her at a Trump event by declaring her “delusional” — a favorite ploy of gaslighters everywhere — even though, as footage of the event now conclusively shows, he did in fact grab her and pull her away from Trump, just as she said he had. Lewandowski’s employer, whose own story on the assault has undergone a number of mutations, is now accusing her of changing her story, which has been consistent from the start. Add to this a heaping helping of old-fashioned misogynistic victim-blaming, and you’ve got a nasty smear campaign going.
But Trump’s latest claim about the Lewandowski incident is so over-the-top ludicrous that it transcends mere gaslighting. During a CNN town hall last night, Trump tried to convince the world that Lewandowski’s assault was perfectly justified because the pen she was holding could just maybe have been, you know, some sort of James Bond style pen-bomb.
“She had a pen in her hand,” he declared, “which Secret Service is not liking because they don’t know what it is, whether it’s a little bomb.”
Never mind that there was a Secret Service agent right there, and he didn’t deem Fields to be enough of a threat to intervene.
Oh, and never mind that A PEN BOMB!!? YOUÂ CAN’T BE FREAKING SERIOUS.
And that’s a bit of a clue as to what is going on here. Trump can’t possibly be serious. The pen-bomb claim is almost certainly a bad-faith attempt to derail the discussion and to draw public attention away from the surveillance video showing Lewandowski grabbing Fields.
This is what trolls do. Trump is pulling the same sort of bad-faith nonsense that anti-Semitic trolls do when they declare that they can’t possibly be anti-Semitic because Arabs are Semites too; when a certain far-right fantasy author declares that he can’t possibly be a white supremacist because he has a bit of American Indian blood in his genes, a fact that he discovered only recently and which he gleefully trots out every time he’s accused of racism.
The trouble is that these tactics, however transparent they are to most observers, work.  As David Marcus notes in The Federalist, Trump’s energetic gaslighting has managed to distract the media from the real issues and shroud the Lewandowski incident in doubt.
Now that Lewandowski has been arrested and video shows that his account is patently false, Trump is lowering the lights. Well, he says, she touched me too, can I get her charged? He says, well, how do we know she didn’t already have those bruises (which she photographed the next day). As the lights dim, those most tragic figures, cable news anchors, fall into his frothing sea of who knows what the hell happened?
And when those claims began to wear thin, Trump started talking about pen-bombs.
Donald Trump is a troll. He’s been trolling us all from day one of his campaign.Â
So it’s no wonder that the Anime Nazis have embraced Trump so enthusiastically. It isn’t just his racism that’s appealing to them, or his not-so-subtle encouragement of physical violence against protesters, more than a little bit reminiscent of Nazi electoral thuggery.
It’s because he’s one of them, a born troll.
I half expect Trump himself to take up the joke slogan of his trolly followers and promise voters that he will make anime real. After all, that’s a claim no more absurd than Trump’s contention that he will build a wall on our southern border and make Mexico pay for it.
Like most successful trolls — paging Milo Yiannopoulos — Trump has attracted a rabid following of trolls happy to troll and smear on his behalf. However ridiculous their memes get, their support for Trump is sincere, and their attacks still sting.
And that’s the problem with trolls. Their ironic stances have a tendency to calcify into sincerely held beliefs. Cartoon fascism becomes real hatred. Donald Trump the media-trolling buffoon becomes Donald Trump the dangerous demagogue. Some of his more over-the-top pronouncements may be mostly hot air, but his racism and misogyny are real. And to those who bear the brunt of Trump’s (and his followers’) attacks, a smear is a smear, even if the smearer knows he’s spouting bullshit.
But trolls can’t bend reality completely to their liking. Lewandowski’s attempts to smear Fields as an attention-hungry confabulator came up against the hard reality of the surveillance tapes. We need to keep calling out the endless lies. Trump’s fans may believe the lies — or they may find it convenient to pretend that they do — but I don’t think most Americans are quite as gullible as Trump and his troll buddies think they are.
I only hope he’s trolling when he says that after he makes abortion illegal, there will of course have to be “some kind of punishment” for women who seek abortions. But the man involved, of course, should not be held accountable at all.
I assume he means the sinful harlot would be taken out into a field and stoned.
