After his gusher of lies, can anyone trust Trump? By Jennifer Rubin
Republicans and their handmaidens at Fox News would have us believe all sorts of things. The FBI was part of a “deep state” plot to oust the president. A 20-year veteran of the FBI, Andrew McCabe, was a Hillary Clinton flunky. The report that President Trump paid $130,000 to a porn star is a “baseless” accusation (says Vice President Pence). Trump had “no deals” with Russians. No one on the campaign cooperated with (i.e. colluded) with anyone linked to the Kremlin.
But, of course, McCabe was a career prosecutor with a sterling record, and his wife’s campaign (to which Clinton never donated) had ended by the time he had been made deputy FBI director. One doesn’t allegedly pay $130,000 to someone with a detailed account of an adulterous affair for nothing. Trump’s finances are intertwined with a host of Russian figures. And Trump himself hyped the WikiLeaks hacked emails, his son met with Russians on the pretext they had “dirt” on Clinton, and a campaign foreign policy adviser pursued Russian operatives also promising dirt on Clinton.
When it comes to matters of policy, they would like us to believe that fixing the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program is part of an amnesty and “open borders” plot. (DACA is about young, law-abiding undocumented immigrants brought here as children.) They wanted us to believe we were in the midst of a crime wave caused by illegal immigrants, until it became evident that crime was down, which they naturally claimed resulted from Trump’s brilliant policies.
Even a casual acquaintance with reality would show how preposterously untrue these claims are. The constant churn of falsehoods provides programming material for servile Fox News hosts and the conspiracy theorists who populate the nighttime programs. The gusher of untruths motivates the Keystone Kops antics of unwitting Russian helpmates such as Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.), whose schemes echo through the Twitter landscape with the help of Russian Twitter bots. Getting Trump cultists to believe the latest utterance of their Great Leader does not mean Trump is “getting away” with anything.
The latest Politico-Morning Consult poll, for example, shows “47 percent of respondents said they had little or no confidence in the presidency, up 3 percentage points from a December 2016 survey with Politico.” Meanwhile, the print media, whom Trump accuses of spreading “fake news,” fared much better. (“Only one institution Morning Consult polled on — newspapers, a frequent punching bag of the president and his supporters — maintained their trust among the public, with 53 percent saying this month and a year earlier that they had at least some confidence in them.”) TV news, however, dropped four points. Likewise, poll after poll tells us a majority of Americans think Trump doesn’t tell the truth.
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