The fact that Trump Troll the Magnificent doesn’t actually have any idea yet what “some kind of punishment” should be is the tell that he is trolling.
You know how manuresphere loves to say that feminists live in a bubble?
Well we fucking don’t. Tribble-Trump is proof of it. We need to share the world with this ghastly rake of a man, and worse people. And we get to see and hear plenty of this shit.
I keep wondering if his comments are getting weirder because he has the violent republican base by the tiger’s tail and has realized he cannot let go now. Smarter old timers there know how much to rouse the fringe elements before placating them – he has no idea how to play that game.
The ONLY thing that has kept me from totally freaking out about this is that I sorta thought Trump would get bored of actually governing, plus the fact that I sorta believed that he while he is a misogynist in a casual-yet-deeply-ingrained sort of way he wasn’t necessarily anti-choice or at least wouldn’t do much about it pursuing an anti-choice agenda. I kept thinking: “Well, he’s not as bad as Cruz, right?”
But his latest thing about punishing women who obtain illegal abortions, well – that’s that. Ugh – ugh – ugh – what is happening to America??? I haven’t been back in quite a few years now. What is happening??!
@Iseult,
holy crap! Did he actually say he’d outlaw abortion? I know most Republicans want do to that, but the majority are content to just gradually erode the means.
I just watched the security footage of the Lewandowski assault on Fields. It’s pretty unambiguous, he reaches past another man and grabs her arm. Yet in the comments there are Trump fans excoriating Fields and still calling her a liar, and banging on against feminism. I’d guess they’d rather believe Trump than their lying eyes.
On that subject, I’d definitely recommend this open letter from a former manager of a pro-Trump PAC. It goes a little overboard on the paragraph breaks, but that’s OK:
http://www.xojane.com/issues/stephanie-cegielski-donald-trump-campaign-defector
Here’s a pertinent quote:
—-
I agree with this. One thing that doesn’t get talked about so much when the media discusses Trump’s big victories in Republican primaries is that he’s hugely unpopular with independents and, of course, Democrats. A winning presidential candidate needs to unite American voters, not just pander to the hard-right base (or to the hard-left, for that matter, though in the U.S. that’s a pretty paltry contingent).
I keep hoping that sensible Americans will ensure this ignorant cockwomble doesn’t get anywhere near the White House, then I see he’s spouting more rubbish and people are actually supporting him, and I worry that the sensible USians will be overwhelmed by the prats. You have my condolences.
On the other hand, perhaps his hair will escape one day and his mouth will stop working. I think it’s one of those poisonous caterpillars and it’s controlling his brain.
The president can’t actually outlaw abortion altogether. Not without the Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade. Of course, forced birthers are usually ignorant to fall for the rhetoric.
Is anyone else getting an ad with a woman doing basically a backbend in lingerie from a site with the PUA sounding name of Girlfriend Activation System? It’s creepy and it’s both on the top and bottom of the page. Can anything be done about that?
The transcript of his comments on abortion made it sound to me as if he’s personally pro-choice but knows he’s not allowed to say that without pissing off his voters.
I mean, I think it’s pretty likely that he’s paid for an abortion or two in his time, and back in the 90’s he was actually pretty left-wing so I seriously think today was just him spewing what he thinks his voters want to hear.
Doesn’t really make it any better, he’ll do what his shitty voters want anyway, but I don’t believe that he’s actually anti-choice.
Doesn’t mean he won’t go along with the anti-abortion contingent if it means he gets what he wants. :/
Trump is so damn inconsistent with what he says, it’s pretty safe to say that he will just say whatever is most likely to get him votes. He’s a sell-out. His ego is too big to say something that could potentially hurt his numbers, so even if he was pro-choice I doubt he would say it because it would make Republican voters not want to vote for him. He would literally be willing to go against what he believes in just so he can feel all high and mighty. Forget President Trump, he wants to be Donald Drumpf: King of the Universe.
This is not someone we need in the White House. If he is this impulsive and fickle you can bet your ass he’ll nuke anyone who pisses him off even slightly at the drop of a hat. I wouldn’t be surprised if he started a 3rd World War. At all. In fact if The Donald wins, we’re almost guaranteed another war of some sort.
How can even the most extreme conservatives consider him a good candidate?
Kinda-sorta OT: I recently downloaded a Donald Trump soundboard on my phone. It. is. hilarious.
Oh I also wanted to note that I agree with the content of this post overall. I think that often, people support the candidate who seems most like them or their friends: we project ourselves onto public figures, and when someone like us gets power, it feels like a bit of a personal validation. Trump’s an asshole, and many of his fans love him because they’re assholes, too, and want to see assholes like themselves in positions of power.
@Mike
I saw that article earlier and it gets at something I’ve been thinking for awhile. Watching Trump, it doesn’t seem like he wants to be president; he just wants to win. That’s all there is to it. It’s not about policy. It’s not about “making America great.” He just wants to win. His inconsistencies are a direct result of this. He says what he needs to in order to get the votes and his positions will change depending on which audience he is pandering to at a particular time. It’s terrifying to watch and only partially because we don’t know what positions he will take if he gets into office. The prospect of a president with a “win at all costs” mentality scares me. A leader needs to know how to compromise and nothing I’ve seen of Trump shows that he can do that.
Trump is like a YouTube comments thread that became human and ran for president.
@Buttercup
He ‘s actually the super prototype of that nazi, sexfiend Microsoft robot deemed too powerful to release, but it escaped one night.
I was going to post that letter from Trump’s super-PAC ex-manager but I see Mike did it already. I highly endorse reading that, because it is a good, clear articulation of the facts.
For those who are terrified of a Trump presidency: fear not. He can’t get elected. Not even Hillary Clinton’s bad decision to not be born with a penis can change that.
I was impressed by the New Republic article someone linked to here (thank you, whoever it was and apologies I can’t remember who) about the difference between a liar and a bullshitter – Trump is the latter, meaning that he doesn’t care what is true or what isn’t true, so long as what he says serves his turn.
https://newrepublic.com/article/124803/donald-trump-not-liar
OK – but I don’t think he will become President, not even sure he’ll get the nomination (though I wouldn’t like to be around his supporters when he loses) but the thing is – how the hell did this happen? How did he get this close?
WWTH, where’s the ad showing up exactly? The sidebar? Or at the very top of the page with the “sponsored links?” There shouldn’t be any dating/PUA site ads running at all.
I have a very inarticulate theory about the fact that most people on any side of politics are aware that news is blatantly subjective now (if, indeed, it was ever objective at all). Political news, doubly so. This is a source of intense frustration and sometimes distress – ‘they’ are always lying, and a lot of anger gets generated because people hate being lied to, and they can safely assume that someone is probably lying to them at some point in order to get something from them. And they never know when.
So there’s an undercurrent of rage. Seething rage at the establishment of the whole political system. Along comes someone who looks like he is a political outsider – bombastic, financially powerful, who just does not seem to care about anything and clearly bullshits through everything for no better reason than he can. Because the news generation system has zero defences against someone like this.
He’s white enough and republican enough to be familiar, and disruptive enough to give the feeling that he is upsetting the news cycle. He’s a vehicle for revenge, not just against the democrats (always assumed to be lying) but against slick republicans who are now also the focus of rage.
He could have zero policies at all – it doesn’t matter, because his function is not related to morality, ethics, or public policy. It is related to shaking the entire system in a way that feels like vengeance – the only right wingers that will suffer are the faceless ‘them’, and there’s a big appetite for that right now. All democrats and ‘those’ republicans are assumed to be morally destitute, so any blows they take are seen as improving America.
I think the best thing to hope for if he should somehow get elected is that he takes this troll thing the whole way, and goes “Haha, I won! Yes! This was just a joke campaign though, obviously I don’t actually want to be President cos that kinda looks like hard work, LOL. So I refuse the position, come on, get nominating, it’s time to do this whole thing over again!”
In other news, G*merg*ters just ruined another innocent person’s career. Asshats.
David,
It was the Taboola ads at the top of the page and in the middle, between the post and the comments. They’re gone now.
To be fair, I don’t know if it’s a PUA site, I just thought it looked like one.
But wasn’t he saying that he was pro-choice just a few weeks ago? That he was for Planned Parenthood? That was at one of the debates where he and Ted Cruz were arguing.
Yes, I do believe he’s saying whatever he can to win. You know who else did that, along with massive heaps of bigotry? The name rhymes with “schmitler”.